News

So I meant to write about this a while ago...but a few months ago I entered a photography contest for the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, of which the winners would be featured in the Garden's 2012 calendar.

And I won!

My photo will be featured in December, and will be on display at the Garden in the spot where it was taken, which is the bonsai museum.

Here's the photo (click to enlarge to the full size):

In other news, I've started a new weekly column at the blog Hourglassy.com. It's written by the lovely Darlene Campbell, founder of Cambell & Kate, a line of white button-up shirts designed for busty women. The Hourglassy blog focuses largely on the pitfalls and successes in dressing an hourglass-shaped body (since most adult women's clothes are cut for a 14-year-old). My column is about life with a small waist and big chest, with a focus on positive body image and easy sewing alterations to make ill-fitting off-the-rack clothing fit a curvy body. I update every Friday.

Brooklyn Museum's "reOrder"

After seeing photos of the Brooklyn Museum's new "reOrder" exhibit (March 4, 2011-January 15, 2012), I just had to go see it in person. The renderings online looked so massive, so larger-than-life, so...glow-y. And after visiting in person, the installation is far more stunning than the pictures even give it credit.

reOrder consists of huge fabric sculptures made of flat, round frames with heavy white fabric folded and stretched from one circular frame to another below it, at varying heights and diameters. Each fabric monolith appears lit from within with a slightly blue-toned light, so that they all give off a luminescent, mystical glow. They're set up in the 10,000-square-foot hall on the first floor, which is capped with a flat glass roof. The small, green-tinted panes of glass that checker the ceiling pair perfectly with the luminescence of the exhibit, and only add to the otherworldly environment.

Each structure is rooted to the floor with heavy-looking white bases, some of which have a bulbous protrusion encircling it at just the right height to use as a bench (which museum-goers were only too happy to do). The clunky bases coupled with the light umbrellas give the installation an overall feeling of being ethereal yet solid at the same time, an effect made all the more pronounced when standing in the center of the hall, craning one's neck upward at these floating, oversized sunshades surrounding you on all sides. It was like walking through a sparkling white forest, and felt, in a word, magical.

For you architects out there, the Museum is also displaying videos of the building process and the installation and assemblage of the exhibit within the hall, sped up into time-lapse clips. It's fascinating, to say the least (and can also be viewed on the Brooklyn Museum's website).

Whatever you do, do not miss this exhibit. (It'll be on display for 10 months, so you've got no excuse not to go!)

You can find more information on this and other exhibits at brooklynmuseum.org.

And here are some photos I took (which, due to my camera's increasing quasi-brokenness, don't really do the site justice):

Everybody go to the museum!

Thanks, crummy camera, for making this shot blurry.

This dad and his daughter were really sweet. Start 'em young (art lovers, that is)!

The right outer wall.

The left outer wall.

Review: AX Alternative Manga

After reading a lot of mostly positive articles about this book, I checked it out from my local library (side note: I love that the Brooklyn Public Library carries this very adult manga!). And unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed.

Ax: Alternative Manga collects a slew of comics from the Japanese alternative comics magazine Ax, in the style of McSweeney's "Best American Comics" series. It consists of a sizable introduction and a collection of short comics, some of which are standalone tales and some of which appear to be excerpts.

While I'm always happy to see unexpected (and adult) manga translated into English, the content in this book was just not that great overall. There are a few titles that I liked, but too many were boring or nonsensical. Takato Yamamoto and Keizo Miyanishi's pieces, for example, were beautifully drawn, but I couldn't even get through them because they didn't follow a narrative and basically read like a stream-of-consciousness thing. I personally prefer my comics to tell some semblance of a story.

One complaint I read numerous times online is that the book as a whole has too much juvenile and gross-out humor, but this is definitely something I disagree with. Out of the 33 pieces, there are only about 3 or 4 that contain anything gross-out. Yes, these particular stories were pretty dumb and seemed like little more than an excuse for the author to draw penises, but they're hardly representative of the entire collection.

The stories that I enjoyed most were the furthest removed from the feel of traditional manga. Katsuo Kawai's simple line drawings more closely resemble the homemade mini comics you'd find in a local independent comic shop, and his brief tale about a woman's boyfriend leaving her for another woman is incredibly clever and elegant.

Toranusuke Shimada's thick black lines and bulbous shapes are positively fun to look at, and his fictional history of Eldorado motorcycles is one of the most engaging tales in the entire book. Kotobuki Shiriagari's "The Twin Adults" shorts are very clever and his drawings of the two little naked men are gently done in the watery brush stroke style of sumi (ink wash) paintings.

My two favorite pieces are by Shinya Komatsu and Akino Kondo (whose work also graces the cover). Komatsu's "Mushroom Garden" is illustrated in a highly detailed and magical Franco-Belgian style (think "TinTin" or "Asterix"), and the story of a mineral collector who switches to mushrooms is short and sweet. Kondo's "The Rainy Day Blouse" looks much more like traditional manga, but with perfectly smooth lines and lots of subtle roundness that gives it just a touch of an art nouveau feel. The simple story of a girl's new blouse and umbrella is also sweet and short with a hint of nostalgia. I will definitely be seeking out more of her work.

Now that I'm writing all this down, it sounds like there's a lot more that I like than dislike. However, that's because beside the stories I like a lot, I feel ambivalent about the rest. I don't like what's left, but I don't hate it (well, most of it) either. This collection is listed as "Volume One" on the cover, so I'm assuming Top Shelf will be publishing more. I look forward to picking up the next one at the library, but I would definitely not buy it, and overall there's just not enough good stuff for me to recommend this first volume.