November 3, 2009 | New Art | by Nikki Savvides |
New Delhi-based digital artist Archan Nair (aka archanN) has worked for notable clients, including CNBC, Hugo Boss, Apple and Tiger Beer. But although his corporate works stand out in their glorious, hyper-real colour, his more intricate and personal works are my favourites. Read more
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October 26, 2009 | New Eco | by Nikki Savvides |
The Miss Rockaway Armada is a group of about thirty artists, musicians and performers who hail from across the United States. In the summers of 2006 and 2007, the group floated down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans on a flotilla of handmade rafts. Crafted mainly from junk and recycled materials, the rafts ran on wind and solar power, were fuelled by bio-diesel, and their crew subsisted on rainwater and dumpstered meals for the entire journey. Read more
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October 21, 2009 | New Eco | by Nikki Savvides |
Eve and Eryn, two amazing Free Spirit Sphere tree houses, are located in Vancouver, Canada, high up in the canopy of the West Coast rainforest. They are, as their creators describe, ’suspended like pendants from a web of rope’ from the trees. This is a unique way of creating unobtrusive means of living amongst nature. Insulated and set up for one or two people to stay in, these spheres allow people to experience the ‘energy shift’ that occurs ‘once one breaks contact with the ground’. Read more
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September 10, 2009 | New Art | by Nikki Savvides 
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When I was a kid, I loved balloon animals and was always sad when the colourful, inflatable creatures I bought home from shows and circuses slowly deflated. I think Jason Hackenwerth may have had a similar passion, which he has transformed into a peculiar form of art-making: balloon sculpture. Drawing inspiration from nature, Hackenwerth brings strange animals and bizarre landscapes to life through the twisting and turning of hundreds and thousands of balloons. Reminiscent of millipedes, of crustaceans, of deep sea fishes and waterborne plants, his giant works make the microscopic macroscopic. Rendered larger-than-life but yet unnaturally airborne they are brilliantly surreal, capturing the transcendentalism of both air and of nature itself. Read more
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September 4, 2009 | New Art | by Nikki Savvides |
Sardinian born Carolina Melis is an illustrator based in the UK. She’s obviously multi-talented, her bio listing her not only as an artist but as an animator, dancer and choreographer. Her illustrations are apparently ‘informed by her background in choreography’ and explore ‘ideas of delicacy, organic development, life-cycles and living relationships’. Read more
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August 13, 2009 | New Trends | by Nikki Savvides |
A survey of two thousand Britons has revealed the country’s perfect pet. Max is a bizarre hybrid that is part cat, part dog, part rabbit and part horse. Insurance firm More Than, which conducted the research, suggests that Max ‘has high energy levels, loves daily walks and sleeps for an average of nine hours 27 minutes a day’. Read more
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August 11, 2009 | New Events | by Nikki Savvides |
Cremations Solutions, ‘[y]our complete source for scattering urns and accessories’, offers personal urns which are created from the image of the deceased. The large containers, which feature lifelike features, but no hair, can hold an entire loved one’s ashes, and cost only US$2,600. Read more
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August 11, 2009 | Cool Travel | by Nikki Savvides |
I’ve just returned from an amazing trip to Vanuatu, a small cluster of islands north east of Australia. There my friend and I spent time exploring the coral reefs of the Nguna-Pele Marine Protected Area, home to hundreds of thousands of brilliantly colored fish, sea turtles, reef sharks, sting rays and other fascinating underwater critters. Read more
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July 9, 2009 | Cool Travel | by Nikki Savvides |
May’s is an outdoor gallery in Sydney’s St Peters that is devoted to promoting a legal space in which street artists can exhibit their work. The brainchild of Tuli Balog, who runs his own graphic art business behind the colourful façade, he set up the gallery to encourage and document the evolution of graffiti and stencil art in Sydney. Based on several removable and replaceable wall panels, May’s allows artists to work on an entire wall, and to keep the parts of their works on the panels before the next artist’s work takes up residency. While this system challenges the usually temporary nature of street art, it also provides an avenue for street artworks to be protected from removal or cover-up by the local council. For this reason, it is a unique space, protected from the rampant clean-up and gentrification which is sanitising so many areas of the city.
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July 1, 2009 | New Events | by Nikki Savvides |
Rob and Christian Clayton hail from Pasadena, California, where, together, they create fascinating and somewhat nightmarish images portraying the ‘unique people, animals, and places that occupy the outskirts of the American psyche’. The sad-faced, tired-eyed characters that inhabit their bright, almost suffocatingly busy pieces seem bemused by, yet unarguably a part of, their hectic surroundings, while the rough honesty of their work reminds me of artists such as Frieda Kahlo and comic artist Lynda Barry. The Clayton Brothers have an exhibition called Jumbo Fruit coming up on July 18 and running until August 29, which will be held at the East and West Galleries in Santa Monica, California. If you’re in the area, I’d highly recommend dropping by and immersing yourself momentarily in their colourful chaos.
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June 10, 2009 | New Photography | by Nikki Savvides |
Andrew Zuckerman’s beautiful photographs make me imagine how it would feel to be in close proximity to a menagerie of amazing creatures — orangutans, mountain lions, chameleons, and zebras. With a careful eye for what makes these animals unique, Zuckerman has, in his wonderful book Creature, shown the intimate side of animals that are usually considered ‘wild’. Up close and personal, these animals reveal what might be termed an innate humanness, or, perhaps, as I prefer, a pure and primal sense of emotion, a capacity that is too often denied to them by humans. Captured in this way, we see that it is not animals that are human-like, but humans that are animal-like: each of us share the same glimmer in our eyes, the same need for safety, food, companionship and belonging. Read more
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May 28, 2009 | New Illustration | by Nikki Savvides |
I really like the work of Craig Phillips, an Australian illustrator whose notable achievements include creating the cover art for the new EP from Sydney band Lions At Your Door and being named as one of the 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide (Leurzers Archive). Read more
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May 5, 2009 | New Art | by Nikki Savvides |
I’ve been keen on Mandy Ord’s work since we were both involved in the Australian underground comic scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s. She shared my love of the dark and the bizarre, and her cool little self-published comic, Wilnot, inspired me greatly in my own work. While I drifted away from the scene a few years ago, Ord continues to draw her darkly witty, autobiographical comics and has just had her first full-length graphic novel published by Finlay Lloyd. It’s entitled Rooftops, and it tells the tale of a night spent out and about in Melbourne with friends, discussing, amongst other topics, the existential nature of coincidences. Read more
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April 29, 2009 | Cool Travel | by Nikki Savvides |
Several years ago I spent five weeks hanging out with friends who lived in the friendly environment of Copenhagen’s Freetown, Christiania. A former military base, Christiania is a self-governing borough set on 85 acres of mainly lush forested grounds, surrounding a lake. It is a beautiful and idyllic location where 850 residents have built their own idiosyncratic constructions in which to live and play. While I was there, I watched local bands play in the coffee-house, helped paint a psychedelic mural on the wall of one of the military bunkers, smoked some legal marijuana bought from street sellers, and jumped off a homemade tree-swing into the freezing cold lake. Sadly, in recent years the Danish government has cracked down on the pot sellers and attempted to ‘normalise’ the legal status of the community. I hope they leave the place as it was. Staying in Christiania for that brief amount of time was such an amazing experience, and it would be a shame if the unique nature of the Freetown was lost.
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April 22, 2009 | Cool Travel | by Nikki Savvides |
Late last year, I spent a month volunteering at Northern Thailand’s Elephant Nature Park, located 45 minutes from Chiang Mai, in a lush valley by the Mae Taeng River. This was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life. Every day was spent working on projects like building fences and huts and collecting food for the 35 elephants who call the Park home. Almost all have been rescued from terrible situations. Read more
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New York photographer Jennifer Loeber’s series, Cruel Story of Youth, is based on the Rowe Camp for teenagers, where she spent some time and which is ‘grounded in the ideals of a counter-cultural past and freed from the forced constraints of a conventional camp experience. It’s a glimpse into what the world would be like if no ideas were too absurd, and eccentricity was the rule, not the exception’. Read more
Of all the weird places the world has to offer, the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia has to be one of the coolest. Literally. At 3,700m above sea level, it’s the biggest and highest salt flat in the world, where after dark, temperatures can drop to minus 40 degrees celsius. The best way to explore the salt flat is to hire a 4WD and driver from the Uyuni township. En route, you can even stay at a Salt Hotel, where everything is, quite literally, made from salt: the chairs, beds, tables and even the walls. There’s no heating and the beds aren’t exactly ‘plush’, but it’s worth every salty second. Read more
These small but innovative in-ear headphones from Audio-Technica are part of a new wave of noise canceling buds that claim to block up to 85 to 90 percent of outside sound. Read more
I’m such a sucker for colored pencil these days and I’m really digging the way UK illustrator Peter James Field goes at it. The pencil brings a soft, folkiness to what might otherwise be pretty straightforward renderings.
I’m one of those people who lament the death of analog film as a medium, not because I romanticize the process, but because I love the unpredictable imperfections inherent in non-digital formats. Read more
An intelligently told, morally complex tale with a raft of unexpected twists, Gone Baby Gone is one of the most original films of recent times. Most films give you a sense of their narrative arc and it is easy to recognise the major plot points. Read more
Shortstack are a Washington DC band that not many people know about outside of the the city. They recently released an EP of covers with some sweet choices on there — The Kinks, Captain Beefheart, and The Pupils, among others. Once again a band takes different styles, sounds, and time periods, and owns it like an extra finger.
Listen to the Shortstack track, House On Fire.
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1970s and 80s Soviet Union buildings
Cambodian born photographer Frederic Chaubin is the editor of French magazine Citizen K. His photo series on bizarre buildings built in the former Soviet Union during the 1970s and 80s is absolutely fascinating. Read more
Wheeeeee! This game is so freaking fun! You move your cursor over each dot to make them split into four smaller dots ad infinitum.
Amazing cake designs by Charm City Cakes
Baltimore company Charm City Cakes produces the most innovative wedding and party cakes on the market. Inspiration for these creative bakers comes from everywhere: art, fabric, furniture, architecture, landscapes, science, and music, and each cake is individually designed to match your personality, and the theme of the occasion you are celebrating. Don’t miss these cakey engineering masterpieces. Read more
Trip out with Sparrow Vs Sparrow’s retro illustrations, I love their aesthetic, color use and sense of humor. Read more
Thanks to Sony Australia, four Lost At E Minor readers will win personal audio prizes, including the new 8GB Walkman S series video MP3 player and the MDRXB500 Extra Bass headphones. Read more
This beautifully soft, handmade and dyed scarf is by the New York-based designer, Ryan Sullivan. They can be purchased through the Lost At E Minor store. Read more
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