Lisa Occhipinti: The Book Re-Envisioned and Restored

Lisa Occhipinti

[As always, all images and the objects they depict are copyrighted to the artist and/or his/her legal representatives.  Images are displayed here purely for purposes of commentary, i.e., no commercial use.]

The book is dead, long live the book!   I love Lisa Occhipinti's work:  she is hacking (both literally and figuratively) volumes, re-imagining the form and contents, helping us re-see one of our most treasured achievements.  

Portraits (her term) of our books, in their formal moments but also as candids, with all the dignity, humor and pathos of people...which, in essence, they are.  

For more about Lisa Occhipinti and her work, click here  and  here .  And also here.

Still too hot

The heat and humidity intensified this week in NYC...it is just too hot (canary feathers singed and drooping) and humid (even lobsters need to breathe) to do more than seek shelter under a tree and take a nap...synapses running syrupy, thoughts meandering into a hazy mist or baked slowly under the opaque sky...

Never too hot for art

Raqib Shaw, Adam (2008)

For more of his work, click here.    And here.

The dog days of summer came early this year in New York City, so the Lobster & Canary seek to cool our sweltering heads with the beauty of art.   The sun and the humidity smothering our analytical faculties, we surrender to the sheer primal love of design, color, the luscious line, the idea so weird it knocks your elbow off the table.

Pawel Bownik, "Reconstructed Flowers" (2013)

For more of his work, click here.

Natvar Bhavsar

For more of Bhavsar's work, click here.  

[As always, copyright in all images displayed here is held by the artist and/or his legal representative(s); images used here solely for purposes of commentary, not for commercial gain.]

Slantwise across the sky

Sarah Charlesworth, one of the pioneers in Conceptual Art, died two weeks ago.

The Lobster and the Canary are fascinated by her slantwise approach to the world, the way she excised elements to create a new set of objects, a sculptor of images carving away the surface to get to the core.  She helped teach us to see the shadow-lines as the most important vectors, to see the negative space as the essence of the volume, to read a new story into and behind the narrative distracting us with its bombast.

Arguably her most famous work is Arc of Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979, partially reproduced here.  She photographed the front page of c. 20 separate newspapers in the Pacific Northwest as each recorded the eclipse, and then she eliminated all but the mastheads and the photographs, resulting in an eccentric document of the sun's passage across the region and into Canada.   The newspapers did not all use the same photographs, so the event becomes even more singular.   There is no standard, straight-on, transparent story here.   We all see the same things-- even the greatest of natural phenomena--in our own ways.

Click here and here for more.  As always, the artist and/or her representatives hold copyright in the images displayed here (I believe the Whitney in NYC holds the original work).   All images downloaded from public web sites, for non-commercial use and for purposes of commentary only.