I have to confess to having seen this show three times now and have found myself appreciating the first as much as the last. Arresting film installations with subjects ranging from the dividing factions in Palestine in ‘The Green Line’ to Mexican dust storms in ‘Tornado’. Mixed with wonderful miniature paintings showing a delicacy of effort yet carrying an intoxicating detail rarely found today. Also of note are the brick-a-brack weapons made with film reels for magazines, crossbows with film for tensions – the new weapons of our society. Very worthy of your time, so get down to the Tate Modern and treat yourselves.


A Story Of Deception – Francis Alys, Tate Modern
A week in images
We have been frantic this week in preparation for the five new productions that are now in play, along with this busy shoot schedule we have managed to get over 2,000 images prepared and uploaded to the Stock Library including The Bonachela Dance Company in rehearsals, spectacular new panoramics, parkour deep etch images from some of the best UK talent including Sticky and the current world champion Tim (LiveWire) Sheiff and finally Vintage Sony deep etch images that includes early model retro designed radio’s from as early as 1952 shot whilst being given access to the largest privately owned Sony collection in the world.
Here are just a few of those images…
The Green Back has an image problem !
The Obama bill anchors their sweeping concept for redesigning U.S. banknotes, which also includes plastering a tepee on the five, the Bill of Rights on the 10, and FDR on the 100 each in its own technicolor hue. The impetus: The greenback has an image problem. It has come to represent everything that’s wrong with the American economy, and worse, with its cartoonish graphics and vaguely sinister styling, it actually looks the part. Dowling Duncan’s scheme, though purely hypothetical (it’s an entry in the The Dollar ReDe$ign Project competition) is about imbuing U.S. currency with sunny new meaning. Their bills are designed to be educational, intuitive, and, to put it plainly, make America feel like it sucks a little bit less.

Part of their idea is just making U.S. banknotes easier to handle. To that end, each bill has its own color for simple identification. They also come in different lengths — the dollar’s the shortest and the hundred’s the longest – so that when you stack your bills, you can instantly eyeball how much you’ve got. Varying the size is especially useful to help blind people distinguish between notes.
Perhaps most dramatically, the bills are arranged lengthwise. Dowling Duncan say they conducted extensive research on how people deal money and discovered that transactions are almost always carried out vertically. It’s true: How often do you hand someone a bill clutching the center widthwise? How many money machines accept cash horizontally? The new orientation would obviously take some getting used to, but in Duncan’s view, it’s ultimately more instinctual.
That brings us to the imagery, and here Duncan hatched a curious concept: Images directly relate to the value of each note and offer insight into America’s heritage, to boot. So since Obama is the nation’s first black president, he’s the face of the one-dollar bill.
A view from the street


Another wacky video aestetic that we couldn’t resist sharing with you
An environmental awakening in the Midway Atoll


We picked this up from Sweet Station ” These photographs of albatross chicks were made on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, none of the plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the untouched stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent. ” – Chris Jordan
what will be the legacy from the BP disaster
loving the aestetic here – simple, clean and quite eery
Ansel Adams glass plates found at garage sale worth £130 million or a possible fraud
Rick Norsigian’s hobby of picking through piles of unwanted items at garage sales in search of antiques has paid off for the Fresno, California, painter. Two small boxes he bought 10 years ago for $45; negotiated down from $70 are now estimated to be worth at least $200 million.
Those boxes contained 65 glass negatives created by famed nature photographer Ansel Adams in the early period of his career. Experts believed the negatives were destroyed in a 1937 darkroom fire that destroyed 5,000 plates. But the photographer’s family rejected the claim and insisted that the photographs were fakes. Matthew Adams, the photographer’s grandson, said: “There is no real hard evidence. I’m sceptical.” Bill Turnage, managing director of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, said: “It’s an unfortunate fraud. It’s very distressing.”
“It truly is a missing link of Ansel Adams and history and his career,” said David W. Streets, the appraiser and art dealer who is hosting an unveiling of the photographs at his Beverly Hills, California, gallery Tuesday. The photographs apparently were taken between 1919 and the early 1930s, well before Adams who is known as the father of American photography became nationally recognized in the 1940s, Streets said.
“This is going to show the world the evolution of his eye, of his talent, of his skill, his gift, but also his legacy,” Streets said. “And it’s a portion that we thought had been destroyed in the studio fire.”
How these 6.5 x 8.5 inch glass plate negatives of famous Yosemite landscapes and San Francisco landmarks — some of them with fire damage — made their way from Adams collection 70 years ago to a Southern California garage sale in 2000 can only be guessed. The person who sold them to Norsigian at the garage sale told him he bought them in the 1940s at a warehouse salvage in Los Angeles.
Photography expert Patrick Alt, who helped confirm the authenticity of the negatives, suspects Adams carried them to use in a photography class he was teaching in Pasadena, California, in the early 1940s. “It is my belief that he brought these negatives with him for teaching purposes and to show students how to not let their negatives be engulfed in a fire,” Alt said. “I think this clearly explains the range of work in these negatives, from very early pictorialist boat pictures, to images not as successful, to images of the highest level of his work during this time period.”
Alt said it is impossible to know why Adams would store them in Pasadena and never reclaim them. The plates were individually wrapped in newspaper inside deteriorating manila envelopes. Notations on each envelope appeared to have been made by Virginia Adams, the photographer’s wife, according to handwriting experts Michael Nattenberg and Marcel Matley. They compared them to samples provided by the Adams’ grandson.
While most of the negatives appear never to have been printed, several are nearly identical to well-known Adams prints, the experts said. Meteorologist George Wright studied clouds and snow cover in a Norsigian negative to conclude that it was taken at about the same time as a known Adams photo of a Yosemite tree.
In addition to Yosemite the California wilderness that Adams helped conserve the negatives depict California’s Carmel Mission, views of a rocky point in Carmel, San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, a sailing yacht at sea and an image of sand dunes. “The fact that these locations were well-known to Adams, and visited by him, further supports the proposition that all of the images in the collection were most probably created by Adams,” said art expert Robert Moeller.
Wiki Leaks, a terrible legacy to the Afgan nation
See WIKI LEAKS to read the story behind how your taxes are spent. Whilst not wishing to disrespect those risking their lives, we can all take an informed decision about whether we should be involved in any kind of activity that kills innocent people and purposefully concealing the facts on the scale shown here. If we want to change how our government acts, we all need to start talking together.
Off Modern interview by Maksymilian Fus-Mickiewicz
An in depth discussion about ‘Fusion’ and how it came about. READ THE INTERVIEW
Lui Jie’s first European show at Gallery 27, 12-17 July
It was a crowded venue by the time we arrived, not your usual art appreciation crowd as there seemed to be a fair amount of corporate big hitters. You can always tell this when guests are more interested in standing awkwardly close to the front of the artworks with their backs turned to the work talking about this deal or that big takeover – leaving the lesser mortal art lovers to try and negotiate a view of the artworks around and in between these portly figures.
The 15 pieces on show are playful self-portraits of the artist herself in a style suggestive of the daydreams of a young girl. Bright colours and a whimsical sense of form create a distinctive world within each work.
The more you look into Liu Jie’s world of cartoon-like characters and strikingly juxtaposed colours, the more conscious we become that our wonder is reflected in the wide-eyed gaze of the artist herself, peering back at us from the canvas, observing our world with a childish innocence, a coquettish curiosity, perhaps even a sense of bewilderment at what she sees or, possibly, at being the object of such interest herself.
Free of external reference or artifice, it is this personal communication between the artist and viewer that makes Liu Jie’s work so engaging.
An official incident on Brick Lane
We tried to show some work by hanging out some large format pieces in the streets around Brick Lane earlier today, thinking a busy Sunday vibe could be a good way of gauging public reaction to some of our new works.
Within ten minutes of the first pieces being hung from the metal shutters of a derelict store front, we were pounced upon by council officials flashing badges with an aggressive agenda to pursue.
Quite a bizarre incident really, beginning with them trying to covertly photograph us. We were then told menacingly that our artworks would be seized by these charming government officials and destroyed at will should they choose. Our response, we grabbed a few pieces each and ran – also quite bizarre as i am sure it must have looked like the great art heist…..
We are a locally based studio and we have all been regular visitors to Brick Lane for years and we ask – What The !
























