The first cut is the deepest

Field Favorite, 2007.

Loving Simone Lourenco's exuberant, sculptural works in paper. Lourenco's drawings and collages are being shown at Art101 Gallery's Flat File program in Brooklyn.

Annie Vought's paper cuts

A few days ago, Neatorama featured a papercut piece by Annie Vought that immediately fascinated me -- it looked like a handwritten note, but it was actually a finely crafted cutout mimicking one of those relics of bygone days, middle school, passing pieces of college-ruled paper between classes to your best friends, scrawling impetuous thoughts in a pink sparkly hand. Vought discusses the series on her Web site:

Handwritten records are fragments of individual histories. In the penmanship, word choice, and spelling the author is often revealed in spite of him/herself. A letter is physical confirmation of who we were at the moment it was written, or all we have left of a person or a time.
I have been working with cut out correspondence for the past four years. I meticulously recreate notes and letters that I have found, written, or received by enlarging the documents onto a new piece of paper and intricately dissecting the negative spaces with an Exact-o knife.  The handwriting and the lines support the structure of the cut paper, keeping it strong and sculptural, despite its apparent fragility.

The piece above really resonated with me: in full, it reads "I was all of 25 at the time with out a clue to my future, hindsight doesn’t make the view any clearer except  where one begins to get a sketchy outline of life by discovering what it isn’t."

Well, I am now all of 27 (My birthday was yesterday! I accept belated gifts, baked goods, and well wishes!). I'm not sure what that means, and I'm as surprised as you are that I've made it this far. Here's to a new year of art, writing (Did I mention? More than 16,000 words for my little NaNoWriMo pet! Most of them are terrible, but I'm ahead of schedule!), and trying to discern a hazy picture of the way I want things to be.

Bright lights, smooshy city

Amazing plush sculpture of the Paris and New York skylines by French artist Emilie Faif. Not sure how it would be displayed, but if you, say, devoted one wall in your living room to skylines, a photograph of this fantasy would certainly be an interesting counterpoint.

You light up my life

I need a new bedside lamp. How very cool would it be to read myself to sleep under the lambent glow of this number? It's a piece by Parisian artist Garbage (Gilles Eichenbaum), and there are many more repurposed pots where this one came from.

Mona Tofu

Ju Duoqi reimagines famous works of art using veggies as her medium. On her process and the meaning she maps onto it:

I never leave the house, and when I do I rarely travel more than 15 kilometers. In a studio, with a knife, a box of toothpicks and some vegetables, I can make small sculptures and slap together big scenes, using a woman's most effortless and thrifty method of fantasizing about the larger world.

Do not pass go, do not collect $200

Look familiar? Think Monopoly. This house, a work known as Title Deed, was conceptualized by An Te Liu, a Toronto-based Taiwanese artist. Title Deed was part of the Leona Drive Project; according to Canadian Art:

The project featured 18 artist interventions in a series of bungalows waiting to be demolished for a new townhouse development. Built in the late 1940s as affordable suburban housing for returning war vets, the houses are of a type to be found across Canada and represent one of the first forays into suburban development. The most commanding project of the group was done by Toronto artist An Te Liu, who took one of the rundown houses, cleaned it up and painted it a pristine Monopoly-house green. In one fell swoop, Liu’s Title Deed spoke beyond the immediate locale to make a wide-ranging statement about housing as a funnel for broader financial concerns and lessons learned in last year’s subprime mortgage meltdown.

Canadian Art has an interview with Liu here.

(As seen on Neatorama.)

All you need is ...

Loving (natch!) Pei-San Ng's matchstick artworks. Above is Matches: Passion:

This piece is made up of approximately 2,500 match sticks and a total of 24 hours. The board is a reclaimed art board / plywood. It was previously used as a glueing surface. The type is hand drawn.

Love on fire represents romance and passion or destructions and jealousy.  It is raw and gritty.

Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds

As part of the Tate Modern's Unilever series, Ai Weiwei (or a cohort of Chinese artists under his aegis) has painted more than 100 million porcelain bits to look like sunflower seeds. The exhibit runs through May 2, 2011. From the Tate's note on interpretation of the work:

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds challenges our first impressions: what you see is not what you see, and what you see is not what it means. The sculptural installation is made up of what appear to be millions of sunflower seed husks, apparently identical but actually unique. Although they look realistic, each seed is made out of porcelain. And far from being industrially produced, 'readymade' or found objects, they have been intricately hand-crafted by hundreds of skilled artisans. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall's vast industrial space, the seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape. The casual act of walking on its surface contrasts with the precious nature of the material, the effort of production and the narrative and personal content that make this work a powerful commentary on the human condition.

For bonus points, read Evan Osnos's profile of the artist, "It's Not Beautiful," from the May 24, 2010, issue of the New Yorker.

In our image

Sura 84, Sandow Birk

Dying to see this: a series of suras illustrated by Sandow Birk, who is trying to make an "American version of the Qur'an." Unfortunately, looks like I missed it -- the show at the PPOW Gallery (511 W. 25th St., NY) closed October 9 (though Birk's Web site said it was there through October 30?). Nonetheless, fascinating. About the work:

An ongoing project to hand-transcribe the entire Qur'an according to historic Islamic traditions
and to illuminate the text with relevant scenes from contemporary American life. Five years in the making, the project has been inspired by a decade of extended travel in Islamic regions of the world and undertaken after extensive research.

Coffee. Books. Yes, please.

The new D'Espresso outlet (317 Madison Avenue, at 42nd Street, (212) 867-7141), just one block from the New York Public Library, offers a twist on the crowded bookshelf, courtesy Anurag Nema and his team at nemaworkshop. Fastcodesign.com reports:

The "books" are actually tiles printed with sepia-toned photos of bookshelves at a local travel bookstore that ring the room, including the floor, walls and ceiling. In addition to painting unusual surfaces with intriguing patterns -- whoa, you're standing on books! -- it gives an Alice in Wonderland-esque sense that the room has been suddenly upended.