Hubcap Creatures by Ptolemy Elrington

Emily C-D

Baltimore-based artist Emily C-D assembles gorgeous, colorful installations and sculptures out of rusted metal, discarded machinery, old snow shovels, and whatever discarded junk she can find, wiring it all together mostly with found materials. She often incorporates painterly components to these pieces, channeling her abilities as an illustrator to add little flourishes — stylized figures, flowers, butterflies, and abstract textures and shapes — to change the nature of the dangerously gnarled materials she works with. C-D also works in inner-city communities around the city, often collaborating with children to create similarly motley murals that often spill off the walls onto the streets and pavement. Read more

Gabriel Dishaw’s Junk Art

This design by Gabriel Dishaw is an original creation constructed from little more than old junk such as adding machines, typewriters, and computer parts bound together using wire. Read more

Hooded Menace

I had to put up with some seriously obnoxious jocks and drunken highschool kids at a recent show featuring flavor-of-the-moment acts that did the whole ecstatic, 80s electro thing that’s so popular these days. Lots of fluorescent colors. I had to blast some death freaking metal when I got home, and Hooded Menace fit the bill perfectly with their doom-leaning, aural assault. Nothing pisses me off more than tepid, uninspired music, and nothing makes me feel more alive than real, gut-wrenching, skull-pounding, giddily sinister heavy metal.

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Anthony Lister

The bad boy persona in the art world is still alive and well in Australian-born painter and installation artist Anthony Lister. Posing for most photos slumped below his work, cigarette dangling from his lips, Lister is the latest in a long line of somewhat deviant figures in the art world. His work, which generally features superheroes — ‘misguided role models,’ as Lister puts it — has a jerky geometry to them, yet simultaneously a gestural quality reminiscent of 80s art deco, fitting with Lister’s ‘impulsive genius’ image and suggesting a bit of a nod to the cocaine-dusted, heroin-soaked downtown New York scene of 30 years ago. Read more

Hipsters on Food Stamps

Heeb magazine founder Jennifer Bleyer recently interviewed me for an article about young creative types on food stamps. The editors at Salon.com decided that I am a hipster. I don’t really know what that means. Judging by the comments that the article generated, I’m some sort of lazy bum who can’t give up my artisinal chevre. I don’t need to go into detail defending my food choices, but all I’d like to say is that I try to buy healthy foods at the lowest prices. I never eat out. I love to cook, and I really need to control what goes into my food, so I cook every meal for myself. I often share with friends. I want to be healthy and I want my friends to be healthy because none of us have health care. Read more