Lundgren+Lindqvist

The Sweden based design and development bureau Lundgren+Lundqvist has updated with some fresh new work. Looking very good!

Happening now, through February 5th, 2012. On Medicine Lake in Plymouth, MN.

The fabulously quirky Art Shanty Projects, is a four-week-long exhibition that is part sculpture park, part artist residency and part social experiment. It is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which the relatively unregulated public space of the frozen lake can be used as a new and challenging artistic environment to expand notions of what art can be.

Art Shanty Projects is an homage to the uniquely Minnesotan pastime of ice fishing in a well-equipped and creatively-executed shack. Dotting the state’s lakes in winter, anglers set up shelter, bore through the ice, set up their poles and propane heaters, then sit around playing cards, drinking beer and laughing the whole night long. Sounds like fun, right?

With names/themes such as “The Shanty of Wonder”, “Monsters Under the Bed Shanty”, “SitandSpinShanty”, “Fort Shanty” and “Robot Reprise”, the Art Shanties provide a unique opportunity for artists to interact with their audience, and vice versa, in an un-intimidating, non-gallery like environment. Artists can choose to work in a way that directly engages the audience, or in a more passive way.

Previously an annual exhibition, from the 2012 season it will run biennially, potentially changing to a new Twin Cities-area lake every two years.

Little bald Léon loves his grandfather. He loves the old man’s bushy black beard, which seems endowed with magic powers. But Léon’s grandmother wants to cut off the unkempt beard and regain the distinguished-looking man she married. When the old man’s asleep, grandmother prowls, scissors in hand, but Léon’s keeping a watchful eye on her. As long as grandpa lives, the beard will stay!

One day, grandpa doesn’t wake up. Léon is sad, especially as his grandmother is at last able to shave off the beard. To soften his pain, Léon decides to bury the beard. The rising sun next morning reveals that a beard forest has sprung up, thick and black like grandpa’s. Léon’s round head sports a sort of thick black brush. A souvenir of the old days, when he played and laughed with his grandfather.

Directed by Claude Barras and Cédric Louis, and co-produced by Hélium Films and the National Film Board of Canada

Taylor Holland has a new book out on Matmos Press called Eurobus, photos of tour buses in Paris. Thanks for the email.

Great work by 23-year old Andrey Ilyaskin from Moscow.

Through photography, performative gestures and temporary installations, I rearrange objects, alter their function, attempt to forge new connections between them, or simply take their portrait. My practice is engaged with the interstitial space between the art object and its documented image as well as the potential of photography as sculpture.

-Maryanne Casasanta

Elise Jones is a London-based artist combining photography with drawing and installation.

Aurélien Arnaud, founder of PNTS, is now freelancing and has updated his site.

Today we’re adding 4 new contributors to the TSA roster. Chicago based Greg Anderson, Toronto based Laurie Kang, Venezuelan born/Brooklyn based Yker Moreno and Swedish born/Brooklyn based Peter Sunna.

Welcome friends.

Benjamin Edmiston’s compositions are fueled by the creation a familiar but askew world. Using a flat and decorative style, his fantastical settings are inhabited by ominous characters. Planes of floating heads, half-skinned snakes, and bodiless arms are some of his visual vocabulary; recalling the tension of an early, crude Mickey Mouse cartoon – or a misplaced folk sculpture, standing eerily on a dusty shelf. Benjamin lives and works in Brooklyn.