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Don’t click this link and figure out if you are registered, how to register, how to update your address or how to get an early or absentee ballot.

I’ll admit I have different taste… this has to be one of my favorite pieces I own now though.  Artist is Jason Byron Nelson of LA.  I bought a huge (framed it’s like 2′ x 3′) signed print of his piece “Flowers in the Attic” that also has been printed through Threadless once or twice which is where I became familiar.

I love the title, love the picture… I think it’s amazing.  Beautiful juxtaposition.  It’s framed in my bedroom…  Not to everyone’s liking I imagine but it is to mine.

Airtight Interactive released a little bit ago another iteration of their fancy Flash based photo presentation webware.  You can see an example of it on my site here;

It’s 3Dish and interactive.  Click the cycle arrow/button at the bottom to cycle another page of photos, click on a picture to zoom in, click the circular button on a picture to flip it over and get details.  I installed and had it pull only Flickr pictures from my account with a tag “budapest” so it’s showing all my photos from my trip there.  You can pull all sorts of combinations of tags and whatnot.  If you’re organized with tags that is.

Below is a new ad campaign developed by photographer Roger Stayte and art directors Pier Madonia and Stuart Macmillan for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.  I like it a lot.

Awareness, 20 ml concentrated.

Basic medicines are still needed in many parts of the world, but basic awareness is what we need here.

Increasing our knowledge of different cultures promotes understanding and compassion, which helps eradicate the disease of discrimination.

Tolerance, 48 x 3 mg daily dose

Wouldn’t it be nice if all the world’s problems could be solved with a little pill?

We can fight against cholera, malaria and AIDS, but tolerance is the only medicine that can cure the real problems.  An you can prescribe it.

Everyone has the right to live a life free from racism, sexism, and discrimination.  A daily dose of tolerance is the only way to ensure we all enjoy this right.

Compassion, 150 ml universal recipient

With a little more compassion pumping through our veins we would only need blood for hospitals, not war zones.

Every conflict around the globe, whether it’s between countries or cousins begins when people disregard this basic human emotion.

Compassion helps us find common ground and overlook our difference by discovering that we all have the same colour blood in our hearts.

Six hundred volunteers will pose nude for Spencer Tunick’s latest photo shoot in Miami, FL.  Hailing from New York, this is Mr. Tunick’s signature art form.  Last year, he set a record with 18,000 posing nude in Mexico City (photos below).

I have a digital picture frame at work (that points towards those seated in front of my desk) that cycles through various art… I have a few Spencer Tunick photos and only a few people have caught what they are actually looking at.  I quite like his art.

Care of a link the sister sent… what follows is an example of a photographic manipulation technique patterned after tilt-shift photography which uses a specialized lens.  The examples are accomplished with Photoshop manipulation (i.e. artifical) to obtain gradient focus and lens blur.  It’s designed to draw your attention to a piece of the photograph.  It yields the effect of appearing to be a “miniature” of the subject.  Below are several photos I’ve taken in my travels…  Did the effect work?

If you have kids or are bored at work (I was the later) Readymech has 20+ flatpack creatures that you can cut out, fold, tape and create.  All you need is a color printer and some tape and scissors.

Here’s a couple of the end results;

UPDATE: For whatever reason, this is my most crawled blog posting.  Look to the bottom of this posting for more information on his work.

My latest art purchase is a couple of prints from Alex Pardee.  Alex was tapped by the band “The Used” to develop their album artwork and website a year or so ago.  Before you see the pictures… here’s a bit of a bio on him.

Alex Pardee’s unique style is one conceived through watching years of horror movies, writing graffiti, and listening to gangster rap. His work best represents that of avibrant undead circus sideshow. Final pieces are often brought to life by translating random shapes and colors into signs of torment and absurdity. By juxtaposing these two conflicting moods, Alex makes his works more personal to his viewers, forcing them to project their own feelings and emotions onto each character in his twisted universe.

After months of hospitalization and many futile attempts at seeking out professional help in his early teens, Alex finally overcame his battle with severe depression and anxiety through his own form of therapy: art. His love for drawing and painting spawned from his fascination with the grotesque images of Garbage Pail Kids and Tales from the Crypt comics. For years Alex used sketch drawing and graffiti as an emotional outlet. He started photocopying collections of his sketches and scattering them around the Bay Area. He began placing his homemade books between the pages of tattoo and porn magazines, in clinic waiting rooms, and in public bathrooms. With the help of street canvas and Kinkos, Alex was able to overcome his emotional setbacks and move forward in the world of artistic expression.

And so here’s the two signed prints I purchased…  Little macabre, but fun to look at.

The artists personal website is EyeSuckInk and his blog is here.  At his site, you can purchase prints and whatnot directly from him and his peers.  He might let you be his friend on MySpace here.

As of October 1st, 2008 he designed a small line for Hurley that you might see in stores around your town.  You can check it out online here .

His DeviantART profile is here.  His Wikipedia entry is here.

Lastly, you can see him painting a window for Upper Playground (a clothing/t-shirt label) and another video of an interview he did in May of 2008;

Los Angeles based contemporary artists Davis & Davis created a series called Childish Things, where they stage mini-psychodramas on miniature sets with the toys portraying the conflicted children who left them behind.