Gallery Opening Soon!

Tiger Strikes Asteroid will open in March. Please come to our inaugural exhibition, which will feature the work of Phillip Adams, Tim Gierschick, Alexis Granwell, Alex Paik, Nathan Pankratz, and Caroline Santa. We're all super excited! More details to come...

Three (plus one) Great Covers

I found some great covers recently that I'd like to share. The first is from River Cuomo's 2nd collection of home recordings, Alone 2. Love the combination of mid 90's distortion and Beach Boys harmonies -- two of my most favorite things!

Rivers Cuomo: Don't Worry Baby (Beach Boys cover)

The second is from the forthcoming Jon Brion Remix EP of Of Montreal songs. I'm really looking forward to this -- I love what Jon Brion does and thought he did great with the minimalist sound of Spoon in The Underdog and with the 1st version of the Fiona Apple album. I didn't think that Of Montreal could somehow get more Baroque, but Jon Brion did it. Just like how I didn't think that the Shins could get more poppy, but Of Montreal did it anyway (Oh, I should throw that cover in, too).

Of Montreal: First Time High (Reconstructionist Remix of An Eluardian Instance by Jon Brion)


Of Montreal: Know Your Onion (Shins cover)

The last cover is Bon Iver doing Feist -- a really lovely slow jam for you all :)

Bon Iver: The Park (Feist cover)

ZOMG animated GIFs!!!!

Jack Sloss, Upside Ground

First off, I love Fleisher-Ollman Gallery for using an animated GIF successfully on their website. I have a hunch that this is the work of Claire Iltis, the Assistant Director, but I'm not sure. Awesome.

Fleisher-Ollman puts on some bangin' group shows -- they seem to have a lot of fun with them and use their excellent collection and connections really well. Rich Text is no exception. Rich Text, which focuses on contemporary work that uses text (duh), is a really varied and satisfying show. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures at the opening, so I can't post any images. Highlights for me include Alex DaCorte's birthday-banner pieces, Anthony Campuzano's Diebenkorn-text hybrids, and Bob and Roberta Smith's giant wooden walls of text. Everyone go see it!

Assisted Viewing and The Frantic Eye

From Art News Blog:

"Prado Museum on Google Earth

Google Earth is an amazing tool that just keeps getting better and it's still FREE. Over the years I have spent hours looking down on our fascinating little planet with Google Earth.

Now Google has made it even more compelling for artists to download as they're opening museums up and taking us inside. No longer content with looking down on art museums from above, they have zoomed in on paintings hanging on the walls. They have gone in armed with some amazing technology too, revealing every crack and brush stroke on each painting."

Pretty cool stuff. I really hope that other museums jump on this and let Google photograph their pieces. The detail is pretty amazing, and, since I'm not going to Spain anytime soon, it's the closest I can get to the real thing for a while.


As I was looking, it struck me as odd how different my experience of the paintings felt when I was forced to view it through the lens and controls of GoogleEarth. I realized that when I look at a painting, my eye jumps around really quickly from place to place, zooming in and out quickly. It felt really weird to have to laboriously slide the zoom control, and to manually "scan" the paintings in such a cumbersome way.

Obviously people don't really look at paintings like that, but it made me think about how we look at paintings --have our collective eyes evolved over time? Sitting in front of a computer for long periods of time and constantly multitasking, my eyes jumping back and forth between my two monitors, between different browser tabs, IM, poker tables, GoogleReader, etc -- does that affect how I see paintings?

I think it does, but I'm not sure exactly how. Wil made a great post a while back that had a bunch of interesting articles that I am going to re-read. I'll post more thoughts later.

I'm starting to suspect that my job as an artist is to somehow trick people's frenetic, ADD, Web 2.0 eyes (mine included) into slowing down and looking at my work.

Also, did you know that women see as much as 30% more colors than men???? WTF? Why am I cursed?

Visual Pop Songs

Paul Klee, Fire in the Evening

People often chuckle when I tell them that I really like Paul Klee, but I think that he is a very underappreciated painter. Maybe I just relate to him because he was also a fairly serious musician throughout his life and was influenced heavily by musical ideas like rhythm, harmony and structure, especially in his abstract work. I love the playfulness and whimsy of his geometric abstractions, and have been especially loving the structure of paintings like the ones here. I love how he was able to take a structure that is so simple and dry -- start with a block and keep dividing it into two -- and turn it into paintings that are full of life and charm. Sometimes all you need is a good verse and a good chorus to make magic.

Paul Klee, Monument in a Fertile Country