Inside an actor's brain | Fiona Shaw performs in a scanner
As part of a new exhibition on human identity, actor Fiona Shaw agreed to have her brain scanned while performing parts of TS Eliot's poem The Waste Land. Stuart Jeffries joined her at University College London
Appreciation of the art of Henry Darger is unequivocally influenced by the known facts of his life: his mother died when he was four years old after giving birth to a baby sister, whom he never saw. When he was eight years old his father, unable to continue caring for him, put him in an orphanage and died soon after. Diagnosed as a disruptive trouble-maker, he was removed to various mental insitutions until he ran away at age 16.
For the next sixty-four years, he lived a reclusive life, working as a janitor in Chicago area hospitals and going to Catholic Mass daily. Neighbors would see him going through the trash, picking out magazines and newpaper illustrations. Finally, at age 80, unable to climb the stairs to his rented room, he was moved to a nursing home and died shortly thereafter.
His landlord was cleaning out his room after his death and came across a startling discovery: alone in his room, Darger had created a beautiful and violent fantasy world, primarily embodied in a 15,000 page epic narrative, "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." (...)
from Sara Ayers | Henry Darger Page
Trailer for Jessica Yu's "Realms of the Unreal" about Henry Darger. Narrated by Dakota Fanning:
BROOKLYN, NY.- Causey Contemporary announced that sculptor Norman Mooney permanently placed his newest sculpture, Windseeds at the Richard and Helen DeVos estate in Michigan.
The piece which consists of three separate eight food diameter cast aluminum isohedrons is the second in a new scluptural direction for Mooney. The first cast aluminum sculpture in this style entitled Star 1 appeared at his two person exhibition, "Falling Short of Knowing" in New York in the autumn of 2008.
Wind Seeds themselves were previously exhibited at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan from September 23 - October 8, 2009. The Devos decided to add it to their collection after viewing the sculpture in ArtPrize.
Mooney says of his recent work, "The sculptures deal with the eternal dichotomy of the present, the immediate moment when we are ultimately becoming and eternally dying at precisely the same time, I am looking to understand the idea of something much larger than ourselves, than our capacity to see, that is ever-present, persistent and constantly in motion. It is our intuitive sense of the whole and our complete inability to define it that the work explores. The Forms are in a state of becoming. In and out of this process of engagement we discover the present. What we intuit, what we feel rather than what we see."
What words would you use to describe 1960s French pop sensation Gigi Gaston? With a growing cult discovering her through the dozens of photos, periodicals, songs and videos assembled by Josh Gosfield, some adjectives describing the chanteuse nicknamed the "Black Flower" include "sultry," "elusive," "scandalous," "murderous" and "misunderstood."
To that you must add the word "fictitious" Gigi Gaston is wholly and entirely a creation of Gosfield, an artist and designer whose exhibition at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Manhattan closes on Wednesday, November 25th after a monthlong run. Not only did he cast Gigi, shoot the period-perfect photos and created the meticulously rendered versions of the covers of actual magazine of the era along with a staggering variety of her record sleeves, he's also responsible for the putative Jean-Luc Godard film short for Gigi's haunting song "Je Suis Perdue," which is presented here for your viewing pleasure.
Poet. Lover of academy and porch.
