Other neck art

With loads of help, I finished my latest knitting project - a bow tie to give to my Dad for christmas. Not only is my Dad one of the few people who regularly wears bow ties (!), but this also fulfills my requirement for low-cash intensive gifts. Finding the clasp was difficult though - the Queen St. W. design blocks were not a help on this front; I went running from store to store over a number of different days and in the end had to cobble something together from J's childhood, 1980s watercolour-print bowtie. In the end, it also meant far too much time (and cash) spent in Mokuba - ohhh Japanese ribbbons.

With my brother's strange obsession with emulating Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl (not so strange I suppose - I admit to liking the show too) - he's put a request in for one too.

The Language of Bees

Do Holt Renfrew's Christmas windows rip from David Altmejd's The Index (installed currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario)?

In The Index, displayed in 2007 in the Canadian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale, and now at the Art Gallery of Ontario, David Altmejd displays a creepy collection of contrastingly ballsy and decaying man-animal specimens. He refuses to either set out on his work with, or distill from them, a clear 'message', which only adds to the tension conveyed by his sculptures. The curator at the AGO, however, seemed to think The Index put the modern world on display - cataloguing its hybrids, anomalies, and casualties, trying to make sense of them, like efforts to classify and document rare birds and extinct animals before them. Andrea Rosen, Mr. Altmejd's dealer is quoted as saying that, "It's partly about our fear of animal instincts, but transformed into things that are beautiful." I find it hard to describe The Index as anything but haunting and perhaps even hideous.

Walking along Bloor Street yesterday, I was reminded of Altmejd's sculpture in the windows of Holt Renfrew - the elite shopping destination in Canada, like Barney's is to New York. Holt's christmas windows are the most elaborate in Toronto, perhaps even Canada - you can see the attention to detail, and cost, that goes into them in the photos below. I wonder if the designers were taking inspiration from The Index. It wouldn't be that hard to imagine them having visited the AGO and seeing his imposing sculpture. But I'm at loss of pinpointing what they were getting at - not unlike how Altmejd's work leaves its audience guessing. Are we all animals - slaves to our instinctual desires? Were these windows a hopeful vision of harmonious man-animal relations (a theme also explored in this month's Spacing) - (things are alll good, it's Christmas!)? Or were they a basic comment on our destruction of the animal world - pronounced by the use of arctic-dwelling penguins striding nonchalantly along. Maybe the windows are just meant to be creepy yet beautiful - a holiday distraction. But, still, while the animals are portrayed as cool, confident, even decadent - humans were shown as puppets, rising unrelentingly up and down, almost unwillingly. Who is pulling on these puppet strings?

DAVID ALTMEJD'S THE INDEX

HOLT RENFREW'S CHRISTMAS WINDOWS

neck art

Sunday morning. I listened to the CBC and ate my potato and zucchini frittata, inspired by a recipe from 101 cookbooks. I'm surprised - I even made the cilantro chile sauce, despite that last night's stolichnaya is still sitting resolute in my liver.

It's the day when the Financial Times' weekend edition arrives on my doorstep, which I pour through while eating my breakfast, most time spent on the Arts and Leisure section. I don't much like the FT from Monday to Friday because it's a lot about the stock market and the latest acquistion attempt of Cadbury by Kraft - well, I am getting more interested in these, and I am skeptical of 'life and arts' being 'news' per se..but I digress. Tucked within the pink pages is the FT's brilliantly-named larger-than-legal-sized magazine - HOW TO SPEND IT. Because this is of course the number 1 question that plagues my life (read NOT), I enthusiastically read this too. Lately, however, I've realized that the latest in jet set luxury that graces the shiny pages of How To Spend It couldn't exist without the Monday to Friday editions of the FT. Not just because it would be wierd to have a newspaper come out once a week..oh wait, that's The Economist......but that - I don't know why it took me so long to come to this realization - to have the ability to afford one item on the fashion pages ('prices upon request' or even no prices listed at all gives some indication of these) one's livelihood would have to be in some way connected to all the mergers and acquisitions and stock tradings and maybe even the Calabrian mob-sunk ships with barrels of nuclear waste on the Mediterranean floor (story covered in the FT ~ two weeks ago). This gets at my inner conflict as of quite some time - I love nice things, and lots of them, but most ways of getting them don't seem to be that nice. And I agree with Socrates, I think it was him who said this, that, generally, wealth tends to corrupt. It's much easier to live a good life without it.

With this in mind, take a look at one photo - actually my favourite - in the fashion spread of this week's HTSI. I think the message was 'sequins and studs are what you should be wearing for the 3-week long period where you'll be going to holiday parties'.

I quite like the dress and especially the silver sparkly dust on the model's hands; the latter, probably not great for holiday party socializing. Yet, the whole feeling of the spread was a bit over the top splashy - giving off the effect of covering up all the financial woes and troubles (yes, still on those) with sequins and then plastering on some studs. I'm being far too harsh right now. But at the beginning of the FT was an interview with a woman - an interior designer I think - who was wearing a white button up, well-cut, above the ankle grey pants, and a colourful, unique, well-designed necklace. In short, I think if I have to go to 3 weeks of holiday parties that's the look I'm going to copy from - because that woman looked so much more together, intelligent, and happy than the star-dusted model above.

Here are some of my favourite neck arts at the moment:

Autumnal Library necklace, hand-crafted using 'antique and scrap leathers in autumnal tones of black walnut, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, crimson, sap green and soot'. Even the description is beautiful!

So much bolder than all those 3-stranded chains so in for Fall. Toronto-based Melissa Clemente's jewelry is awesome.

Dries Van Noten oversized bangles necklace. I think it's about $1000. I'm going to try to recreate this following The Iconic Fashion Blog's how to.

The sun is shining, I'm off for a run in the park!

first

Welcome. The title of this 'blog' signifies what I'd like to make this space about, a space where I work through ideas about the relationship between humans and nature, and everywhere that these entitites touch up against and contract away from each other (what an un-natural place to do so?). I expect that, often, this will play out as a perhaps schizophrenic picture of my own conflicted love of three things: first, bio-/physical nature - like trees, weather patterns, the lake my family's cottage sits on; second, the possibilities brought about by contemporary environmental consciousness; and, last - human designs and fabrications - like clothing, living spaces, and art - that either reconcile or really don't agree with a peaceful relationship between the human and non-human worlds.

There'll also be a tension between originality and borrowing in this blog. For this first post, I'd like to explore this issue in particular. Today I picked up a book at the local bookshop in my area. The book's title is "Wary Meyer's Tossed & Found." It is an aesthetically and conceptually brilliant book that showcases the unique projects that Linda and John Meyers have made from 'cast-offs' - things they've salvaged from yard sales and the street. Certainly, their work is an example of the current coursing of environmental consciousness through specific sub-sets of society. Far from a crass example of contemporary 'green consumerism', however, theirs is an exemplary example of sound environmental practice, with no compromise of the greatness in thought and even aesthetics that are often missing from 'back-to-nature' manifestos. In short, the below photos reinvigorate the mind, and to actualize them probably requires a good amoung of physical labour too.

Pipe umbrella stand, set in my future home. In somewhere like the Cotswolds. Ideally sheltered underneath a thatched roof.

Luggage with painted on stripes! Although I don't have suitcases nearly as elegant, I'm going to customize the new polycarbonate luggage set I was given for my birthday with some blue, yellow, and grey.

YES! Devil horns meet ghetto-blaster circa Vanilla Ice, updated with iPod playing capabilties. Genius?

Before I end, I'd like to give kudos to two influences that have lead me to embark upon the blogging journey - Tavi of Style Rookie and Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks. Their creativity and insight brings out the good in life, and the inspiration they provide has reversed my initial blogging qualms.

- END of first! -