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Chris Scarborough is an artist known for his preoccupation with mixing, morphing, and combining things in improbable ways. And he always does so with impeccable drafting precision, so that the finished works, while unusual and often surreal, appear to have an element of truth to them, as though they are right in some unknown way — even though the objects and figures he creates don’t look that way in the “real” world. An artist with such tendencies seemed like a good choice to provide an EARTH BY image, and his contribution (no. 24 in our ongoing series) is every bit as enigmatic and thought provoking as we would have imagined. “It explores an environment,” he says, “that exists after some global event — the big bang if you will. But we are not sure what kind of bang it was, and the world we now experience is similar to the one we knew, but some things are now askew.” Having received his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2000, Scarborough is off to an impressive start in his art career. He has been included in New American Paintings and covered in ArtPapers Magazine, High Fructose, and PLANET among others. He exhibited at Foley Gallery in New York City in 2008 and has an upcoming show in December at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta. He currently lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

Houses of the Holy Eric White, 2009. 12″ x 12″ oil on panel 2009

Pity the poor album cover. Once the artistic and marketing doorway to many great (and less than great) musical experiences, and the site of many a rolled joint, the old 12”x12” canvas has now been reduced to a little collection of pixels on your iPod screen. Seeing classic covers in their full size, from Houses of the Holy to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is no longer part of our day-to-day musical experience, but part of our collective past.
     That’s where Eric White’s latest exhibition, LP, comes in. Grabbing the classic covers of his childhood, the Brooklyn-based painter has taken the totemic images of classic covers, such as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and rendered them in oil paint, mutating and twisting the familiar with a modern eye. Harry Belafonte’s Belafonte, a mainstay of baby-boomer collections, features a melted portrait of the singer, his mouth — his instrument — now gone, and the title reprinted in Arabic. Similarly the made-for-radio faces of The Knack are now swirls of paint and the title of their Get the Knack is now “Too Much Content”. And there, over these twisted faces, is the greatest clue to the mystery of LP.
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The Diguised Jing Young Yu, 2009.

It’s not every day that an artist is able to stake her claim in the art world using an invisible medium. Yet with each pigeon-toed, see-through figure she creates, that is exactly what Korean sculptress, Jin Young Yu has done. Constructed entirely out of a self-formulated PVC (glass and clear plastic just weren’t transparent enough), each invisible man, woman, and child is a three-dimensional examination of hypocrisy, domestic secrets, and the ongoing battle between a private versus public self.
Created in full scale and often standing four feet tall, the translucent sculptures are as awe-inspiring as they are painstakingly conceived. Every limb, smock, and random accoutrement is created individually before being reassembled and woven together with transparent thread, taking Jin Young around forty days to make one figure.
     Much like each somber-faced character, the artist has nothing to hide when it comes to sharing her worldview. “My figures express the loneliness of people living today. The transparent body means a perfect shield that makes it possible to hide itself anywhere, while the crying face represents a warning: ‘Don’t come towards me!’  I intend to remind viewers of the loneliness of people in this modern society, where there is little of true communication.” And as for an overall theme?  “I want to get away from the plastic smiles and fake facial expressions,” she says. Thus is the essence of Jin Young’s stoic army.
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Most of us would regard a months-long, 1,800-mile commute a chore, an undue burden. For Painter William McKinnon, though, the long drive from his home in Melbourne, Australia to his post in the Northwestern town of Fitzroy Crossing — a cross-continental trip — was a creative goldmine.
     A Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship laureate, MacKinnon spent months on the road, fulfilling the terms of the award by working with local Kimberley schools and tribes at a latitude and longitude so far from his urban digs that he logged days, not hours, on the road each time he went to teach painting classes or provide local groups with cultural outreach programs. Perhaps a less attentive, imaginative, or industrious driver would have spent the time calling, emailing, video watching, iPod browsing, or all those other pursuits that have made their way into our driver’s seats over the last decade. Instead, McKinnon kept his eyes on the road and, through that inspiration, delivered a series of oil paintings and collages that capture the velocity and constantly changing inner landscapes inside the driver’s eye.
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Photography courtesy of Rizzoli New York

In the 1980s, photographer Nan Goldin rose to prominence with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, an ambitious body of work that depicted the underbelly of New York’s East Village and Lower East Side. Shot with minimal equipment in low-light conditions, featuring depictions of drug use, sexual liaisons, and domestic violence, Ballad ushered in a style known as the “snapshot aesthetic” and influenced a whole generation of younger artists. In an era of Facebook and Snapfish, it’s easy to overlook Goldin’s significance — but in its time, Ballad was as bold and original as artistic statements get.
     As talented as she is, Goldin would have been nothing without the extensive network of friends and fellow artists who served as her subjects. One of her friends was Bette Gordon, an up-and-coming filmmaker who, in 1983, asked Goldin to document the making of her film Variety. Gordon and Goldin were both members of No Wave, a loose coalition of avant-garde filmmakers and musicians on the Lower East Side. Intensely collaborative, the No Wave artists shared ideas and equipment, played music and acted and lived together in the neighborhood’s famous cold-water walk-ups.
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The other day, walking down the street near my apartment in the Lower East Side, I came upon a trailer park, right on the corner of Stanton and Suffolk, which hadn’t been there before. By trailer park I mean a trailer, parked. Not an expansive terrain of trailers. But also, inside the tiny, silver Coachman Travel Trailer was a park — yes, growing plants, shrubs, and trees, a miniature cascading waterfall and pond, wood and concrete benches, and skylights to let in sunshine. I stepped in, and enjoyed the natural park setting, the sound of trickling water, the dappled sunlight on the outstretched plant leaves.
     Originally commissioned in 2006 for an exhibit at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Kim Hollerman’s Trailer Park is not new. It’s been written about before, and some of our readers may have seen it when it first exhibited (parked?) back in ’06. But for me, it was a fresh slice of genius on a sunny fall day.

Currently parked at NY Studio Gallery, 154 Stanton Street.
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juniorfritz.com

It’s well known that Postmodernist re-appropriation — or at least the popular tendency to reuse, recycle, and refashion industrial products into art — began with a bit of toilet humor. Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” — a simple urinal presented as a “readymade” sculpture in 1917 — was a watershed (pardon the pun) moment in Dadaism and the resulting movements. Although recycling today has taken on a different meaning, artists are still pulling ideas and materials from that ultimate place of meditation and material —The Can. Take French artist Junior Fritz Jacquet, who fashions spent toilet paper rolls into faces and other sculptural works. Jacquet is practicing the old art of origami with references to African mask styles and a very healthy dollop of French cheekiness. But his “les masques” collection reminds us that in every First-World household, there is a constant struggle to stay green in the bathroom where we waste the most water and discard the most paper products. Consciously or unconsciously, Jacquet has given a human face to this little-talked-about environmental crisis. We are the trash we make, say the little faces. Just think of that next time you run out of TP.
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Photography by Guillaume Herbaut

In the Ukraine, a country where females are victims of sexual trafficking and gender oppression, a new tribe of empowered women is emerging. Calling themselves the “Asgarda”, the women seek complete autonomy from men. Residing in the Carpathian Mountains, the tribe is comprised of 150 women of varying ages, primarily students, led by 30 year-old Katerina Tarnouska. Reviving the tribal traditions of the Scythian Amazons of ancient Greek mythology, the Asgarda train in martial arts, taught by former Soviet karate master, Volodymyr Stepanovytch, and learn life skills and sciences in order to become ideal women. Little physical documentation existed on the tribe, until recently, when renowned French photographer, Guillaume Herbaut, met the Asgarda back in 2004 in the midst of the Orange Revolution.
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Last year, for our inaugural Global Travel Photo Contest, we received so many great images from all around the U.S. and the world that really hit the mark of our contest theme: Many Worlds, One Planet. It was an incredibly tough challenge narrowing the images down to the top 10. There were literally dozens of images that we wanted to publish and show the world, as well as to honor the photographers who submitted them. So we put together a slideshow of about 100 of our favorites. To all our readers, enjoy these unique images. To all the photographers, thank you, and we’re looking forward to seeing more amazing work for 2009.

The 2008 Global Travel Photo Contest Honorable Mention