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In an alternate universe, Winnie the Pooh and his pals grew up in The Hundred Acre Hood and emerged as “Winnie Tattooh and his friends.” Paris design studio, Grapheart, doused Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet, and Pooh with mean tattoos, making for street-hardened versions of the fluffy characters you knew from your childhood. This falls right in line with our recent theme of posting about reimagined pop icons. Regardless, the beauty of these is in the details, so click more for four close-up images of Winnie Tattooh and his friends, including a shot of the original sketch.
Artist Alex Pardee ”re-imagined” these pop culture icons as bloated creatures for a collaborative exhibition with Dave Correia at the Blonde Grizzly Gallery in Salt Lake City, Utah. According to Pardee, he’s calling them “ICANS,” as a statement against proposed SOPA legislation. Here is what Pardee says about the ICANS (from Juxtapoz): I will be debuting a brand new series of 15 new paintings called “ICANS”. Why am I calling them “Icans”? Glad you didn’t really ask, but I’m telling you anyway. Well, because whether SOPA passes or not, I will continue to take any licensed character, or pop culture icon and do whatever I want with it for art’s sake, because ICAN. Also, I just want to conduct an ongoing experiment to see if ICAN take any cool icon from pop culture and make it way shittier by “re-imagining” it. So far, much like Hollywood does most of the time, the experiment is a super fun success! Alex Pardee is an artist, writer, and apparrel designer, who has produced work for Kid Robot, The Used, Juxtapoz magazine, among many other things. You can find more images of his ICANS below. via InspireFirst and Juxtapoz
As an apparent statement against overly sugary children’s cereal (a box of Frosted Flakes is 37% sugar) and because it’s “Grrrrreeeeaaat!”, Ron English created this Fat Tony figure, which he then promoted by planting it on the appropriate shelf at an LA supermarket. According to Clutter Magazine, this Fat Tony will be released as a toy, limited to 500 pieces with more limited followup editions available later. After the jump, watch a couple of classic Frosted Flakes ads, featuring a slimmer (but no less ridiculous) Tony the Tiger, Superman and horseback riding. via Vinyl Pulse
Currently housed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Chris Burden spent four years making “Metropolis II” – a 10 feet tall sculpture of a city with 1,200 toy cars whirring around tracks at high speeds. According to a recent NPR article, Burden, who originally made his name as a performance artist, said that it goes back to “making an object, but an object that is performative.” He also says that Metropolis II fits more into the mainstream than some of his other work, stating “I don’t think you need to have an art history background to understand this sculpture.” The cars of Metropolis II, which move as fast as 230 miles per hour, occasionally find themselves in traffic jams (just like in real life) and an operator is ever present to switch off the machine and get things back in order. After the cacophony of white noise created by all the motion, the silence left by turning it all off is, in contrast, horrific – the emptiness left by an absence of life. In the short documentary below from Supermarche, Burden says “it wasn’t about trying to make this scale model of something. It was more to evoke the energy of a city.”
Artist Bartholomäus Traubeck created this piece, titled “Years,” by rigging his record player’s tone arm with a PlayStation Eye camera so he could take a disc of wood – a thin cross section of a tree – and listen to it as if it were an LP. The rings of years are picked up by the camera and and translated through Ableton Live to give them life in sound. The result: a beautiful, sad and eerie piano concerto. YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo. via Boing Boing
What does the future of product design look like? Well, it’s starting to look something like this: an affordable home 3D printer that allows anyone to digitally design a 3D piece and manufacture it on the spot. On the other side of things, a consumer can purchase a design online, download it, and watch it form before their eyes. Artists are already starting to upload their designs to sites such as this one. Whereas 3D printing is nothing new, this particular platform by 3D Systems, called “Cubify,” which debuted at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is perhaps revolutionary in its movement toward mass appeal. With a price tag of $1,299, it’s getting into the “affordable” range for home printing. Not that it’s the only affordable option either. For instance, there’s an independent company called MakerBot Industries in Brooklyn that manufactures 3D printers for nearly $1,000. Theirs even come complete with Brooklyn style and ingenuity. In response to these affordable 3D options, we’re all ears about the coming developments in 3D printing – to find where we fit in best (if anywhere), and how we can best support other independent artists and small shops when (or if) it becomes commonplace. For artists who prefer to design digitally (or don’t mind having their sculpts scanned in 3D), home 3D printing could be a prime opportunity for their designs to gain mass appeal through this medium in just a few years. This might be especially good for a number of otherwise unknown artists who might struggle with the threshold of having their work produced to break into the mainstream virally, should home 3D printing take off. This potential future also invites a number of new debates about cost, exclusivity, integrity, creative license, intellectual property rights, and material. How quickly or begrudgingly will the product industry, artists and consumers continue to adapt to this new twist, and will the home 3D printing world offer a clear benefit to all sides? Or, alternately, will home 3D printers be to product design what Napster and home recording were to the music industry? What do you think?
In the same dictatorial vein as our Little Giants figures of Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin, artist Stephen Ives has twisted the classic Mr. Potato Head concept to embody the images of some of history’s most pertinent iron-fist rulers: Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Kim Jong Il, Vladmir Lenin, and others. These figures are pretty incredible looking, and, in the spirit of Mr. Potato Head, their accessories appear to be fully interchangeable.
via Beautiful Decay
See…I told you so. Artist Fabian Ciraolo created these illustrations, mashing old pop culture icons and with modern hipster swagger. Whereas we design Little Giants of Frida and Dali, he makes them like rock stars. In Ciraolo’s world, none are safe. Through his art, Ciraolo has morphed cultural figures ranging from Cleopatra and Gandhi to Care Bears and Captain Planet. Check out more of his work here.
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