Sarah Sze

Unravel, 2005, Mixed media

Sze’s sculptures are flowing structures consisting of a conglomeration of small-scale household items that respond to and infiltrate the surrounding architecture. Like the information flow of the World Wide Web, her compositional language takes form by successively linking small bits of discrete information into a complex network. With an intensity born of a laborious patchwork technique that is at once painterly and sculptural, the interplay between individual components and overall structure allows Sze to explore the boundaries between art and everyday life.

bamboo scaffolding

Airy and lightweight-looking, bamboo scaffolding can reach great heights and creates an incredible outside structure for buildings.

Mumbai, India

3-D timber frame views

Great diagrams showing timber frame construction in houses, including joinery and truss design. Handy for looking at examples of designing bracings and structures.

The Martha Rosler Library

This project grew in part out of artist Martha Rosler’s space problem: she simply had too many books crowding her home and studio. They covered the shelves, piled on the floors, and cascaded down the stairs. We offered her a solution. We asked her if we could borrow her library for a while, to open to the public in the form of a reading room at the e-flux space on Ludlow street. As an artist’s library, her collection suggests multiple meanings and possibilities. She has constantly brought the familiar under closer examination, using text both as a representational strategy and descriptive tool. Given the uncommon diversity of her interests and influences, and their significance in the production of critical positions, we deemed it relevant to open her familiar – and occasionally obscure – sources to readers.

David Ireland

“Confessional, 1989.” Metal chairs and C-clamps. 48 x 20 x 20 inches

“You can’t make art by making art” has been a guiding principle in the work of David Ireland, one of California’s most important and critically acclaimed artists working in the challenging arena of conceptual and installation art. “Ideally my work has a visual presence that makes it seem like part of a usual, everyday situation,” he says. “I like the feeling that nothing’s been designed, that you can’t tell where the art stops and starts.”

The quilts of Gee’s Bend

Gee’s Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850. After the Civil War, the freed slaves took the name Pettway, became tenant farmers for the Pettway family, and founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world…The town’s women developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. The women of Gee’s Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present…

Michale Swaine: “Reap What You Sew”

On the 15th day of every month Michael Swaine can be found on the sidewalk near the Senator Hotel in the Tenderloin district. He’s usually perched behind his vintage sewing machine, stitching patches onto worn jacket linings, hemming trousers and repairing tears in ladies’ blouses — all for free.

Swaine, 34, a trained artist, calls it his “Reap What You Sew Generosity Project.” In 2002, Swaine turned an old-fashioned ice cream cart into a mobile sewing table. On a cast-iron, treadle-operated machine — last patented in 1911 — Swaine tends to the neighborhood’s rips and seams. Most of his customers live in the long-term hotels that line the streets. About one in 50 is a hipster who’s sought out his quirky services, said Swaine. But he’ll sew for anyone who asks, and occasionally provide fashion advice.

“Pimp my shopping cart”

What, you don’t think the homeless deserve to roll in style? We’d opt for some 20-inch dubs ourselves, but this bad boy has GPS, a mini-fridge, AM/FM cassette stereo, LCD screen with TV tuner, can crusher, alarm with strobe lights, a tent, solar powered battery charger, and a slide out seat.

braiding

instructions and more at Dreamweaver Braiding

hand-knit leprosy bandages

Very weird but metaphorically interesting…a church website showing people how to make crocheted or handknit bandages to be donated to lepers in tropical countries.

Phil Ross

“Triple Now Power,” 7′ x 6′ x 3′ Salvaged redwood, steel.

In the Museum of Natural History in NYC there is an eight-foot wide cross section of a Sequoia sempervirens, its polished surface engraved with important dates in human history at corresponding growth rings. It is both awesome and troubling to stand before this several thousand-year-old tree: awesome to see epic time in a physical manifestation, troubling to think about the need for this type of graffiti in the first place. My desire in making Triple-Now-Power is to suggest a view of time that is more complex than a progressive chronology

Erwin Wurm

“Outdoor Sculpture, Taipei” 2000

“The artist is perhaps best known for his ongoing “Do It Yourself” and “One Minute Sculpture” series (begun in 1996 and ‘98, respectively). These consist of written instructions and diagrams and any props needed to carry them out, such as “show your tongue,” “lie on the balls–no part of the body should touch the ground,” and “put the felt markers on top of your shoes, hold this for one minute and think of Rene Descartes….” (read article)

Janine Antoni

“Ingrown,” 1998, C-print

Iraqi civilian gun trucks

An amazing collection of photos of standard trucks and cars that have been modified for the Iraq war by both the Iraqi police and civilian contractors. Like fortified mini-tanks, these improvised units become interesting examples of connecting and rehabbing disparate objects for new purposes.

Chimeras, past and present

In Greek mythology, the Chimera (or, as in Latin, Chimaera) is a monstrous creature made of the parts of multiple animals.

“Back in 1997, a rather bizarre photograph suddenly became very famous. It showed a totally hairless mouse, with what appeared to be a human ear growing out of its back.