Art Direction: Andrew Austin

With the new year well underway, I'm thinking a lot about 2009 and what is has meant for me. While I hardly accomplished my goals for the year, I can say that 2009 brought a surprising new direction to my otherwise academic mode of work. Being surrounded by some pretty talented people meant that I was given all kinds of opportunities to do Art Direction as a compliment to their work. I got to design for some short films, a music video, a couple photo shoots and even some merchandise, and although I was a total novice at all of these endeavors, got great feedback, and (perhaps more importantly) I really enjoyed the work. So in the interest of making my status as an Art Director existentially official, I thought I'd declare it on this mostly-personal pseudo-public way, and post some of the work I've done.

To start off, here's some merchandise I designed for Toronto singer/songwriter Andrew Austin:

This was cover art for the first single. Some people have told me that it looks like a shell, and others a pear "as seen from above" but the intention was that it be the planet Mercury, which would be followed by three other planet-theme single covers.

And here's the t-shirt I designed, which can now be seen all over Southern Ontario sported by both my father AND my sister.

And finally if you're interested here's a link to Andrew's music video which I did the art direction for. I cut 127 circles out of foamcore, and spray painted them gold. Exciting right?

Cowpoke (For Becky)

Here's a new picture that I finished in December for my sister's Birthday. I was trying to continue on with this idea I had about weird animal encounters, and horses being Becky's favorite animal, felt like the next logical step.

Granada Part 1

Hey friends,
I'm freshly back from a Christmas Vacation in Spain with Nick and his family, and I'm pumped to send the pictures I've taken out into the internet. As I edit through these photos, I'm realizing that I've spent the greater part of the past two and a half weeks looking through my viewfinder. Editing is not coming easy, so I'm likely going to post way too many pictures over the next few days.

Spain was beautiful but cold -- unseasonably cold -- having been hit by a deep freeze that preoccupied two weeks of Euro-CNN news coverage. Oranges on trees in Florida, school children were kept out of class throughout the Northern Hemisphere, and we rarely experienced temperatures above 10 C. As a consequence, I've returned home with the Spanish Flu. Sure it's not the Spanish Flu, but it certainly is a Spanish Flu imported from Spain. Due to the typically temperate climate, and the staggering cost of electricity, most residences and hotels in Spain opt out of centralized heating systems. After going to bed with wet hair one night, in an off-season hotel room in Malaga, my nose won't stop running, and my head feels kind of like a hacky sack. But aside from my weakened immune system, the result of Spain's relationship to electricity is kind of inspiring. It seems most Europeans are forced to be much more cognizant of their energy consumption, then we in North America (inspite of our best efforts) tend to be. For example, Ben's apartment in Grenada, where we stayed for about a week, heats water and runs its stoves and the occasional space heater with the same propane gas tanks that we use in Canada to run our barbecues. Each tank has to be ordered and delivered up to three days in advance, at no small expense. As a consequence few consider leaving a light on, let alone installing an electric clothes dryer.

Anyways, here are the first batch of pictures from Grenada, a small town in the South of Spain the feels like the setting for a Disney film. For posterity, I threw in a few poorly exposed shots of Ben's apartment. In the basement of a very old housing complex, it looks like the building's original cellar, but feels more like a cave in the side of a very cold mountain. There are many more pictures to come, but I took so many that I quickly maxed out my memory card, so for the time being they're stuck in New Orleans, waiting to be uploaded for me to a dropbox. Most of these are from the Alhambra, and huge and beautiful islamic castle in Grenada. Its architecture is serene and awe inspiring, and its ornate Islamic designs are only occasionally interupted with the mundane Catholic decors of its Spanish conquerors.











































There they are. I've been trying to improve my photography skills, so any criticism or advice would be greatly appreciated.
jt

Joshua Barndt

Yesterday I was working on a photo shoot with my friend Ryan Marr, and we almost couldn't make it into the studio in time to set up because his friend Patrick, who owns the studio, got into a car accident with this artist Joshua Barndt. So naturally, I looked him up on the internet, and now he's my new hero. Elephants + Environmental Descruction + Mind Blowing animation = good times.

Free Fall from joshua barndt on Vimeo.

Check out his website. You won't be sorry. http://www.joshuabarndt.com/

Morning people stop kidding yourselves.

As it turns out, I'm not a morning person. I've been struggling for months to wake up before 10, and get to work promptly and effectively, and failed every time. I never seem to get it together, and off of other people's websites and the couch before 6pm, which is long past the threat of morning. I must be a night owl because night seems to be the only time of day that I can write lucidly, and think clearly about what I'm writing, without feeling panic stricken by the whole ordeal. The problems is that night is also very distracting.

I'm considering some kind of sleep reprogramming, where I wait until I'm absolutely dead tired before I go to sleep, and regardless of hours, wake up at the same time everyday. But that seems unfun.

Clearly, this blog is going nowhere fast. From what I gather, most blogs live and die by their ability to focus on a singular topic, preferably a singular topic that people want to read about, and especially a singular topic that people want to read about from the person writing the blog. These credentials seem as though they're unlikely to materialize for this here Micropsic Vision.

With that in mind, here's my friend Sharlene's movie 57 ways (formerly Vag), fresh to the internet.

Enjoy

57 Ways (2009/ 5 min. / Canada) from Sharlene Bamboat on Vimeo.

Marcel Dzama

I’m pretty enamored with Marcel Dzama right now. His small-scale, seemingly quaint, ink and watercolor drawings offer profound emotional depth and political critique that’s surprising for their form.



With all the talk of torture in the news lately, these wartime figures that recall the traumas of WWI, seem as appropriately commonplace as the trees and birds that he combines in these whimsical conversion of everyday life.


















He recently directed this video with Patrick Daughters for the Department of Eagles song “No On Does it like You”.



I love the tone of this video, and how these desperate scenes of human depravity appear almost effortlessly celebratory. It’s pretty haunting.

Yesterday was for the people.

Lately, life has felt good. I’m riding my bike in late November; my thesis is back on track; and I’ve had art published twice in the past two weeks. It feels good, really good to live in a place where I’m continually confronted with inspiration, and opportunity for collaboration, and until yesterday I was convinced that life in Toronto was for me.

I woke up happy and clear headed, made coffee, turned on the CBC, and heard on the news that a deer was found sleeping in a tiny park in the downtown Financial District. Growing up in the suburban scrawl of St. Catharines, I remember a sense of excitement when our overly manicured, playground landscape, was disrupted by a deer, or another undomesticated creature. Wild animals amazed, not only because they challenged the tedium of our everyday scheduled clockwork life, but also because they reminded us of the space and shape of the wilderness we encroach upon. Aside from the odd grumbled-at raccoon, we used to feel lucky when we happened on a wild animal. But not anymore, and not in Toronto.

Apparently the urban world has completely lost touch with the part of humanity that feels bad about our ever-expanding environmental destruction. Yesterday, at around 11:15 am, shortly after the arrival of a veterinarian yielding a tranquilizer dart, the Toronto Police Department tasered the shit of the deer. The doe had been lying calmly in the garden for hours, a calamity that apparently brought much of the downtown core to a “standstill”(where would we be without the National Post)!?! When surprised by the dart, the Deer made a break for the sidewalk, and was met with tasers, according to Const. Tony Vella of the Toronto Police, in the interest of its own safety. You can see the video for yourself here on Blog TO.

Its pretty horrifying to realize that we live everyday in an environment that is a danger to all animals except for humans. Our own ambition has shaped us into creatures that navigate the world aggressively by neon street signs, walk always on the right, and bridle our children with adorable leashes for their own safety. I hope this trend turns around, but with the ever urbanization of our world, that seems unlikely. I feel helpless.
This is making me think about working on a series about confrontations with animals. Here’s something I did a few weeks ago for my Dad’s birthday present. I think I’d like to do more.