Extreme Craft

SHELL CHAIR

Brooklyn-based designer Alexander Reh has fired a round over the bows of the shotgun shell christmas light set and shotgun shell vase with his "Reload" chair. The chair, made from over 450 shotgun shells, massages the backside while it massages the absurdity center of your brain. Reh's master's thesis is very intriguing to me--the concept of "Constructive Witticism", which posits that design and absurdity are opposing principles, but overlap in the gray area of HUMOR. Other objects by Reh include "No No Knives", a ceramic knife block in which the knives are sheathed in an electrical outlet, and "Assroots", a method of placing advertising in steaming coils of dogshit.

Lock-N-Load via MAKE

Sweet-N-Nasty Bakery, Boston

Sweet-N-Nasty Bakery, Boston
Originally uploaded by Extreme Craft.

Greetings from Boston! I'm here for the College Art Association Conference, which has been great, but one of the side benefits is partaking in Boston Culture. Next to the Hynes/ICA Subway stop is the "Sweet-N-Nasty" erotic bakery. Need confections for that Bachelor or Bachelorette party? Has that look in your loved ones eye expressed longing for explicit chocolates? I took a few other photos of the baked goods and chocolates inside...you'll find them when you visit this photo on my Flickr account.

Going to the Chapel of TUMS

All of this talk about the Sistine Chapel Ceiling reminds me that the Eye-Talians don't have anything on us when it comes to touching displays of religious devotion. Among the most extreme sights that I have beheld is the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri. I don't know what's in the water in Missouri, but anyplace with the stones to produce Branson, Precious Moments, and my fiancee, Claire is worthy of my devotion. You are no doubt familiar with Precious Moments, those cloying, creepy encephalitic figurines from the Hallmark Store, but not many folks realize that they are the brainchild of a butcher... Samuel Butcher to be exact. Mr. Butcher lives up to his name with the Precious Moments Chapel, which is his small way of returning the love that people have shown for his figurines (and if the site is 75% gift shop, so be it).

Upon entering the chapel, you can't help but notice the main attraction, a mural of precious moments angels welcoming a bunch of presumably dead babies to Heaven. I swear that I remember the ceiling being a scene-for-scene reproduction of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, but I think my imagination was working overtime. Various chapels and stained glass windows commemorate dead children. The gift shop is haunted by life-sized Precious Moments babies with heads the size of Minnesota balls of twine. No road trip to Branson would be complete without a stop at Precious Moments. If you can tear yourself away from the walnut bowls and homemade fudge, you will be richly rewarded. Precious Moments even has a wedding chapel and hotel! Did I mention the fountain show? You can sign a contract with God and Satan simultaneously!

LINK to seriously deranged tour.

Touched by the Needle of God

Joanna Lopianowski-Roberts is clearly touched. Think of the craft project that you spent the longest on. I once spent a solid month doing a single ceramic piece, and felt preeeeeeetty pleased with myself. Ms. Lopianowski-Roberts, a resident of Junction, Texas, spent a whopping 2,800 hours (over ten years) working on a cross-stitch reproduction of Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling. That's almost 117 solid DAYS of work! The entire masterpiece measures 40 inches by 80 inches, and can be only be suitably viewed in this 1 Meg JPEG file. For those of you who would like to follow in her footsteps, the patterns are available (as individual scenes...whew!) at lulu.com. Painting the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. It's only the second most rewarding thing you can do on your back.

LINK via BoingBoing via SpiritFingers

Things That Make You Say Pugh

As if we needed more evidence that fashion designers hate women. On second thought, looking through the rest of the slides, Gareth Pugh seems to be an equal-opportunity misanthrope.

LINK via BoingBoing

Toile and Trouble

Kent Henricksen is a New-York based artist who takes French Toile de Jouy fabrics and embellishes them with his...um...personal iconography. Frolicking Acadian couples sport Klan robes and rubber bondage masks as they sashay, swing, and cavort through baroque landscapes and interiors. Henricksen's exhibition, Timeless Pleasures was shown last year at Berlin's Atle Gerhardsen gallery, and he most recently participated in the ARS 06 exhibition in Kiasma, Finland. The gallery website goes beyond boilerplate analysis of re-appropriated art by talking about Henricksen's relationship with appropriation as an inverse to the way societies change older images to make them more appropriate to prevailing social mores:

Utilizing the traditional medium of embroidery, Kent Henricksen works contrarily to the historic convention of partially covering works of art in order to adapt them to the prevailing moral code of the time. The fabrics, inspired iconographically by the French rococo of Boucher or Fragonard lose their light heartedness and uncover new contents precisely as a result of the act of concealment. The depicted, hooded figure acts as a universal symbol to reflect the actions of stigmatized individuals of terrorist or masochistic groups. Apart from personal associations with actual events with a political, religious or sexual motivation, historic components are also brought to bear on the basis of the French printed fabrics, criticizing the reign of absolutism during the times of the baroque and rococo.

Dammit. ARS 06 is giving me that old itch to visit Finland...but then I look outside at the 70 degree weather that we're having in Atlanta in the middle of February, and thank the gods that I can experience the work through the miracle of the internets.

LINK via We Make Money Not Art

The Wurst of Times

The fight to save Print Gocco continues. The Wurst
Gallery, based in Portland Oregon, but living on the internets, currently has a grand showing of artists that use Print Gocco to their own evil means. Included among them is Kate Bingaman, she of Obsessive Consumption and co-member of the Mississippi Bureau of Extreme Craft. The artists in the show raise the Gocco bar beyond its everyday greeting card capabilities. This is art, kids, and it can be yours for a pittance. Help support the Wurst Gallery, the artists involved, and most importantly, Print Gocco.

LINK LINK to Save Gocco

Happy Birthday, Extreme Craft!

Happy Birthday! Extreme Craft is 1 year old as of last week! For some reason, my server at Blogger wasn't allowing me to post, but hopefully, that's been taken care of. Thanks go out to everybody who has kept me pumping out the posts (295 of them!) over the past year. That's a heapin' helpin' of inspirado. Here's to the next year of Extreme Craft! Big things are afoot in the art world, the craft world, and of course, the extreme craft world. Massive.

Charley Friedman Rules the World

Nebraska-born and bred sculptor and artist Charley Friedman is true to his muse. Sometimes, that muse tells him to construct a gigantic soundproof box suspended from the ceiling with a ladder below. That same muse might tell him to be eating cake inside of the box, just inches from where a spectator might climb the stairs and stick their headin . Maybe the muse tells him to surprise the viewer with a bright light that turns on, revealing the cake-eating artist inches from their face. Muses rule.

Currently, Charley has been constructing three-dimensional versions of figures from Miro paintings, and notably, perpetrating the most extreme latch hook object that I have ever laid eyes on. Carpet World (pictured above) is a 6 foot Geo-Political globe, completely latch hooked by hand. Charley has a new show at the Barbara Mathes Galleryin New York entitled Gross Anatomy. The thing about doing a piece with such intricate handiwork? It gives you a lot of time to think. Craft tends to grow exponentially due to this fact. The simple act of crafting begets more (and more extreme) craft, which is one of the cornerstones that Extreme Craft is built on. I can only guess what extremity Charley will be up to next.

LINK

Whip It!

My friend Henry (of Chunklet Magazine infamy) has taken to saying..."Oooh...I'm gonna blog that" every time somebody says something snotty back to him (which happens like clockwork). Oh, blogs. Pretty soon, the Earth's crust will collapse under all of the weight of bookmarked websites on everybody's browsers. Even so, it's worth it to add WHIPUP.NET to your rounds. WhipUp is the brainchild of Kathreen Ricketson, and serves as a sort of Justice League of crafters, all posting to the central site. So far, so good! My head is full of schemes about lava lamps and plush toys. The site has only been rolling for a week, and is already packed with goodness....I couldn't help but notice that the "extreme" section was...um...a bit on the skimpy side.

GET BLOGGING!