In celebration of our one year anniversary, we have partnered with Civil Ape to present our second giveaway (with a very special surprise). One winner will receive all the goodies in the photo below. And, if Civil Ape recieves 75% of their kickstarter goal by Friday, July 27th, then five more of you will win one shirt each month for a year. And these aren’t normal shirts, these are handmade super badass ones. So basically, the more you reblog this post and give exposure/donations to Civil Ape’s cause, the more you are helping yourself and others to win this generous offer.

To enter the contest and get more information, refer to our tumblr.

Each morning this summer I seem to wake up, run, shower, and run off to my car to go to work, class, or a friend’s house. Summer as an adult sucks – I keep walking by my little sisters splashing in the pool and get super jealous. Said class is in silkscreen printing, where we’re currently working on a text/image project. This cross section of graphic design, photography and writing is right up my alley. Jenny Holzer and Robert Montgomery have greatly influenced this series I’m calling “Extended Aphorisms.” I’ve been writing one of these each night before I fall asleep. Here’s an example of one I haven’t developed into a poster yet:

WRINKLES, LIKE DELAYED TATTOOS OF FEELING, SLOWLY BUT SURELY CAPTURE THE EXPRESSIONS YOU PUT ON MOST. CHEERFUL GRANDMAS THAT WERE ONCE KINDERGARTEN MUSIC TEACHERS HAVE LINES AROUND THEIR LIPS RIPPLING POSITIVELY UPWARDS, WHILE GRUMPY MEN THAT SPENT THEIR HONEYMOON IN PARIS SCREAMING ENGLISH IN A BELITTLING TONE AT TOUR GUIDES HAVE CREVICES DROOPING DOWNWARDS. THESE IMMORTALIZED FEELINGS, LIKE A COSMIC MAKEUP, CAUSE OTHERS TO UNCONSCIOUSLY JUDGE YOUR DISPOSITION.

Below are two mock-ups of prints I will make in the next few weeks. The first one will be printed on sheets of glass as shown, and the second on black paper. Click to see them larger:

A big thank you to Erica Segovia for the background image of the second poster.

Everyone loves Ikea. The cheap, cheerful products and maze-like layout make the store a bit of an adult’s playground. I hadn’t been to IKEA since I was a kid, until I had the idea to shoot a colour story there, and realised there was a store just a 20 minute bus ride from my house!

This is also an editorial from a magazine I’ve been working on for a university project, alongside three other students. We’ve just got it printed but only have four copies in total (because it was so expensive to print). However, I’m thinking of uploading the whole thing to issuu.com sometime soon – so keep a look out! You can get a sneak preview of our inspiration and some behind-the-scenes shots on our tumblr. There should also be a playlist/mix uploaded there soon as well, to go alongside the magazine.

Massive thanks to Alice Neale for helping with art direction and styling.

You can see the rest of the shoot on my website.

After having visited the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Tate a couple of months ago (you can read my review of it here), I was inspired to do some of my own work influenced by her beautifully intricate paintings…

Photography, Painting, and Post-Production by me
Modelling by Tru Kim

“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you…. The minute that you understand that you can poke life … that you can change it, you can mould it … that’s maybe the most important thing.”

-Steve Jobs

After school last week, I called my friend Kylie, who I was supposed to visit in a few hours.

“My mom and I are heading off to Malibu right now…. Well, actually, feel free to come with us! The backseat is a little small, though….”

“That sounds way more fun that going home to sleep like I was planning to! I’m at my school’s parking lot, see you soon!” I joyfully said and hung up.

After a few minutes’ time, an old 70′s Mercedes convertible whipped through our parking lot and it took me a moment to register that I was supposed to get in it. My friend and her mom called out to me, and I hopped into a pathetic excuse for a backseat. It looked like a small hole behind the driver’s seat.

We drove off and people from my school kept waving to me and yelling things. It was fun, but I thought the attention was kind of weird. Before I registered what was happening, we were going seventy miles per hour on the freeway. The dry air whipped into my whole body, and it simultaneously froze me with fear and lit me up with excitement.

But after fifteen minutes or so when the novelty wore off a little, I had one of my routine philosophical panic attacks.

“The ritual of driving is so strange,” I thought. “People just close their windows, listen to the radio, space out, think about their problems, talk on the phone, think of vacations they’d like to take and whatnot…. It’s so isolating.”

Would people scream at each other for being “dumb fucking drivers” if they were all in convertibles? Probably not. But for once on this little venture, I was pretty conspicuous. For the first time I felt aware what was happening: the people in the moving metal boxes all saw me as well as I saw them. I’m sure it was entirely due to the situation being sort of funny-looking and probably slightly and unsafe and illegal, but whatever works.

Living in Los Angeles, where everything is a drive away, this human-made system of driving is particularly significant. Everything in our world was constructed through preconceived human decision-making. We are born into a world where our large-scale political systems, social conventions, cultures, and languages are all created for us. These ideals are constantly shifting and changing and crashing and rebuilding – nothing about it feels concrete.

But then there’s nature. On this drive to Malibu, we were deliberately going out to the “natural” world. Nature in my metropolitan world is treated as the “other” place to go. People often say that they are either a city person or an outdoorsy person, as though it is one or the other. Allow me to challenge this notion, though. Perhaps everything we strive to create has been here all along, and we altogether overlooked it.

(by Laurence Philomene)

I stepped out of the car at the yuppie open-air market in Malibu, stretched my legs, and sat under a large olive tree. It was more or less the middle of the day, and the dappled circles of sunlight surrounded me. It was a moment not only of physical relief, but also of visual beauty. Orbs of dappled sunlight are perceived as little, pretty lights for a reason, though. Did you know that the small circles of dappled sunlight are actually individual pinhole images of the sun? In essence, each orb is a perfect projection of the sun. This principle of optical physics says that any pinhole will flip light through it upside-down and backwards and project it through the other side. This is the science behind how all cameras work; all you really need to make a camera is a box with a hole in it and some film. There, a concrete basis behind photography.

Then Kylie and I started down the path to the beach. We turned and saw a particularly pleasing wildflower to our left. I normally leave flowers alone, but I picked it with a faint motivation to give it to Kylie’s mom as a present. There are underlying reasons behind why it appealed to me, though. I’ll focus on two of them: color and layout.

It was a yellow flower with bits of purple. Any artist would shout out, “Well duh, those are complimentary colors!” But looking at these phenomena even closer, one can see that complimentary colors are not random. One researcher in this field, biophysicist Pupa Gilbert, says that, “The complementary pairs we learned aren’t real physical complements. True complementary colors are two colors whose combined wavelengths span the whole visible spectrum, creating white.” There, a concrete basis behind color theory.

Now the layout: this particular flower had a large outer petal with a small inner chamber. To be more specific, this flower followed the mathematical principle of The Golden Ratio. In 300 BC, Euclid defined this ratio in his book, Elements. This specific ratio (equal to about 1.618) represents an aesthetically pleasing design plan that artists, architects, musicians and designers have used since the Renaissance to create aesthetically pleasing designs. This ratio is not random, though – it turns out that the natural world is already designed with this ratio. For example, psychologist Adolf Zeising found the golden ratio manifested in veins of leaves, animal skeletal systems, connections between veins and nerves, and even the geometry of crystals. There, a concrete basis behind composition.

I could go on with what we saw on our walk on the beach, but it becomes exhausting to analyze every reaction in this way. One pattern stands out clearly from this questioning, though: our very beings are in sync with the animals, plants, rocks, mountains, lakes, and skies. This nature is what we were created from, but many are ambivalent towards it. It is the foundation of what our whole world is based on. Nature provides us with ways to design cameras, to create energy, to reproduce, to breathe underwater, and even to fly. There is nothing out of the realm of possibility that hasn’t already been done before. In fact, there is a relatively new field of research known as biomimicry that works to look at nature and learn the processes behind what it does. For example, in the crucial case of energy production, one might address the fossil fuel crisis. A scientist of biomimicry would look to nature for answers, rather than turning to abstract physical science. It is easy to see that plants and animals are in a system that allows for sustainable living. All of our fellow beings gain energy from other natural beings that once had life, and we are in harmony. Perhaps our answers hide directly in view.

So perhaps the next time you come across a way of doing something that you find strange, look at it both up close and from afar. Natural patterns will pop up, intersect, and weave in and out. Plato once wrote in his famous Allegory of the Cave that people are born chained in a cave and forced to see projections of life. If these people can realize there is a natural world outside the cave and escape, they can finally see the truth.

Here are some mock-up covers I designed last weekend! Covers are extremely important to me, and I personally find it justified to judge a book by its cover. If an artist truly loved the media they created and if they got any say in it, they would probably bother to make the cover meaningful too. If neuroscience doesn’t work out, I’d be very happy with becoming a graphic designer.

The Lolita cover has a bunch of images from the novel in it. See if you can find the butterfly! Click on the gallery below to see the full covers.

Art and psychology are the two loves of my life. When I go off to college next year, I plan to major in neuroscience. And as an artist, I do think going an academic route for a little while will help me to refine my art more. As Christian has shown us, he combines geology and photography to express himself, and our new staff photographer, Margaret Durow, majors in biology while still pursing photography.

That said, here is some art that has struck me as particularly psychological:

1. Thai artist Rook Floro‘s sculptural expression entitled “Shadow” is an acutely personal representation of the repressed ideas and desires that he carries around with him. He says, “My sculpture/performance piece is inspired by Carl Jung’s psychological theory about the shadow … which involves my hidden desires to be different and become perfect in my own right. We always feel the pressure to be perfect by everything around us such as the media, social network, advertisement, friends, and family.”

The biggest surprise? That’s the artist himself, sitting the chair behind the sculpture.

2. Robert Montgomery‘s ongoing series, “Words in the City at Night,” is created by hijacking advertising spaces and covering them with his own work. There are sculptural and poetic elements to his work, and he hopes that his work is “an inquiry into our own collective unconsciousness.” His short poetry has more meaning to me than most novels I’ve read, and I highly suggest you poke through his website.

Kolleen also introduced me to Jenny Holzer‘s projection series, which is quite similar.

3. The Impressionist movement has always struck me as an introverted psychological expression, and it fascinates me how it affected literature, music and art. I have been reading a few classic works of Impressionist literature, and although it’s not my favorite genre, I do find it very worthwhile and a fun thought experiment.

From Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,

[Mrs. Ramsey] was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. Then he said, Damn you. He said, It must rain. He said, It won’t rain; and instantly a Heaven of security opened before her. There was nodbody she reverenced more. She was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt.

From Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle,

What it had come to was that he wore a mask painted with the social simper, out of the eyeholes of which there looked eyes of an expression not in the least matching the other features.

From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,

‘Catch ‘em,’ he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth— ‘catch ‘em. Give ‘em to us.’ ‘To you, eh?’ I asked; ‘what would you do with them?’ ‘Eat ‘em!’ [...] I would no doubt have been properly horrified, had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past.

One can see from these excerpts that it is quite hard to tell what true reality exists, and the way the world is viewed from each of these works is more about effects than causes, and more about a certain flow of perception and energy than anything else.

4. Have you ever wondered why hospitals are so ugly? I mean, what motivation is there to feel better if you’re in a sterile, cold hospital room? There is a movement going on now in architecture to create better spaces for healing. As this article says, “The idea that architecture contributes to healing isn’t new; it dates back to the late 18th century, when hospitals were designed to provide fresh air and access to the healing powers of nature. These concepts were forgotten by the 20th century when the rise of technology-based medicine spawned the ugly, utilitarian hospitals we all know and loathe.” One architect, Frank Gehry, created a hospital in Scotland known as Maggie’s Centre that was made to resemble a modern-day gingerbread house. On the inside, it is full of light and is much happier and quainter than most hospitals. I hope some architects start doing this in the United States soon!

James and I are decidedly different people.  We can and will debate over absolutely anything and everything.  He may have bested me in the battle of best Neutral Milk Hotel song, but I was crowned winner in our match on the worth of slam poetry.  “Stairs vs. Escalators” and “Saturdays vs. Sundays” ended in ceasefires.  Last summer, we legitimately argued over how often we argue.

Although the two of us may not see eye-to-eye on everything, James and I were equally excited to visit the New Museum’s current exhibit, “Experience” by Carsten Höller, together, even if we both admitted that the main source of our excitement was photos of a two-story slide on the museum’s website. As we read on the exhibit’s website before our trek to the Bowery, “Experience” is a “form of experiments designed to test the limits of human sensorial experience through carefully controlled situations.” The exhibit is described online as something of an interactive journey for the audience, carefully constructed by Höller to distort viewers’ sense of space and time.

After signing waivers we both didn’t read, our “Experience” began on the fourth floor of the museum, a floor dedicated to motion, as I was later informed.  The elevator doors opened to an enormous mobile of cages, containing particularly vocal canaries, hanging in the air.

“Why?” I asked.  I’ve never been fond of birds.

“Fuck da police,” James responded.

I looked to the small labels beside the mobile for answers, but they offered only a list of materials used and the name of the organization assuring the health of the canaries.  I looked up at the birds, wondering if they had the answer.  Nothing.  And so, my search for meaning throughout the exhibit began.

I immediately began to take note of every single detail the exhibit presented.  When James and I rode the Mirror Carousel (2005), I carefully weighed how each piece rotated and what was revealed and concealed by the angle of the mirrors in each revolution. I even had the crazy idea to count how many seconds it take to go around, hoping that the number would offer some solution.  Beside me, James took pictures, swayed around a bit in his seat, and experienced the slow glide of the carousel.  I noted how it felt to walk through the tunnel, regarded how fish look under flashing, hallucinatory lights from inside a fish tank, and speculated as to what floating in a sensory deprivation pool might feel like.

We discovered a mountain of white pills next to a water dispenser, tucked away in a nook of the staircase.  When a security guard with a secretive smile hinted that we were to gain newfound superpowers from the white pills, I immediately downed mine and began asking her questions about what other museum-goers thought of the piece and how the pill dispenser was engineered.  James had trouble swallowing and chewed his pill slowly. Apparently, it tasted fine.  And when we were all done, we briefly stumbled through parts of the museum again with goggles that flipped one’s vision upside-down.  I had spent the entire day trying to compare “Experience” to other museum exhibits, where elements of each piece could be carefully constructed to form a Bigger Picture.  Höller’s only piece that didn’t inspire analysis was Untitled (Slide) (2011).  Despite the necessary safety helmet, the fifteen second ride down the slide was slide was a slice of childhood and riding a rollercoaster without a seatbelt rolled into one.

My moment of clarity finally came as James and I left the New Museum.  I had been so deeply wrapped up in my quest for Meaning in “Experience” that I had failed to notice the differences between our experiences.  James started gushing about how much fun he had had and how excellent the exhibit was.  I interrupted him to ask, “But didn’t it bother you that there were no explanations for anything?”   He liked the exhibit because there were no explanations.  “A very fuck-da-police exhibit – no inherent meaning to anything.” Maybe that was the beauty of the exhibit.  Not that the exhibit was inherently meaningless, but that the meaning was not prettily packaged and lying under the viewer’s nose.  Instead, Höller’s journey of self-experimentation and distortion of the senses allows viewers to discover their own meaning in the exhibit.

In the end, “Experience” was an experience worth having – just not for the reasons I had expected.

Being a million feet tall, clothing that I like is hard to come by. Clothes that look good on most people are never made in my size (I have size sixteen feet for god’s sake), and specialty online stores make ugly loser clothing. I have often wanted to give up on stores altogether and make my own clothes, but chances are the stuff I’d make would be even worse.

Here are three projects I have done in the past few months to customize my clothes the little bit that I can. Please feel free to do these too! They’re fun ways to spend weekend afternoons.

1. Use buttons!

Buttons are cheap – you can find them at vintage stores (especially political ones), online, and elsewhere. The ones I used to decorate this backpack I bought at Jetrag on La Brea and Melrose in Los Angeles.

2. Sneaker Painting

A few years ago, my brother painted some white Vans for me as a present, and they were quite possibly my favorite shoes ever before I grew out of them. Kolleen showed me a cosmic shoes tutorial and I decided to make some of my own.

After that, my friend Kat commissioned me to paint some sunset gradient shoes for her.

3. Sewing Fabric

I was inspired to make a tongue hoodie after seeing this photo on flickr. I got an old pullover, and went to Joanne’s to buy some fabric in red, black, and white. The materials only cost me about six dollars, and I used an old sewing kit I had at home.

Okay, I lied a little. I cut the design out and tried to sew it on by myself, but it didn’t really work out the way I wanted it to. My grandma very kindly helped me make it, though. I’m sure you can think of many other designs to make on hoodies; just be sure to get a stretchy fabric if you’re making a pocket in the front!

Here are some vintage postcards I found: