Art news

Peeked into this amazing show in Berlin last week. A group of mostly American artists working with paint, illustration, sculpture and collage, presenting a new trend in figuration- broken, decaying, fractured and monstrous! Fran Spiegel paints soupy sloppy women engulfed by slime piles. Rapper's hoes, socialties, and pin-up girls are all thrown into the stew of mylar, goo, glitter and chewing gum.

Unnervingly uncertain in its voyeuristic gloom, Ashlee Laing’s Night Time is for the Boy Who Can Fly places its audience in a position of passivity in what appears to be an essentially intrusive situation. Three large wooden water tubs are posited within the centre of a darkened space, each featuring video projections of shirtless, confined males, gazing helplessly up towards the viewer. A sombre investigation of social and psychological states of confinement, the work of Ashlee Laing invokes disparate thoughts from sexuality through to thriller-film iconography.

www.shiralivne.com

Animator, brand buff and design devotee Giuseppe Demaio has got so many projects on the go it makes the rest of us look like we're swinging in hammocks. Shortly winging his way to Paris for the Rock en Seine music festival where he'll assemble an installation at Levi EU's behest, he'll also be launching the tee shirt range he's designed for said label.
Add to that a trip to South America and impending fly by night meetings with the crème of Europe's brand creatives (an undisclosed global giant) and you¹'e only getting a whiff of what this wunderkind's got cooking.

Dreams, slumberous states, and their innumerable related trajectories and
associations are quirkily explored in
Dead to the World, an exhibition of artworks by Melbourne's Adam Cruickshank and
Dell Stewart (working collectively under
the guise of Sleep Club).
Delightfully eccentric and curious, Dead
to the World is a colourfully cozy display of drawings, sculpture and installation that
serves to intrigue its audience with an
amiable aesthetic, and furthermore
perpetuate musing regarding the enigmatic, enfolding and escapist phenomenon of sleep.
JD

Many would say 60,000 “flying rats�, or pigeons, as they’re more commonly known, swooping and scavenging around Melbourne’s laneways and lunch spots was more than enough. But as winter really hits, our feathery population has increased by a further 200 immigrants. Thanks to artist Omega Goodwin and his Pigeons of Melbourne project, a host of pink fibreglass pigeons have come to roost on the city trees with the aim of inspiring some optimism in us sombre Melburnians. "In America, some prisons paint the cells pink to make the inmates happier and I've heard of gridiron teams painting their changing rooms pink to relax opposition players before games.� Goodwin explains, “I'm hoping the pink pigeons will have the same effect."

Illustration by Kelly Smith
www.myspace.com/little_red_rider