Nele Azevedo's Melting Men

In 2002, Brazilian artist/researcher Nele Azevedo began working on her Minimum Monument project, intervening in public and highly-trafficked spaces with hundreds of humanoid ice sculptures, each 20 centimeters high, and doomed. The installations are so defined by their ephemerality that they can only be set out quickly enough with the help of passers-by.

The result is breathtaking, but also alarming as we learn that the works serve as a warning of the dangers of global warming. We must watch the doleful figures waste away and eventually disappear, with the drip, drip, drip of their melting bodies reinforcing the passage of time like a terrible clock. Reflexively, we wish to save them. We're made to understand, if we've forgotten, that a human being is more precious than commodity, but that, like the thing, we are dispensable. We are no more immortal than a block of ice, left out in the sun.

With her "army of melting men," Azevedo has traveled worldwide.

Wanderlust: Night Flowers

 

Poetry Wednesday

Handy

Sharing water from a jar we

talk about the day our

air conditioner fell two stories

and killed no one we

wipe salt from our upper lips, remember

being cool.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Moreover, the Moon ---
by Mina Loy

Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.

Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.

Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,

touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles

Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf.

Sea-Scape/See-Scape: The Art of Yoan Capote

In my random internet wanderings the other day, I happened upon a thumbnail of a work by Yoan Capote, a Cuban artist I hadn't encountered before. The work was Isla (See-Scape), and I was immediately (pun intended) hooked.

Isla (See-Scape) is a seascape realized in oil and, you guessed it, fish hooks. Over 500,000 of them, affixed to the plywood and jute surface of the work over a period of six months in 2010. 

I think we sometimes have immediate positive reactions to works like these simply because they play on our expectations, producing that fizzy mixture of surprise and delight that optical illusions or trompe l'oeil paintings do, regardless of how formulaic or creatively empty they might actually be. But, while we get that surprise/delight cocktail here, I don't think Capote expects that to suffice as the beginning and end of the work, and, indeed, I think that it might simply be the happy byproduct of his work's actual program. On his website, he talks about how "the obsessive process of creation reinforce the meaning of the work, inspired in issues like Isolation, emigration, Collective fantasies and obsessions, etc...". Process becomes prime. The labor of 30 assistants, working shoulder-to-shoulder with materials that are utterly manufactured, whose function is entirely prescribed, to produce a world that is organic, whose possibilities are endless and in flux...this is what is at stake.

Have a look at his site. Other works of Capote's I really appreciated were his Retrato De La Masa (Lote) from 2008 (in which he begins carving stone portraits of strangers on the street, but only ever gets as far as an ear before the block proves too small) and Doubt from 2006 (where two doors--one black and one white--intersect to form a grey area that makes passage impossible).

Navigating the Night

Have a look at this beautiful photo series by Luis Gonzalez Palma, entitled "ARA SOLIS (aquí estoy ante Mi)". I'm absolutely in love.

Wanderlust: Landlocked

Poetry Wednesday

Fire Works

The accident was

that the explosives went off

(they were going to go off, so soon)

and everyone saw the same vision

tangerines on a meager table

I was four

on the right side of the lake I

wasn’t ready.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

The Term

by William Carlos Williams

A rumpled sheet

of brown paper

about the length

and apparent bulk

of a man was

rolling with the

wind slowly over

and over in

the street as

a car drove down

upon it and

crushed it to

the ground. Unlike

a man it rose

again rolling

with the wind over

and over to be as

it was before.

That Time I Went to A Wrestling Event...

Moody loves wrestling, Kelly loves Moody…..Kelly loves wrestling?

Not exactly.

A couple of months ago, I started panicking about what I was going to get Moody for our one-year anniversary. I was resigned to getting him a lovely (but boring) Fossil watch when, BEHOLD, the holy grail of Ticketmaster alerts appeared in my inbox. WWE RAW. Coming to Rochester.

It was fate. Anybody who knows Moody knows that he has more than one strange love in his life: convenient store coffee cake, Jackie Chan movies, Charlotte Gainsbourg, blue soda, me….and professional wrestling.  I splurged and bought two ringside seats, blacking out for a moment on the fact that, with this ticket purchase, I was basically volunteering to go with him.

I’m not going to lie, I had a blast.  Imagine endless beer, a comfy chair, adorable kids running around in floor-skimming t-shirts and sweat bands, and muscly men in what amounts to underwear, jumping around in a well-lit central location. Not to mention the goofy grin on my sweetie’s face. These are all good things.

Definitely glad I didn’t go with the watch.

Don't be fooled by his stoic expression. Moody had a blast.