Geoff McFetridge

Geoff McFetridge seems to be one of those people who can excel in anything he turns his hand to. A renown designer, illustrator, animator, filmmaker and "all-around visual auteur" so I hear. His work is just too easy to like, the simple icon based illustration style he has become known for is what I'll be looking at. Although his work on the Virgin Suicides and Adaptation are surely worthy of note, I am just too distracted by the visual language of his illustrations.

Geoff McFetridge is a designer who is not bound by media, a new breed of creative who uses ideas over method. A kind of 21st century Renaissance man if I could be so bold. Utilizing print, film, animation and skateboards, he has become something of an icon himself. Humor plays large role in his work, using irony, witty phrases and sayings which I'm sure make perfect sense to the LA fraternity. The rest of us just have to nod and agree sometimes, but on the whole it's pretty universal stuff. Enough of that though take a look at a few examples of his work I've gathered to feast your unworthy eyes upon >>>

For more information on Geoff McFetridge check out this interview - kinda interesting. Especially the birch tree revelation. I did not know that the root systems link up! nice.

Also look up the King of Mountain site for a slightly more 'official' take.

And this interview by the Coudal Partners is really worth looking at >>>>

10% off on the Tate online shop

Just tweeted by the tate today!

TateRT @TateOnlineShop 10% off for our new Twitter friends. Enter the voucher code in your basket - 10%Twitter09 http://tinyurl.com/tateshop

Enjoy

Lost luggage?

Have you ever been the unfortunate soul who loses their luggage at the airport? Well look no further, you may be in luck! Take a look at this website of lost luggage. The aim, to re-unite travelers with their lost luggage! The suitcases are collected, photographed and and well documented, and now published rather nicely on the 'lost luggage' site.

Design your Olympic 2012 50p coin

The Royal Mint have set a challenge to the public to design a set of new 50p coins to celebrate the 2012 olympics coming to London. The winning designs will recieve £1,000 prize and a copy of their design set in gold! There will be 27 winners in all, as the aim is to have a 50p coing per olympic event. The deadline for the competition is 24th April so not long to go!

Take a look at this short video about the Royal Mint's competition to design the London Olympic 2012 50p coin >

Whitechapel Gallery reopens

Whitechapel gallery, East London, has finally re-opened it's doors to the public after a costly make over (£13.5m!). There is a buzz over the new gallery space which has seen it's first new coat of paint for a few years. The curators have many events planned to keep the hype in motion. The first exhibition opens on Sunday (5th April), entitled: Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame!
Here's what the Whitechapel Gallery website has to say about the exhibition,

"In her remarkable pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, German sculptor Isa Genzken immersed visitors in a series of environments on the theme of ‘Oil’. Like a three dimensional collage the pavilion presented a poetic culmination of the major themes in her work: the psychedelic qualities of industrial materials, architectural form, the loss of the natural world, the properties of colour, and the energy and violence of western culture.

This is the first retrospective of a major European artist whose fusion of photography, paint, architecture and found objects into the realm of sculpture has influenced generations of younger artists. The show commences with early floor works from the 1970s and continues with a sequence of windows, rooms and buildings cast from plaster and concrete in the 1980s. Living and working in Germany and in New York, Genzken’s column structures of the 1990s draw on the vertiginous, reflective forms of Manhattan skyscrapers, adapted in 2000 into proposals for improvements to the architecture of Berlin.

The exhibition also features elements from more recent installations such as Oil, 2007 and Ground Zero, 2008. They are created with toys, souvenirs, furniture, building materials — the stuff of consumer culture, arranged in associative scenarios that are in turn funny, poetic and disturbing."

Other exciting events coming up are:
Gallery Talk: William Mann
Michael Craig-Martin in Conversation with Andrea Tarsia
Mother Foucault with Will Self
England: A play by Tim Crouch
Sigmund Freud's Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity & Jay Street Film Project