Family Stuff, a photojournalism project by Beijing-based photographers Huang Quingjun and Ma Hongjie, has been circulating among blogs for a couple of years now. We came across it recently and wanted to share the work. Huang and Ma juxtapose the results of China’s economic progress with its enduring poverty – often in the same household – by documenting families and their belongings arranged outside of their homes.
     The photographers capture Chinese families from various regions and ethnicities. Ma in particular focuses on the country’s rural majority, rather than the urban population more frequently displayed by the media. While to first-world eyes the number of possessions appears scant, their owners are obviously proud of what they’ve gained in recent times. Occasionally, too, other faces are more troubled, as seen in the expressions of a family in the resettlement program in Beijing, waiting to move to a new home so their old residence can be demolished.
     Huang and Ma work completely independently of one another: Huang covers the Northern half of China while Ma documents the South. The shoots can take months to finish. Although families are compensated for their trouble, the task of explaining the project and convincing families to so nakedly display themselves and their possession often proves difficult. Six years in the making, this epic project will result next year in fifty photos and a book.
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Color photography may have been invented as early as 1907, but the artistic viability of the medium was questioned even as recently as the 1980s. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who is currently the subject of a retrospective at MoMA, was a particularly notable opponent. Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980, released this spring by Hatje Cantz publishers, explores the work and ramifications of the artists whose breakthrough images opened the floodgates for color photography’s later practitioners. Beginning with William Eggleston’s watershed show at MoMA in 1976, the book takes readers through the early work and critiques of contemporaries Stephen Shore, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, William Christenberry, Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, Richard Misrach, Joel Sternfeld, Eve Sonneman, and many more. Accompanied by contemporary critical essays as well as many original reviews, this survey provides a snapshot of a powerful and surprisingly recent paradigm shift in the course of modern photography.
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Fiber, one of the most ancient natural materials, is currently enjoying somewhat of a renaissance. Used for craftwork, utilitarian items, clothing, and contemporary art, fiber today serves as “a resilient and easily sourced material for many of today’s sustainable design solutions”. Re-fashioning, recycling, or reusing natural fiber is gaining in popularity, as a new wave of eco-crafting hints at the ways in which fiber is working to reconnect artists and consumers to one another as well as to our threatened natural world. A synecdoche for a more environmentally-conscious world, environmental and textile artist Abigail Doan’s upcoming Tribeca exhibit examines new ways of considering fiber “in relation to the natural environment, our patterns of consumption, and contemporary definitions of fashioning self”.
     According to Doan, (Re)Fashioning Fiber will include “collaborative environmental fiber art from Iran; handcrafted vegetation jewelry from Bulgaria; sustainable, locally-minded fashion and drawings by Eko-Lab; no-waste textile fashion by Study NY; recycled ‘flotsam fiber’ from the streets of NYC; handmade books spinning tales about a global pilgrimage; crochet tower structures infused with sound”, and much more.

(Re)Fashioning Fiber opens tomorrow, May 20, 6:30-8:30pm at Green Spaces NY, 394 Broadway, 5th Floor. The exhibit will be on view through August 13, 2010.
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With a supremely simple sub-thirty-minute, thirteen-track debut, this British trio calls to mind the brisk noise-pop of Sub Pop label-mates No Age (not to mention early Seattle grunge). Perhaps, a description of their first show says it all: the band played a party titled “RAGE” in their native London which purportedly involved a lot of beer and one giant trampoline, evoking an image of disgruntled, drunken, and high-flying youth that is only too apt given the sounds unleashed on Nothing Hurts. While “Worse to Come”, which features guests Vivian Girls, recalls a grimier version of the male-female vocal interplay of the Vaselines, much of this record revolves around hazy feedback giving way to the rapid-fire play of singer/guitarist John Arthur Webb. Chunky, distorted riffs spike through “Weird Feelings” only to be followed (if not soothed) by a lush, almost shoe-gazer-like, drone on the ethereal “Franklin”, during which Webb contemplates the band’s ostensible infatuation with ephemerality, crooning, “All this won’t last forever”. Combining both of these currents is “Years Not Long”. The grizzled sweep of guitars on the album’s opener deftly straddles the line between cockeyed exuberance and infecting heaviness for an effect that all but boils down Male Bonding’s unique allure in two-and-a-half glorious minutes.

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Buy this at iTunes. After the jump, watch a live session the band did for BBC. (more…)

From Simon Ekrelius, a designer who worked in couture almost exclusively until 2006, comes “Stardust”, an autumn/winter 2010 collection made up of spellbinding oppositions. According to Ekrelius, the collection is the story of a stargazing space goddess who believes the stars to be more like diamonds than glowing balls of light: Ingrid Bergman in a futuristic Casablanca escaping on a UFO, rather than an airplane, at the end. But the basis of the design is rooted in the past: Le Courbusier’s Phillips Pavilon, constructed for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, inspired the silhouette of the entire collection.
     The end result is highly structured shoulders on fitted dresses, jackets, a one-piece jumpsuit, and multifaceted skirts that jut away from the body creating a diamond-like shape similar to the stars that surround Ekrelius’s imagined space goddess. His detailed construction gives the collection a strong, authoritative presence, but paired with organza and silk the collection retains a distinct femininity.
     The prints for “Stardust” complete the Stargazer story — brightness bursting through darkness, streaks of grays and yellows against dark backdrops. In this, Ekrelius successfully binds future to past; couture with ready-to-wear.
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Green thinking is changing the way we build. We’re reusing existing structures and materials, designing more efficient building systems, and thinking about long-term sustainability. But these changes are minor in view of the far deeper changes to come, as ecologically-minded designers reexamine their most fundamental assumptions about a door and a roof and a foundation, and reimagine what a building is entirely.
     The visionary French architecture office R&Sie(n) is right at the forefront. Its projects, collected in the book Bioreboot: The Architecture of R&Sie(n), offer an architecture that’s deeply enmeshed with natural forces, and entirely liberated from modern conventions about design and construction.
     Since the mid-nineteenth century, when steel framing supplanted heavy masonry construction, buildings have been conceived as stable shells that shaped efficient interior environments, as machines for living. R&Sie(n) complicates this paradigm. Its buildings aren’t discrete, unchanging objects but mutable devices embedded within ecologies of weather, time, geology, flora, and fauna.
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Cheryl Molnar has lived in New York for most of her life. Born and bred on Long Island, the young collage artist currently lives and works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Fascinated by the shifts and alterations constantly happening to the urban locales in which she lives, Molnar creates intricate, powerful collages that capture tenuous moments of architectural change. We interviewed Molnar via e-mail about gentrification, her unique choice of artistic medium, and an intriguing future project on the rapidly-changing Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront.

You grew up on Long Island and currently live in Brooklyn. How have the places you’ve lived influenced your work, and what draws you to depict them?

I have always been sensitive to my surroundings. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood on Long Island, I spent time in a place that was engineered to provide young families with the “American Dream” — new (at the time) ranch houses, “modern” appliances, a small patch of green space and a driveway. But the structures and goods, manufactured to supply this dream, were generally poorly constructed, impersonal and generic. This “assembly line” production not only prevented neighborhoods from developing any lasting character but did not integrate itself into the natural surroundings. This disregard for nature deeply affected me and is one of the central themes in my work.
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Formerly a fringe movement, the concept of edible gardening might now officially be called a nationwide trend (after all, even Michelle Obama is doing it). The premise? To rid our suburbs of resource-draining expanses of green lawns and replace them with sustaining — and sustainable — vegetable gardens. Since the first edition of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, by author and activist Fritz Haeg, was published in 2008, the edible landscaping movement has only gained followers.
     Last month saw the release by Metropolis Books of the greatly expanded second edition of Edible Estates, which documents the eight regional prototype food gardens that Haeg designed and planted in California, Kansas, Texas, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and England. Alongside countrywide reports from individuals who have planted their own edible gardens, the book features essays by edible-landscaping pioneer Rosalind Creasy, artist and writer Lesley Stern, and bestselling author Michael Pollan. Other highlights include Haeg’s thoughts on Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden on the White House lawn and the never-before-published Declaration of the Good Food Revolution by MacArthur Fellow and urban farmer Will Allen.
     As Eva Hagberg of Architectural Record writes, this book “is not an attack on the front lawn. It is an attack on our sanctificiation of the idea of sameness.” A chimeric mash-up between how-to book, garden showcase, and landscaping manifesto, the second edition of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn teaches and inspires readers to see their urban landscape with new eyes, and to understand the ways in which private property can become a public model for social change.
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Spend a few hours at a local skate park, and it becomes clear that the dynamism of the halfpipe’s gravity-defying techniques often gets lost in translation from reality to a two-dimensional photograph. Long confined to the realm of motion picture spectacles, German photographer Sebastian Denz uses 3-D imagery to capture “a hybrid space that is in between virtual and real,” one kickflip at a time. Armed with a custom built apparatus assembled by camera specialist Dr. Kurt Gilde, Denz has been on the road with streetwear brand Carhartt’s European skateboard team for the past three years, capturing the athletes in “hyper-reality.” Unlike the comfort of a dark theater, however, these spatial photographs are not about audience passivity, but rather “creating [one's] own construction of reality within these spaces” – a far cry from, say, the lush escapism of Pandora in IMAX.

Carhartt Presents Skateboarding.3D is on display at the Carhartt store in Rome from May 7 through May 26.