Category:
Art
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Strange Things, by Boris Servais, is a book you won't find for sale on Amazon.
Servais had it "Produced in Italy by a specialized printer for small-size books, it collects odd discoveries and inventions around nostalgic aviation, astronautics, time trips or science fiction warfare." Below is an example of one of the entries. (via
Book By Its Cover)
An unusual hobby: Adrian Leskiw designs fictional cities and nations, and then he draws roadmaps of them. In painstaking detail. He describes himself as a "roadgeek". You can browse through his collection of fictional roadmaps at
The Map Realm. One use I can think of for these would be to sneak them into rental cars. (Mislabel them, of course.) Tourists would spend hours examining them, trying to figure out where they were.
But wait, there's more. Leskiw also collects covers of real roadmaps. He has an
extensive collection of the official Michigan, Ontario and Ohio road maps. In the old days transportation departments apparently hired artists to design these covers. Now they seem to just slap generic photos on them.
I see that the
"Meat After Meat Joy" exhibit at the Daneyal Mahmooh Gallery recently closed. I'm kicking myself for missing this one. From the exhibit's press release:
Meat After Meat Joy brings together the work of contemporary artists who use meat in their work (raw meat, the concept of meat, its symbolism and viscera) in order to investigate the paradoxical relationship meat has to the body.
Shown to the right is Sheffy Bleier's minimalist work, titled "Testicles." This would look lovely hanging in my bathroom. Right above the toilet, perhaps. On second thought, maybe not.
Of course you recall the baseball great,
Ted Williams. Decapitated after death and head frozen, once the family quit squabbling in public...?
Well, now many of his possessions are up for sale at auction, including, ironically, a number of severed animal-head trophies. And also some fine "space alien" paintings and drawings by daughter Claudia, like the one at right.
Check out an article and photo gallery
here.
In his
Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre Wilhelm Staehle places silhouettes over Victorian paintings, and adds a subversive caption. Two of my favorites below.
Jason deCaires Taylor has received international acclaim for his
sculpture park in Grenada, West Indies. Though to view it, it helps to be a diver, because it's underwater.
I think it's a swell idea. If I'm ever in Grenada, I'll make sure to sea it.
In honor of election day: the George W. Flush urinal, created by urinal artist
Clark Sorensen:
This piece is a preview of Clark's up coming solo exhibit: "DOWN THE DRAIN - THE LEGACY OF GEORGE W. BUSH" Clark is holding an election night party to watch the elections results roll in and give George W. what he deserves - a good flush!
I recently met a woman who could tie a knot in the stem of a maraschino cherry with her tongue. I thought that was pretty impressive. But what this Romanian chewing gum sculptor can do is even more impressive.
Welcome to the very first contest sponsored by your pals here at WEIRD UNIVERSE.
Here's the deal:
The single prize is a used but in-good-shape trade paperback copy of Ricky Jay's
Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, an essential handbook for any true lover of the weird.
The challenge: to win the book, you must identify the painting and artist behind this little visual snippet to the right. The painter is one of the more famous outsider artists of the past 200 years. With luck, this challenge will be neither too easy nor too hard. If the contest goes on for any length of time without a winner, I'll post more snippets of the canvas, and other clues.
Please make your guess in the COMMENTS section of this post, not through email. Priority of the response, in the case of multiple correct guesses, determines the winner.
When we have a winner, I'll get their snailmail and post the book with some of my mailart on the envelope.
Good luck, and play nice!
All original content in posts is Copyright © 2008 by the author of the post, either Alex Boese ("Alex"), Paul Di Filippo ("Paul"), or Chuck Shepherd ("Chuck"). All rights reserved. The banner illustration at the top of this page is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Altergott.
Category: Art, Books