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When you’re walking along and you see a pigeon nibbling at some weave-strewn chicken in the gutter, or when you’re watching someone dressed in a Pikachu costume being sick at a party, or browsing the gift section of a provincial corner store, you may be unwittingly witnessing things that Jamie Lee Curtis Taete manages to actually capture with his lens. Most of us pass by these tawdry, depressing sights without a second thought, but it takes someone like him to record it for the good of civilisation.
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As an institute specialising in modern and contemporary American art it seems essential that The Whitney Museum should have an identity that reflects its contemporaneous status, and with plans to expand into a second Manhattan site in 2015 that need seems even more urgent. The Whitney have realised this and have just commissioned Experimental Jetset to revamp and rebrand this established and respected institution, imbuing it with a sense of fun and experimentation that better represents the artists on display. The Whitney’s new logo mark, a malleable ‘W’, is a bold, confident symbol that can be reimagined and reinterpreted to suit the museum’s diverse needs. There’s not many institutions that would embrace such a fluid identity but it’s testament to The Whtney’s ambition that they’ve opted for something so bold.
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To conclude our speaker profiles for Here 2013 we present to you multi-award-winning international stage and costume designer Es Devlin. Her stunning work spans a number of genres: from film and TV to music, dance and theatre.
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We Cross The Line have already demonstrated that they’re more than capable of producing engaging short documentaries but now the small team of Belgian and Italian film-makers have branched out into new territory, producing their first ever music video. Uncomfortable follows a similar recipe to their documentary work – find someone who’s naturally interesting and point the camera at them – and manages to match the music incredibly well. So prepare to meet Emiliano, a Michael Jackson impersonator from Rome who honours the King of Pop on the city’s streets on a daily basis, albeit with a cheeky little belly that’s more akin to another King.
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This week we were all talking about Tim Peake being the first UK astronaut to visit the space station out in…outer space, so in honour of his bravery we decided to make our monthly playlist SPACE themed! Not necessarily all relating to outer space, some of these songs hark back to the feeling of being in a teenage bedroom, getting out and about in the great outdoors or even just being in your trusty old house. Apart from Holly, our intern, she chose Modjo’s “Lady (Hear me Tonight)” because that would be what she’d want to hear if she was flying through space on her own. Fair enough. Here it is!
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She’s back! Gracia Lam, born in Hong Kong and now living in Canada, has updated her portfolio with some delights. Still in her brilliant style we loved so much last year, you cannot deny Gracia is consistently hitting the nail on the head. Her portfolio is brimming with impressive clients like The New Yorker and Random House, and she has won a bunch of awards too. Simple with surprising depth, her illustrations are colourful yet do not detract from the brief given – it definitely seems like no challenge is too big for Gracia.
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British music festivals take note, this is the second excellent identity for a Scandinavian festival we’ve featured this week.THIS WEEK. Those Norwegians are having a blinder. The first came from Santtu Mustonen and Flow festival and this one arrived direct from Non-Format, who have produced a selection of anthropomorphic robotic faces for this year’s Only Connect Festival of Sound, this year themed around Machine Dreams. The illustration and design work is all top notch and we must confess we’re excited by the programme, which looks like a covetable piece of print in its own right. Come on Glastonbury, you know what to do; that little ring of dancing men won’t cut it forever.
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Not often does a video simultaneously make James Cartwright admit feel that he’d rather be a girl than a boy (finally) and also make me genuinely want to participate in competitive sport, but this one did. This was released a few months back, but because I only ever witnessed it in the five seconds before a YouTube clip until I could skip it, it meant it was never watched in full. The first time I actually did, I watched it three times in a row.
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Ahoy there students! We’ve got another announcement for you. You know how just there other day we launched our Represent-sponsored The Graduates 2013? In all the excitement you probably thought we’d forgotten about Student of The Month didn’t you? But we haven’t – not at all – and in the relentless fashion of one of our favourite monthly features it’s back for May 2013. As ever, the deadline is tight (you’ve got until next Tuesday, May 28) but we’ve got every faith in you, so get sending in your work!
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Please welcome very busy image-maker Mr Chad Kouri. Tirelessly juggling about a hundred projects at once, Chad is a good example of someone whose work/play life is as one. His consistent swapping of mediums makes him one of Chicago’s most impressive commercial multimedia artists. He’s also a bit of a dab hand at typography. Here he is, let us introduce Chad Kouri…
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Our intern Holly Wilkins talks about the current status of gardening and how the Chelsea Flower Show, which often ticks all the boxes of an art and design exhibition, can sometimes fall on deaf ears.
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Last year studio Fons Hickmann M23 produced a beautiful yearbook for Dresden’s Semperoper, interspersing beautiful photographs and engravings of the city’s history with bold geometric shapes; transforming a severe monochrome landscape with bursts of colour and texture. This year they’ve done it again, moving the concept one step further with geometric collages of Dresden fused with other locations across the globe – creating strange patterns that function as optical illusions. As ever, the accompanying design is first rate but it’s the commissioned images that really steal the show.
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Very happy to welcome Slugabed back to It’s Nice That with the video for his new single Bombok, released to coincide with the launch of his new record label, Activia Benz. The word Bombok alone conjures up memories of the word bombastic and the feel of most Thai beach resorts, so it comes as no surprise that this video is nice, seizure-inducing a mixture of the two.
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It’s been ages since we featured any of Ping Zhu’s work, which means (because she’s a supremely in-demand, freelance-illustrating genius) that she’s got an absolute shed-load of updates on her site. Since we last met Ping’s been working for Plansponsor, The New York Times and The New Yorker on an almost weekly basis it seems, in between whiles finding time to put together an impressive installation at this year’s Pick Me Up and fill up a home-made sketchbook with work that she’s documenting on her blog. Because of this slavish attitude to work Ping’s illustration just keeps on getting better – and we were big fans in the first place. Hopefully we’ll be seeing her on the cover of The New Yorker soon!
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It’s not often we feature a fashion shoot on It’s Nice That, but when we do, they are pretty spectacular. Edie Campbell (away from her usual light hues) dons jet black hair and the smokiest eyes I’ve ever seen for a US Vogue’s June 2013 shoot in Morocco, shot by well known photographer Peter Lindbergh. There is a loose story line following a lone traveller through Morocco and is rather unlike other fashion shoots, mainly due to the charming compositions detracting your gaze away from the clothes to the surrounding environment of mosaic tiles and desert landscape.
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It’s certainly not often that online dating references make us do anything other than cringe on our morning commute (I’m looking at you hand-drawn type and soft-focus record player) but please welcome an absolute game-changer from Channel 4! Meet Arthur, the grieving tortoise who, after losing his wife in the zoo in which they’ve shared a life together, goes on the hunt for a new companion.
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A recent graduate from Pratt in New York, Anthony Cudahy has an incredible talent when it comes to painting. Using the gouache method, Anthony’s pieces are romantic and fluid with the lively brush strokes and large blocks of colour suggesting a sense of ambiguity. Anthony explains his concept in the statement below:
