Elsewhat

Raymond Biesinger is a designer/illustrator/artist based in Montréal. If you know his work, his geometric, flat colour style is unique and instantly recognizable. It also makes rip offs of his work or style pretty easy to spot.

This book chronicles the times where his work has been brazenly copied, lazily borrowed-from, or downright stolen. From a $50 Megadeth poster contract to a non-profit using one of his illustrations without permission. Biesinger’s writing is extremely honest, candid, and a pleasure to read. The only thing I wish could have been included were images of the thefts, but of course permission for that would be impossible.

Available to purchase straight from the publisher.

This simple carving by Montréal-based Chloé Desjardins caught my eye by feeling incredibly light despite being made of marble.

In artist Jun Ong’s luminous installations, rays of light pierce through concrete, stone, and steel. In his ongoing Stars series features LED strips that intersect with the human-built environment in monumental, illuminated geometries.

Important to note, the above piece is on a former Buddhist temple, hence the iconography.

Though aesthetically very different, I also see echoes in this work of Gordon Matta-Clark‘s geometric works like Conical Intersect, pictured below. Both combine existing architecture with larger geometric shapes.

When my family and I rent a car and drive through Montréal, we play a game of looking out for works by a graffiti artist named Kong. His pieces are cute, but that’s not really the point. The appeal of his work is that he does his pieces in the craziest of places. Sometimes they’re on bridges, sometimes on the side of buildings. We always wondered how he did his pieces, that is until we found this video.

A new(ish) public artwork by Spanish Artist SpY.

Here is a classic short film from one of my heroes, Scottish/Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren. It’s haunting, beautiful, and was groundbreaking for 1968.

Four years earlier, in 1964, McLaren (with Grant Munro) used essentially the same technique of overlaying film to create something with the complete opposite vibe, which is one of my favourite short sequences of film, the second half of his hodgepodgey film Canon. The relevant bit starts at exactly the 4:30 mark:

The difference in these two clips shows one of my favourite aspects of McLaren’s work: his flexibility. They both use essentially the same technique in different ways to create a very different effect.

Colourful mural by Jordan Bennett.

Street Scultpure off St. Laurent blvd. by Spanish artist Isaac Cordal.

Photo of One-Way Colour Tunnel by Olafur Eliasson from the SF MoMA.

A cute little piece of design. This is a self-propelled phonograph, which runs on tracks embedded with music, by Japanese artist Yuri Suzuki. Taken at the SF Moma Art of Noise exhibit.