Filtered

A view of the skyline through one of the "instascapes" on Governors Island. (Read more about these cool pieces here.)

Handily done

A few other pictures from Figment on Governors Island: give the artwork a hand! I didn't catch the name of the piece at the top, or its artist, but the piece at bottom is from The Palm Authority Project by Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos.

Neighborhood garden

Flux Factory's latest show, Bionic Garden, asks visitors to reimagine urban spaces both public and private. The art space incorporates a rooftop garden, a seed-sharing station, and plants rigged with wireless sensors that trigger an LED when they need to be watered. I found the seed-heads by Daupo, above, fanciful and functional.

We may have a hard time getting much of anything to grow in our backyard, but I suppose we'll try planting the tulsi seeds we picked up and hope for a little more luck with it than we've had with our ill-fated flowers.

Flux Factory, 39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, New York, 11101; exhibit closes June 24; open weekends, noon to 6 p.m.

Well-packed shelves

This 2011 piece by Manolo Valdés, Bookcase, is spectacular. This snapshot is a poor reflection of the towering sculpture, which appears at first glance to be a bookshelf stuffed with a compulsive collector's hoard; when you look closer, you see that it's slabs of gorgeous wood, full of beautiful textures and inevitably calling to mind the source of all those pages you've turned.

Shine on

Sometimes, works of art are cool as independent objects and as a basis for creating a new way of seeing. I was drawn to a few pieces at Armory that had bright, reflective surfaces, all the better for seeing the room in refraction.

At left is Dall'anno Uno by Michelangelo Pistoletto; the woman with the book on her head is screened onto stainless steel (for another view of the work, see here), but in this shot, there's the blue canvas, a few gallerists, you can make out a bit of my face, and you can also see a man's hands as he snaps a picture of the piece (as well as the reflection of his hands and his camera phone). Perhaps less interesting, at right, I took a close view of a shiny chrome cube, with the lights and the beams of the pier visible overhead.

In the blink of an eye

I finally got around to going to the Armory Show. (Go tomorrow or forever hold your peace -- well, until 2013.) I saw a lot of cool things, but I keep thinking about the Tony Oursler's video projections of blinking eyes on these big white orbs. Unnerving, to some degree, being disembodied, but weirdly intimate at the same time -- the crinkles at the corner of the eyes, the minute shifting of the glance. Lehmann Maupin has a bit more info about Oursler, as well as images of his other installations.

Color by key

Tyree Callahan's chromatic typewriter -- a hack where he replaced ink stores with paint -- is ingenious. The modified 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter is an entry in the 2012 West Collects West Prize Competition. I sometimes find, in writing, that words are insufficient for illuminating certain brilliant ambiguities; conversely, in painting, I wrestle with wanting to exercise as much control as I can in a well-crafted sentence, a taut paragraph. Perhaps this is an appropriate compromise?

Via Hi-Fructose.

Aimless painting

Sometimes, I paint. Not very well, of course, but I paint nonetheless. This is a little canvas, at a few different stages, that I worked on last weekend.

Colorful crayons

Spending a lot of time in the arts and crafts drawer these days. Collage, mostly, but I dipped into the pastels tonight. This hinged, segmented box is filled with nubbins and odds and ends; its contents and the way they lay together are probably higher art than the little study of a teapot and cups I produced, though.

Flickr and fade

Oh, if only I lived in Amsterdam! At The Future of the Photography Museum, Foam offers an exhibition that includes the above: Erik Kessels made prints of every photograph uploaded to Flickr in a 24-hour period. In the Creative Review, Kessels said, "[The content of] image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines ... mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples' experiences."

I can't help but wonder: What 24 hours? Did I upload something then? Could there be a picture of my cat at the bottom of that very pile?