Blog.

Our design eye is wide and varied. Here our some of our favourite things, thoughts and people.

Hilary Sloane brings back the GIF

Art + Design

Melbourne-based Hilary Sloane has taken photographs in many places around the world, and her work has been shown at the Tate UK, Wallach Art Gallery NY, and Cargo in Rome. She also makes amazing collage GIFs from images she finds in old books and magazines. We’ve never seen GIFs look so cool. The combination of technology and art make her images come alive in the most exciting way. Yay for computers!

After looking at the GIFs her photographs feel so still and we found our eyes looking for the dancing bits.

You can see more of her magical moving art at hilaryfaye.com

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India

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Nepal

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Europe

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Malaysia

Blondie at the Chelsea

Allsorts

The landmark Chelsea Hotel’s Storefront Gallery is currently hosting a Blondie 40th anniversary exhibition, running from the 23rd – 29th September.

Of course the Chelsea has been home to many famous visitors such as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and the Warhol Superstars, including Edie Sedgwick who set fire to her room in 1966. It was also home to many of the Titanic Survivors who arrived at Pier 54 on the White Star Line after the sinking. Over it’s 134 year history the Chelsea has had many more interesting residents including the painter Alphaeus Philemon Cole, who lived at the hotel for 35 years until his death in 1988 at age 112, and Arthur C. Clarke  who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while staying at the Chelsea.

The hotel has had interesting deaths too with Dylan Thomas dying of pneumonia on November 9, 1953, and this is the place where 20 year old Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sid Vicious, was found stabbed to death in room 100 on October 12, 1978.

With all this history let’s not forget Ruth Harkness, the American adventurer, fashion designer and socialite who brought the first live giant panda from China to the U.S. In 1934 her husband Bill Harkness had traveled to China in search of a panda, but died of throat cancer in Shanghai 2 years later. Ruth then decided to launch her own panda mission and with the help of explorer Quentin Young and British naturalist, Gerald Russell, she brought back a baby panda, Su Lin, not in a cage but wrapped in her arms. She then resided at the famous Chelsea.

We’re not sure if the exhibition will be as interesting as the hotel itself but we love the flyer nonetheless. 

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Ruth Harkness with her panda Su Lin

Park(ing) Day Visited

Allsorts

Here’s Park(ing) Day in action on Essex street; one of Freo’s tiny parks filled almost to capacity! 

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Park(ing) Day

Allsorts

Urban open space is a big part of what makes cities and towns vibrant and inviting, but it’s not always easy to find. Today there will be more than usual public space in Fremantle when Park(ing) Day takes place and parking bays will evolve into cool spaces of public art, music and of course green parks to lounge in.

Park(ing) Day originated in San Francisco in 2005 and now takes place annually in 60 cities in 35 countries. We’ve selected a few of the most interesting images from previous years in the US of A.

What could be better than fewer cars and more places to hang out, maybe Park(ing) Day should become a weekly event! Now could we just invent a frisbee that we drive to work?

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Washington DC

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Los Angeles CA

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Albany NY

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San Francisco CA

Hypnagogic Art Mummies: Die First, Buy Later

Guest Posts

Cathy Wilkes was up for a Turner prize. Her gallery installation Non-Verbal (2011) reminds me of a childhood episode. It was the first time I ventured to the bottom of the road by myself and turned onto the busy main road at the bottom, which was out of bounds due to the heavy traffic. After proceeding along the pavement as far as the corner shop I turned back towards the safety of my own road. Suddenly I had the uncanny impression that all the grown up pedestrians walking towards me were all robots programmed to pass me at that particular point, as if there were officials in trilby hats with clip boards and stop watches hidden round corners telling them go so they would pass me at exactly the right time. It was a world stripped of accident. Nothing was left to chance. And though nothing  threatened me, there was an overwhelming sense of loneliness in a crowd. The nearest I have ever come to anything like it was the beginning of The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey is growing up unawares in a completely pre-planned ‘(ir)reality show’. I was the only person in the universe under my own steam.

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Space Days

Allsorts

To continue on our space theme this week here is a 1953 illustration by Chelsey Bonestell titled ‘Exploration of Mars’. We spotted it in Smith Journal and it made us happy just looking at it.

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Welcome

Allsorts

We are so excited to launch our new website and blog.  This is where we plan on sharing cool/random art and design finds that we come across day to day. Rather than blog about websites and other internet biz (well there might be a bit of this) we hope to use this space to share awesome creative finds.  We also plan to have some guest bloggers from the art and design world too, which is pretty exciting. 

We’ve been building websites for a few years now and have made all sorts of sites from plastic surgeons to diamond energy discs (we aren’t sure what these are either?) and a whole lot of plumbers in between.  Along the way we also built some really beautiful sites for artists, dancers and photographers to name a few.  We realised it was building these sites that we enjoyed the most, so we have decided to specialise in this field and relaunch our website as part of this.

We all come from creative backgrounds ourselves, be it fashion and textiles, illustration or multimedia and building websites for those in creative industries gives us our own creative outlet. It inspires us to stay in touch with everything awesome.

2001: A Space Odyssey

To celebrate this new beginning for us here is an image from Stanley Kubrik’s filmic masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Within a fabulous antiseptic colour code of white on acid yellow, the Rubik’s cube geometry captures something immortal about the kitsch of female servitude under future capitalist conditions made worse by the inconvenience of zero gravity.