Résumant 30 heures de travail dans une vidéo d’un peu plus de cinq minutes, Bob Case a réalisé un poster d’une grande beauté pour Pedal Craft, un évènement annuel pour les cyclistes à Phoenix. Sur la musique « Queen Of The Surface Streets » de Devotchka, cette vidéo montre tout le talent de l’artiste.
During Nike’s recent Nature Amplified summit at their Beaverton, OR headquarters, we were presented with a series of innovations that comprise the next palette for product development from the sportswear giant. A visit to the Nike Sports Research Lab meant a deep…
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A recent graduate of California College of the Arts, Toyin Odutola is already celebrating her second show at Jack Shainman Gallery in NYC. The energetic artist produces ink works…
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John Maeda, pioneer of programmatic design, delivered the closing address at South Africa’s premier conference on creativity, Design Indaba. He spoke to the crowd about the nature of code in art (“Programming is not very complicated, it’s just very boring—It’s what you can do with coding that matters more…
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Rapid prototyping and Kevlar construction underscore a line of handmade skis
Based out of Park City, Utah RAMP Sports (AKA “Riders Artists Musicians Project”) has just released a line of skis using next-generation rapid prototyping and vacuum molding to create their boards. Their modern equipment has allowed them to create unique molds and build prototypes in record time by making…
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Reworking the all-American five-pocket jean
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Having built a brand based on better-fitting pants, Bonobos recently sought out to rethink the five-pocket jean. For the Premium Denim collection the brand made sure to incorporate the Bonobos fit—marked by a more tailored thigh for an athletic fit that’s not too tight or baggy, and a comfortable mid-rise—and it was important that this line be produced in the U.S. Not only was denim born here, but domestic construction gave Bonobos the chance to oversee every detail and produce a truly unique style of pant. More than anything, the team focused on creating a pair of well-constructed jeans with a democratic fit and a reasonable price point starting at $125. From today through 23 March 2012, new customers can visit Bonobos’ website to get 25% off Premium Denim with the code COOLHUNTING25.
Cone Denim’s White Oak Mill in North Carolina marks one of the last strongholds of U.S.-made denim and the go-to supplier for top-quality fabrics. The century-old mill produced a solid, supple 12.25-oz fabric for Bonobos that acts as the cornerstone of the new line. The hardware comes from YKK’s U.S. branch, using a classic shank front closure.
From there, Bonobos headed to Caitac in Los Angeles, a Japanese-owned hub for high-end denim. They started with the basics—a resin rinse jean in straight-leg fit without any dry processing—and expanded from there. The distressing on their medium and light washes is done by hand, sanded to create a more comfortable fabric and light whiskering on the hip. Opting for a simpler look, Bonobos nixed the logo in favor of a subtle contrast stitch box pattern on the waistband.
Bonobos successfully translated the success of their trousers to the new line of jeans, which come in straight, slim and bootcut styles. They kept the washes conservative and the branding minimal, but threw in a few denim-head details like the busted seam stitch on the outseam. Contrast stitching on the interior and nautical-inspired pocket bags with the motto “Conceived in NYC, Born in LA” keep in line with the company’s playful attitude.
This spring, Bonobos is bringing in more washes with detailing to go with warmer weather—April will mark the launch of a selvedge style with a weightier fabric, and they’ll introduce two new spring washes. In addition to Premium Denim, for those looking for more colorful options, Bonobos’ recently launched “travel denim” comes in light and mid-weight fabrics with a hint of stretch, in a range of garment-dyed colors.
Head over to Bonobos Premium Denim to see the goods and take advantage of the 25% discount for new customers with the code COOLHUNTING25 through 23 March 2012.
Ground up bones and porcelain dust in a series of biological sculptures
In advance of his first solo exhibition “I stand and look at them long and long” at RH Gallery, we stopped by John O’Reilly‘s Brooklyn studio to see what the young artist had on tap. The warehouse space is shared between four sculptural artists working with communal equipment and unparalleled resourcefulness. O’Reilly, for his part, mixes porcelain with bone powder and polyrethane resin to cast realistic biological altarpieces from silicone molds.
The artist let us in on the process behind his creations, which all start off as clay models. Silicone is applied by brush to the clay forms until the film reaches a 1/4-inch thickness. The mold is cut along a set of seams and reattached in a plaster mastermold for rigidity. The bone powder comes from his dog’s leftovers, pulverized in the studio and added to the resin and porcelain mixture to create a translucent, off-white coloration.
To create the forms, O’Reilly pulls from his experience with silverpoint drawing. “I’ve only been doing sculpture for the last two or three years,” he explains. “I look at these things as drawings in space—just a line that connects to another line. And you keep configurating a matrix of lines to create the form.” Standing in front of a wire approximation of his subject, the artist uses dabs of clay on a stick to apply and modify the shapes. When he finds a line he likes, he builds the entire piece around it.
The artist chose porcelain for its likeness to skin. “It’s got that ghost-like, transcendental quality,” says O’Reilly. For the works in black, he added graphite to the resin mixture and finished the surface with another graphite application. The centerpiece work “Welle” is a graphite sculpture of a dead pup. When asked about the high-contrast, emaciated quality of his subjects, the artists explains, “It feels like the more I can dig in, the more I can release energy from the piece. And that’s basically what you’re trying to do—to create a circulatory system of lines, a matrix of feelings and emotions.”
While he enjoys sculpture, O’Reilly sees the laborious process as an ultimate hindrance to creativity. “Origins” is a wall piece that shows the cavity of a pig and is inspired by Andy Warhol’s series of Rorschach paintings. While he was working on the piece—which can take months—the artist developed a method of molding paint inside a folded, translucent sheet. O’Reilly sees potential in the series of inkblot-style X-rays, though the work won’t be featured in the upcoming exhibition.
Many of the pieces bear the mark of the artist’s Christian upbringing. The off-white color is reminiscent of the Italian marbles from renaissance masters, and the artist freely refers to his works as altarpieces. The anguished expressiveness of the occasionally mutilated forms is balanced by the calm placidity of others, both attributes recalling biblical moments and emotions.
“I stand and look at them long and long” opens 6 March, 2012 at the RH Gallery in New York. See more images of O’Reilly’s studio in our slideshow.
RH Gallery
137 Duane Street
New York, NY 10013
Popular and historic references in a duo of creations by Luca Nichetto
Les Poupées marks the first collaboration between Italian designer Luca Nichetto and French gallerist Pascale Cottard Olsson in Stockholm. Combining a ceramic candle holder with a glass vase, each object blends cultural references from the pure lines of Finnish artist and designer Timo Sarpaneva and the colors of Italian maestro Ettore Sottsass to the silhouette of Japanese kokeshi wooden dolls.
Another new project by Nichetto for David Design, presented at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, is Vader, a lamp that experiments with the possibilities of traditional ceramic production, pushing craftsmanship to the limit in order to create a modern design piece. The range of colors has been chosen with Scandinavian culture in mind, but at the same time reflects the designer’s Venetian origins.
We talked to Nichetto about these and some forthcoming projects.
I was mainly focused on understanding how, in a global world, the classic cultures of such different countries could be able to give me some elements, to let me create a functional puzzle and generate objects to be sold. When you buy Les Poupées, you hold a piece of my personal point of view on Scandinavian, Japanese and Italian history.
This is not meant to be a pop project since the allusion to Star Wars is pure coincidence. The initial intuition was a minimal gesture, just two cuts into ceramics. As a result, a functional light object for the space is capable of underlining the quality of the material itself, a quality which relies also on manufacturing.
I’ll unveil several projects during the Milan Design Week, including new collaborations for Cassina and De Padova. I’m still continuing my research process with Established & Sons, Foscarini, Casamania and Emmegi, but I’ll also be present at Salone del Mobile with small projects for the French editors Petit Friture and La Chance.
Les Poupées are on display at the Hallwyl Museum in Stockholm until 4 March 2012 and sell from Gallery Pascale.
Behind the scenes at the Jameson Distillery with Master Distiller Barry Crockett
John Jameson’s Dublin distillery was founded in 1780, guided by the family motto “Sine Metu”, meaning without fear. To this day, those words appear on every bottle of Irish whisky. At the original distillery, located next to Smithfield Market, Jameson used well water, searched for superior strains of barley, sought out high quality casks and believed the whisky should be matured in cool, damp cellars. Eventually, he built larger warehouses that captured rainwater to recreate such conditions, and by 1890 Irish whiskey had become one of the most popular whiskeys in the world.
Later, because of Prohibition in the U.S. and the consequentially insurmountable tariff barriers in England, there was decline in the market which led to the demise of many Irish whiskey companies and, eventually, to the formation of the Irish Distillers Group. In 1971, Jameson’s Bow Street distillery stopped operations and all production was moved to the Midleton Distillery in Cork.
Back in Dublin, tours of the Bow Street Distillery in Smithfield Village continue today, recounting the legacy and proud heritage of Irish whiskey. Visitors can watch a short documentary film, take the tour and enjoy the tasting room and restaurant. The distillery building is also the setting for special events including the Jameson Global Party on St. Patrick’s Day.
We went behind the scenes of the public tasting tours at the Jameson Experience in Cork to meet the core team. The steps behind the sourcing and repairing of casks was presented inside the coopers’ workshop, revealing a process of connecting flawless pieces of oak cut precisely according to the wood’s rings, that has remained relatively unchanged throughout the years.
We met the current master distiller Barry Crockett, who apprenticed under his father, master distiller Max Crockett, to learn the age-old trade. During lunch with the junior Crockett in his childhood home, we learned about the triple distillation process Jameson has perfected since 1790, and the five-year aging period for the single-pot still and grain whiskey blends.
Since the beginning, “Jameson has been made using same type of equipment and methods, but the product made today is cleaner more refined and sweeter that would have been possible with the old equipment in the late 1700s,” says Crockett. “With the higher level of control with the modern equipment and controls we can achieve a finer quality of spirit.”
“Irish whiskey has always been different to Scottish and American whiskeys,” says Crockett. “The fact that makes it different is the production technique, which is part of what we do. The use of high proportions of barley, harvested locally which gives it a very unique flavor and taste to the whiskey. The barley in my view offers a type of apple, pear or peach type aroma. You will find that very much in all of the Irish whiskies. It also gives a smooth even mouthy effect that lends to a more soft and sweet aftertaste.”
There’s a section of the cottage being transformed to better showcase the history of the brand. “Jameson has a strong story in term of its heritage, imagery, and we are advancing that imagery by getting our archives together to display,” says Crockett. “We know when people are coming here. The principal thing is to understand why it is a popular whiskey in the first place.”
While the company focuses primarily on filling orders, Crockett’s main responsibility lies in developing single-origin pot still expressions. “These certainly show the consumer public that Irish whiskey is not just Jameson, but is also able to present a range of different flavor characteristics,” he explains. “We believe the single-origin pot still range will do for Irish whiskey what the concept of single malt did for Scotland.” Crockett says that their goal is to launch one to two new single pot still whiskeys each year.
Our tour concluded at the Jameson warehouses, where up to 36,000 barrels are stored upright on rows of palettes. When asked what he’d want to drink if he were stranded on a desert island, Crockett answered, “Jameson 18-year-old, or the Legacy.”
Instinctual layered paintings driven by process
As soon as you enter Puerto Rican artist Angel Otero‘s Brooklyn work loft, the intense smell of paint nearly stops you at the door. Shelves housing copious tubes of oil paint and rows of Montana spray cans lining the back walls allude to the strong odor, but it’s the stacks of work drying on wooden pallets surrounding the space that are really the culprit. But the extraordinary aroma is actually the upshot to Otero’s distinct artistic technique, one which involves an extensive process of building up layers of paint on plexiglass before methodically scraping them off.
“I’ve always been intrigued by process,” says Otero. The artist, who received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, typically allows materials to inform his work. While there is substance to his paintings, he’s not driven by the challenge of depicting a personal narrative. Instead his work reflects his ambition in taking painting to another level and his ability to work successfully off of sheer impulse.
“The process kind of starts with usually me painting on plexiglass,” he says. “After I do the painting, I cover it with more oil paint, the whole thing. And then I do more layers of oil paint. Then eventually it goes to the floor and I cover it with a black color, a pigment of oil paint. The pigment of black is the most rubberish one. Pigments come from rocks, so that means they are all different types of materials which dry differently toward the different oil mediums. Black is the one that when it’s dry, stays the most malleable. So the last layer of all the paintings I do, I cover with black—a thick layer of black—and then they go to dry.
Otero initially came to this process by recycling paint as a way of saving money and resources while he was in school. He would scrape the paint off works he was dissatisfied with and add it to a growing mountain of remnant oil paint. Eventually, he started to form the clumps into flower shapes and spray paint them silver, which on the canvas created the illusion of working with tin foil. “From there it developed slowly, in some way,” he explains. “But it felt good because I was using a material that I wanted—oil paint—and at the same time I had found a great process that is pretty unique, and whatever I do, people are going to be more attracted toward ‘how did you do it’ rather than ‘what is it about’?”
While this was an important stylistic shift for Otero, it also laid the foundation for what would become his signature technique of creating oil skins on glass. After his mountain of dried paint diminished, he began putting paint in glasses to dry. He noticed, when reusing the glasses for the first time, that some of them were stained from the paint before it. “When I scraped that second layer, I noticed that it transferred the stains. I was like, ‘oh shit, I could paint on glass, cover it with paint and then scrape it, and I would have a full sheet of paint that would have the painting that I did'”, he reveals.
After several experiments Otero found specific types of oil paint that he could combine that would give him the tactile surface he desired, and one that would last for a long time. Once that process of strategically scraping layers of paint off of glass inch by inch using doctor blades was in place, he was able to begin playing with the leather-like layer of dried paint. After applying a thick layer of epoxy to a canvas, Otero and his two-person team would transfer the heavy skin to the canvas and begin folding in loose wrinkles.
Although his style is certainly contemporary, Otero is interested in experimenting with compositions that contrast the old with the new. He will recreate a work by French classicist Nicolas Poussin, painting it to detailed perfection on glass. Then he covers the painting in more oil paint that “will eventually be the background”, lets it dry, possibly repeats this step and then begins scraping the skin off the glass in a way that exposes the various layers at different points in the composition. In this way, the painting becomes almost like a print or a collage.
Otero’s approach has been attracting attention since his days at art school. Having honed his technique with confidence, he is able to keep experimenting—both with painting and his second love, sculpture—producing works that are meaningful in both appearance and form.
His latest body of work will soon be on display at Istanbul ’74, his first solo show in the Turkish metropolis. The exhibition, put on in partnership with NYC’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery, opens 23 February 2012 and runs through 17 March 2012.
Photos by BHP. See more images of Otero’s studio in the slideshow below.
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