Tiniest, Sweetest House
This 12x12ft (144 square feet) cabin is the Innermost House, and is located in the mountains of Northern California. Comprising a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a study, and a sleeping loft, it has no electricity; the owners, Diana Lorence and her husband, do all their cooking and heating with the fireplace, and use candles to light it. As Diana writes in her guest post over on the Tiny House Blog, [The Innermost House] faces directly south beneath an open porch that shelters our front door. A hill rises to the north behind us and the forest lies all around. The house encloses five distinct rooms: to the east is a living room eleven feet deep by seven feet wide by twelve feet high; to the west the house is divided into kitchen, study, and bathroom, each approximately five feet wide by three feet deep, with a sleeping loft above the three of them, accessible by a wooden ladder we store against the wall.
We do not have electricity or power of other kind, so we warm the cabin and cook our food and heat our water for bathing all over the fire.
It’s absolutely beautiful in my opinion.
Tags: cabins, contemporary architecture, dream houses, environmentalism, modern simplicity
Kate MacDowell
Kate MacDowell makes incredible works of art, akin to installation pieces, out of porcelain, a medium she chose for its “luminous and ghostly qualities as well as its strength and ability to show fine texture.”
Detailed and realistic, these pieces make loud and piercing statements about the troubled relationship between man and the natural world, but remain elegant and delicate. They “borrow from myth” (one example is this piece, titled Persephone, which references the myth of Persephone’s abduction by Hades to the Underworld, in which she mistakenly eats the seeds of a pomegranate he offers to her, thus forcing her to spend a quarter of each year in the Underworld – in MacDowell’s vision, the pomegranate’s seeds are actually pills, tablets with a neat little line down the middle); other sources of inspiration include “art history, figures of speech, and other cultural touchstones.”
The pieces are visual metaphors, or illustrated “figures of speech,” such as a pair of lungs with canaries inside them, or a dead rabbit containing a human skeleton. In MacDowell’s world, man and nature are grafted to each other, repeatedly, in surreal and subtly horrific ways. As she explains, often “aspects of the human figure stand in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world.”
Check out her work below, and be amazed. More can be seen on her Website.
Tags: anatomical-themed, animals, conceptual, environmentalism, greek mythology, installation art, kate macdowell, metamorphosis, political, porcelain, rabbits, surreal
Rat Love
My Victoriandustrial rock idol Emilie Autumn recently did an interview with Planet Green. I thought her answer to the last question, advice on “how to make more green, compassionate, and creative choices,” was most pertinent, as it’s totally the way I see it, too:
I would suggest that the element that would help the most in keeping our planet green is to learn to appreciate the beauty and importance of what it is that we have, similar to my view of vegetarianism and converting people to that way of eating. It is much more effective, and far less annoying, to increase people’s appreciation for animals of all species than it is to tell people not to eat them. A dietary alteration will soon follow once the animals in question are seen as something more important than food. We need to teach people to fall in love with the natural world again before we can expect them to care about saving it.
Also, here’s a behind-the-scenes video from Emilie’s photoshoot for Bizarre Magazine – with rats! (Don’t mind the God-awful porn lounge-type music they always accompany their videos with, it’s so ridiculous):
Follow ze linkTags: animal love, emilie autumn, environmentalism, rats, vegetarianism
The Magic Bottle
The Magic Bottle by Camille Rose Garcia is a wonderful children’s book (for weird kids, maybe) that demonstrates her writing skills as well as her visual artistry. This book is dark, whimsical, and delightfully imaginative. It expresses in a very complete way her concept of “The Tragic Kingdom,” of strange animals and inanimate things (even the ocean is alive and conscious) on a human level living and struggling under the black cloud of industrialism; creating a whole roiling breathing world that has never been seen before. Her cutesy, yet melancholy and acid trip-like style features constantly weeping, lugubrious-looking cartoony characters, in a world entirely of her own creation, populated by bizarre, menacing, and threatened creatures. Growing up in the sinister shadow of Disneyland, Camille was intensely disillusioned with the artificial, sterilized promise of heaven that it offered.
Tags: animated inanimate things, camille rose garcia, cartoony, cute n creepy little creatures, dark side of disneyland, environmentalism, pop surrealism
Caia Koopman
The very pretty pop surrealist art of Caia Koopman:
You can see more of Caia’s art at her site.
I actually got a card case featuring Caia’s art for Christmas, I love it dearly and never use it.
Tags: animals, day of the dead, environmentalism, pop surrealism
Categories
Search
Contact
© 2010-2011 Synesthesia Garden