Results tagged “edwardburtynsky”

Often, ideas are continually improved through the feedback of others. Other times, an idea is at its best when first conceived, and can only be diluted from there.

David Altmejd’s art looks good on paper. First off, it’s about werewolves, and who can resist the cuddly therianthropes? From folklore to B-movies, the werewolf maintains a lasting hold on the popular imagination. However, Altmejd’s work is neither folksy nor campy. In the Montreal-born, New York-based sculptor’s elaborate installations, he starts off with the (usually fragmented, decaying) figure of the werewolf, and embellishes it with everything from crystals and jewellery, to S&M paraphernalia, to taxidermied animals, combining all this within modern display structures of mirror and Plexiglas. While the werewolf itself is a classic symbol of transformation, the addition of such disparate elements expands the metamorphic metaphor into a dialectic between beast and human, repulsion and beauty, decay and renewal, nature and artifice.

We've admired the work done by the people at WorldChanging for a long time. The blog has opened our eyes to the hundreds if not thousands of creative solutions out there to some very pressing problems. The fact that the blog is cautiously optimistic about the possibility of a green future is refreshing.

Yeesh; another week, another pile of movies which were at the Toronto International Film Festival. Considering there are, oh, 32,064 or so films at each TIFF we should probably get over this as soon as possible, otherwise every week our column is going to sound the same.

And so the penultimate day of the festival ends. To be honest, it really does almost feel like day nine was kind of the final day; certainly for press and industry, anyway. All of the press screenings end by the afternoon, and it’s the last day the press office and the video tape library are open all day. We had a fairly quiet day, filling in some films that we didn’t get a chance to see in the festival until now, before hitting the Peter Mettler Elsewhere event and the Midnight Madness. We heard that there was a Vice Magazine party on, but we also heard something ridiculous like it was held in an abandoned factory that was on fire.

Everyone is talking about how TTC Operators will now turn a blind eye on those who are evading fares. The union is complaining about the rising number of assaults and "passenger rage." TTC Chair Howard Moscoe says that people still have to pay their fares. The Sun's story is here and has some wacky numbers like the fact that assaults have gone up over 30% in a decade. The Star's piece has more of the back and forth between TTC Chair Howard Moscoe, TTC Manager Rick Ducharme and Bob Kinnear president of the union representing TTC operators.

Descanter Mark sends us this post about the literary mag's swish fundraiser tonight:

Industrial documentary photography has a long and distinguished history. The works of Lewis Hines, Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans, among others, loom large.