Seven-year-old Charlotte Benjamin recently wrote the Lego Company calling them out on their gender-stereotyped toys: All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach, and shop, and they had no jobs but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks. She calls on the Lego…
Read More
The image-clad steel door in photographer Emily Johnston’s apartment sharpened our eyes for the magnetic surfaces that already exist in many homes, from medicine cabinet to fridge doors. Rather than tacking the usual small photos, mementos and lists to it, we’re contemplating having a poster made that would cover its entire surface, mural-like.
Read More
A reader alerted us to Maya Donenfeld’s great book Reinvention: Sewing with Rescued Materials. Donenfeld writes the popular blog Mayamade. We are impressed by her philosophy which underlies every project: to create something new from what already exists. She loves the challenge of making “something out of nothing” (and so do we).
Read More
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot produces music in surprising and unexpected ways through large-scale acoustic environments and immersive sonic installation. From Ear to Ear at the Peabody Essex Museum employs a flock of 70 vividly-plumed Zebra finches to play iconic Gibson Les Paul and Thunderbird bass guitars. Boursier-Mougenot tunes the electric guitars to rock and blues chords so they are musically…
Read More
This image of an urban igloo jarred memories of hours spent building snow huts as a kid. We devised various methods of making them: building a huge mound of snow and burrowing a room into it…packing walls of snow in a round, graduated slope until we somehow made it hold a “roof” (we never thought…
Read More
(Video links HERE and HERE.) Recently, photographer Ellen Silverman borrowed the Laboratory to shoot Girl + Egg, her whimsical 1-minute video of…just that. Although Ellen brought a variety of egg cups she had bought or borrowed, she ended up using one we’d hacked (the hack is THAT good.) The video gives a nice glimpse of…
Read More
We’re at it again, hacking household items to tailor them to our liking. We used our trusty extra-fine sanding sponge to sand off the cheapish gold rim on some vintage egg cups, to reveal their pure, sculptural shape.
Read More
(Video link HERE.) This beautiful little video about the culture of chocolate in Mexico, will give you a view of the origins of the delicious sweet we love to eat, unaware how the making of it can be an act of resistance and spirituality, as is true with many endangered foods. In 4 minutes, we got a big view of culture, ecology, economic forces and memory that goes way beyond chocolate.
Read More
In addition to her promotion of toast as comfort food, we also dig restaurant-owner Giulietta Carrelli’s freckles tattooed on her cheeks, yet another innovative, curiously pragmatic cosmetic tattoo. Don’t got freckles? Tattoo them.
Read More
Reading about $4 artisanal toast, the Bay Area’s latest food craze, got us thinking about our favorite alt ways of making our favorite comfort food.
Read More
We’re inspired by New Jersey-based artist Madiha Siraj’s installations made of thousands of paint swatches from Lowe’s. We never thought of actually using swatches to decide more than a paint color, but as a material unto themselves for improvising designs and kaleidoscopes of color
Read More
If we were looking for a stunning gift to give a friend, we would give the book Maria Robledo gave us recently: photographer Mitch Epstein’s incredibly beautiful New York Arbor, images of remarkable trees growing in New York’s parks, gardens, sidewalks, and cemeteries, amidst the life of the city. It is not JUST photographs of trees, but a truly transfixing and transformative work that seems as alive as its subjects.
Read More