Wednesday Wallpaper: Les Petits Chiens
Wednesday Wallpaper: Les Petits Chiens
Naked hangouts, rejecting the binary, a fun calculator and more
When I began planning the return of TFIB I knew I had to bring back wallpapers. Over the last five years I’ve thought of many different versions of what a new version of The Desktop Wallpaper Project would be. It was so important to the success of the old site yet I wanted to find a way to modernize it. So I’ve been working on a series of mobile wallpapers over the years and now it’s finally time to open that archive of work.
Our first wallpaper is titled Les Petits Chiens, an adorable drawing of a pack of dogs that I found on a vintage brochure a while back. I’m smiling to myself while I write this because I’ve had this as my phone’s wallpaper since December 11, 2019. Now, after all this time, I finally have an opportunity to share. Hope you enjoy and use it!
Powerful Bodies
One of the bright spots during quarantine has been visiting galleries in Los Angeles. My partner Kyle had this great idea as a way for us to experience culture again and leave the confines of our apartment. I’ve missed museums and galleries and the experience of seeing art, good or bad, and these visits have been nourishing. You set an appointment time and then you have an entire gallery to yourself, it’s such a joy! That said, I do miss mingling with strangers in a cramped, sweaty gallery drinking lukewarm Tecates… there’s nothing that matches that feeling.
Last weekend we stopped by New Image Art to see the new Jeffrey Cheung show, Dream. This series of work continues his exploration of the human shape in all it’s many forms. Bright colored limbs intertwining into more and more complex configurations. I snapped some photos (below) of the exhibit because the colors were so beautiful and his brush stokes are so lively and expressive. It’s so wonderful getting to see all that nuance and detail in person, seeing how his pieces are formed and how these works come together. It’s sitting in front of a piece, the smell of the gallery, all of those senses mingling together that bring you to life as you’re standing there in person. If you have the opportunity I highly recommend you make an appointment at your local galleries and support them in any way you can.
The Divided Self
I was introduced to the work of Lorraine O’Grady this week, thanks to this piece in T Magazine. A conceptual artist who works in poetry, performance art, photography and videography, she will have a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum titled Both/And running from March 5–July 18, 2021. The exhibition will feature twelve major projects she’s produced over her four-decade career as well as the debut of a much-anticipated new installation. Hopefully things are looking better by this summer?
One snippet from the T Magazine interview I was quite fond of is how she described her process in making art, which is such a visceral and comical way of looking at it.
"In other words, I’m not playing in art as much as other artists would be playing — I’m out there to make the best possible work and as close to a masterpiece as I can. I think of myself as somebody who’s working on the skin of the culture and constantly making incisions and stuffing words into each incision, the way you’d season a turkey so that the flavor gets in, even if you don’t have much of the original material left."
Quite The Production
I am a big fan of Maurizo Cattelan, the creative brilliance behind Toilet Paper magazine, and his many other collaborations and endeavors. Yesterday, Vanity Fair released their annual Hollywood Issue and Mr. Cattelan, along with his frequent collaborator Pierpaolo Ferrari, were at the helm of all the photos and videos for this momentous but challenging issue, cover included.
From Costa Rica, the renowned conceptual artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari directed 10 photo shoots across four continents, using techniques that allowed us to minimize on-set personnel and maximize COVID-19 protocols. It was a feat born of necessity but suffused with artistic purpose—to demonstrate not just that the show must go on but that there’s joy in its continuance, even in the most surreal and challenging of times.
The resulting images are hysterical and over-the-top and so dumb, which is exactly what we need right now. Could these have been more ridiculous? Sure, but I think they did some great work considering the hurdles (and potentially big personalities) they had to overcome. Give me Maya Rudolph doing anything and I’m there.
Starting tomorrow night, Thursday Feb 29 at 9pm PST, the Maison Margiela x Reebox collaboration goes on sale. A combination of Reebok’s Classic Leather and Margiela’s split toe Tabi, this is such a cool melding of two iconic classics. I’m very tempted to snag a pair in white!
I’m such a nerd for Frances McDormand. She seems like the coolest, most down-to-earth person, and Nomadland, her new film with director Chloé Zhao, feels like it’s going to be a masterpiece. This interview with Kyle Buchanan will make you love her so much. I want to eat Fritos with Fran!
No one ever has said, “hey, you should download this super fun calculator app” but here we are, and I’m telling you exactly that. The bros at Andy, a couple of fellas who treat apps more like games, have released a calculator, weather, and timer app that go far beyond the expectation of what these can be. They’ve already change the way I use my phone after less than a week.
Secret writing was found scrawled into Edward Munch’s titular The Scream painting, and is it turns out, Edward might have been in quite a state similar to that of his painting. Quite fascinating, expect to see art history kids get this as an edgy tattoo in the near future.
SSENSE sat down with MoMA curator Thomas Lax, a champion of diversity and representation in a rigid, mostly cis white museum system, to speak about the progress he’s been able to bring about. It’s a joy to read and I felt this line really resonated with the where America is at culturally:
"I do have enough of a belief in the possibilities of us coming together inside of, or under the auspices of, institutions as a place to invite strangers into or run away from it, but to nevertheless not spend our efforts trying to destroy it, because then we sometimes waste our energy or we destroy ourselves."
I am not a fan of snow, kind of never, and I fall into a very specific “stereotype of a Californian” even though so much of California get’s snow. But! Geoff McFetridge has done a collaboration with K2 on several sets of skis and I want them so bad, specifically the pictogram ones with “Don’t follow me – I don’t know my wayback” printed on the bottom. Also, if that’s Geoff’s Land Rover kinda car thing I’m gonna rob him, it’s a beaut’.
Speaking of art exhibits, homeboy KAWS also has an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum from February 26–September 5, 2021 titled WHAT PARTY and I’m praying that I can visit NY in that span of time to see it. I get that KAWS falls into the hype-beast-adult-boy-jawnz world but I’ve been a fan of this guy since like 1998 and I think it would be so rad to see a retrospective of his work.
I like this guys hot take that the best image of Mars was actually created in 1965, basically done as a paint-by number. I don’t disagree. This is a piece of art and I hope it’s in a museum somewhere.