400 nudes

I only recently came across this artists work, Jilian Mayer, who has created a display of 400 'naked selfies' at the Montreal Biennial. What's interesting is that these women who take these images, do it as a private, intimate form of photography. They're empowered, in that moment their self confidence is overwhelming; it allows them to be the director, the model and the editor. Yet, the minute they release these images, it because an immediate vulnerability. This intimate exclusively private moment of a picture becomes open for the entire world to find online. Mayer found these images on sites like Tumblr, and she decided to manipulate each image so that her face became theirs; allowing herself to almost be in their shoes. Mayer said: "I felt like if I could become all of these girls in a way it's like universalising the nude selfie". The exhibit allows for an exploration of the potential shame a naked selfie can stimulate; leaked nude photos can often ruin relationships, cause psychological pain and ruin potential job prospects. However, is it even really morally right to be using someone's nude body all for the name of art?
Mayer's exhibition arrives 1st April 2015, at the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal.

Who Are You?

Recently on Channel 4, artist Grayson Perry has created a documentary series called 'Who Are You?', which delves around the aspect of looking deeper into certain individuals, and their true identity.
Perry would create portraits of each of his subjects, whom he believed, were at crossroads with their identity.
For example, Perry studied people with different associated labels, such as: fame, religion, gender and power. For power he chose Chris Huhne, formerly Liberal democrat politician, who was facing prosecution for perverting the court of justice.
In creating Huhne's portrait, Grayson came to the idea of producing a pot. The pot was smashed and then put back together, but artistically using gold strips to show the cracks, which was a metaphor to show Huhne's vulnerability and how he went from everything, to quite simply, nothing. The creation of the pot also saw references from Andy Warhol were images perhaps easily associated with Huhne, were repeated numerously in an Andy-Warhol-like style.
If you haven't watched any of these episodes yet, I truly recommend that you do! They're really interesting and through Grayson's ethnographic research, you really get an insight into the different people's lives and feelings through their struggles and at their crossroads.

here's a link to watch the series on 4od: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/grayson-perry-who-are-you/4od

David Pirrie

David Pirrie's painting projects undeniably have a strong influence of his childhood were he and his brother used to scramble around the British Columbia's coastal range (just out their backyard), and perhaps which led to his interest in ski mountaineering.This aids his artwork as it gives him an intimate sense of the mountains characteristics. The dot overlay portrays reference to pop-art; in this sense 'the work becomes an exercise in re-framing how we perceive the mountains; examining the function of representation and how preserving something in imagery can make it iconic.' 

Shawn Huckins

New upcoming artist Shawn Huckins has recently caught my attention with these eye-catchingly juxtaposed paintings of the technological revolution against America's Founding Fathers. His fascination of our total engagement-overload into technology highlights the amelioration of our laziness, which, has henceforth affected a degree of literacy which has become the new social norm.  The idea is that we evidently live in a very different time and world to the founding fathers, and as such place our priorities in a very different way. If George was alive today, what would he post?