Things We Like

The Light Surgeons’ Living Portraits

The Body Adorned: Dressing London exhibition has opened at the beautiful and peculiar looking Horniman Museum. It’s all about dress, the body, identity and London. The Light Surgeons has created what it is calling Living Portraits 3D installation as a device to explore what Londoners think of their own dress sense and that of others.
The Body Adorned: Dressing London opens on Saturday 24 March and forms one of four Stories of The World exhibitions under the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdyIYdAfvJs

Dominic Wilcox’s Jaffa Cake Art

In flagrant disregard to the rules about not playing with your food, artist Dominic Wilcox has turned his hand (and teeth) to a somewhat untapped artistic medium –  Jaffa Cakes. Wilcox has been busily nibbling away at the citrusy biscuits to create a series of rather wonderful designs – ranging from an uncannily realistic Queen’s head to monuments such as Stonehenge, valiantly chomping his way through three whole boxes to achieve the perfect Tower Bridge. Wilcox says, ‘One of my friends treats it like a Zen ritual, carefully eating the chocolate first then removing the jelly and slowly nibbling away at it. Others go for the edges and gradually work their way inwards.’ www.dominicwilcox.com

Take Two

Following in the jovially-competitive quadruple footsteps of artistic double acts such as Gilbert and George and The Chapman Brothers, Chelsea College of Art and Design graduates Simon Linington and William Mackrell’s new show Take Two draws on an element of competition as its central tenet. The show will be exhibiting works which are created collaboratively but in competition – ‘works that appear to be illogical, absurd or destined to sabotage themselves, poised between sincere endeavour and inevitable futility’, according to the gallery. These include a series of performance works through video shown alongside props as relics of the acts.

Take Two: Simon Linington and William Mackrell runs until 4 May at Arts Gallery, University of the Arts London, 272 High Holborn, WC1V

Hijacking the Soundscape of the Tate

This evening is set to see the Tate in London’s soundscape hijacked by three activist organisations Platform, Art Not Oil and Liberate Tate, in protest against the environmental record of BP – one of Tate’s chief sponsors. This hijacking will consist of a new series of artworks commissioned by the trio of organisations entitled The Tate á Tate Audio Tour. The sound works use recoded sounds from the Tate sites, and are available for anybody to download onto their smart phones and MP3 players. The sounds are designed to be listened to inside Tate Modern, Tate Britain and on Tate Boat in a ‘portable piece of cultural activism for the modern age’, according to art writer Morgan Quaintance. Click here for more information.

Roee Rosen: Vile, Evil Veil

Israeli artist, writer and filmmaker Roee Rosen’s first UK solo show features Live and Die as Eva Braun –  a piece that invites the viewer to become Hitler’s lover, Eva Braun, during the last years of war that preceded the dictator’s suicide. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the work drew such controversy when displayed in the Isreal Museum in 1997 that the then-Minister or Education requested its closure. This piece will be accompanied by short film Out, which explores ‘boundaries between the body and state, radical sexuality and politics thorough a staged domination/ submission exorcism scene set in an ordinary living room’, according to the gallery.

Sign Design Society seminar

A seminar next month organised by The Sign Design society will examine wayfinding and signage design, and how designers play a crucial role in helping people negotiate the metropolis. The seminar will focus on the 2012 Olympic Games, and aims to examine how Games organisers and planners have prepared for the mass arrival of people unfamiliar to London. This will include a look at accessibility strategy for the Games, an independent perspective from the walking community and what wayfinding can learn form the Sydney and Vancouver Games. The seminar will be followed by a two-day conference by the information Design Association.

The seminar takes place on April 11 at University of Greenwich, Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, London SE10. For more information visit http://www.signdesignsociety.co.uk/