Incredibly crafted paper sculptures by Benja Harney.

Site specific environmental art by Andy Goldsworthy. For the most part he uses no tools besides his hands and whatever surrounding natural materials he can find to painstakingly construct each piece. At the mercy of the elements, some works are gone within a matter of hours, collapsing and scattering on the wind or tide. Found via Rivers and Tides, a documentary on Andy’s process, which happens to be on demand on Netflix at the moment.

Drawing, painting, and cut-paper from Saelee Oh.

Sweet and playful, but not too saccharine.

As of yesterday, after battling with at&t for nearly two weeks, I haaaaaave internet again! It’s like being off crutches for the first time! Hello friends! Are you still there? I sure hope so.

It takes an especially good interview to keep my attention long enough to finish it. Black Harbor’s done an excellent one on Jeff Hamada, the force behind one of my all-time BFF art blogs, BOOOOOOOM. Here’s an excerpt that I can relate to:

“Only because I felt a little discouraged coming out of art school, and I just didn’t have a style, or a thing that I liked to do. So, I feel that I did the opposite, where I spent the next few years building up an audience. The blog essentially is an audience now for my work. It’s as if you made a film, and you have to find a theater that would show it. I did the opposite. I invited everyone to this theater and I don’t have a film, and now I have to make the film…I just have to make the stuff. I’m excited for the opportunity to make a ton of stuff, or just collaborate with people, launch projects, and immediately have this pretty big audience.”

This interview has also got me pining really hard for Vancouver, one of my favorites places in the whole, whole world. Read the rest here.

Installations by Megan Geckler remind me of similar ones I’ve seen using masking tape. Megan’s have a more sculptural quality and use flagging tape, which is basically plastic ribbon that construction workers use to mark out space. I can only imagine how spectacular something like this would be times ten in scale. I’m thinking like Christo & Jeanne-Claude huge. God that would be so awesome. Via COLOURlovers and Design Milk.

I love it when my friends impress the hell out of me with their awesome work. In this particular case, it’s a project is en pointe from top-to-bottom. Ten empty storefronts in Wicker Park/Bucktown now have artist inhabitants for the next four months thanks to Make Believe, Firebelly Design, and Pivotal Promotions. Not only have artists been allowed to move into a space to use as their own canvas for MONTHS, in a very high traffic area, but it’s a juried contest with a cash prize of $5,500. (Determined by free and public voting which anyone can do here). As we know, art/design just get no money these days, so the fact that there is some compensation incentive in such an accessible venue is just amazing. Shop, eat, drink and look at art. Perfect.

And the work IN the windows? Just wow. My girls, Indo Projects, snapped up my vote for sure.

These ladies pulled off this incredible feat under incredible parameters. They had just three days to find the cups, of which there’s several hundreds, and five days to build and install. At it’s most basic, their installation takes mundane, dirty, and senseless waste and makes it beautiful. But on a deeper level, it’s calling our accelerated pace sharply into focus and trying to promote a return to a simpler pace and slower, more responsible commerce.

Learn more about their window and vote here.