Brian

@sholis.com

300 Followers 327 Following

Chicagoan in Toronto, art worker, autodidact, dad. This is mostly a read-and-reply account. More about me at sholis.com; I’m also building valise.works for artists.

The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America by Lauren O’Neill Butler Walk through New York’s gleaming gallery neighborhoods and the notion that art (or artists) could be considered edgy, provocative or dangerously political seems like a fantasy. But in the not-so-distant past, dedicated artists used their work to fight for everything from housing rights to AIDS awareness. Butler, a former editor at Artforum, has structured the book around oral histories from several key figures, charting their work from the 1960s to the present. June 17
Damián Ortegas’s 2002 sculpture, “Cosmic Thing,” a VW bug taken apart into dozens of pieces and suspended by cables in a warehouse-like setting
A figurative sculpture composed of a wooden pallet, 40kg bags of concrete (I think), and a spherical head sewn together out of bits of fabric
A mockup depicting a book with a purple cover against a light-blue background. The cover features words in small type and a large black print of butterfly wings.
Photo of an elderly gentleman sitting on a ledge built in to a large new window in a renovated 1840s cottage in Australia. The interior is dark and moody, with brick and wood, despite the light coming in from outside.
Three photographs of Club Piscine signage, featuring a yellow smiley face and the brand’s name in bubbly red and blue letters
Six app icons, four of which could be described as flower-like …
Image of a sticky note superimposed over text. The note reads: “aim for / self- / reflection”
A crowd of people, with one person pointing toward the ceiling, in a high, red-painted room
Georges Didi-Huberman’s hands viewed from above, writing notes and arranging them on a table
Screenshot of Valise depicting a grid of Ellsworth Kelly artworks set in a clean digital interface
A photograph of piles of black-and-white newspaper and magazine clippings and photographs, often frayed or marked on, including some in an shallow, open cardboard box.
On an orange background, the cover of a vinyl edition of the Unrest album “Perfect Teeth,” which features a close-in black-and-white portrait of a woman with short hair and a jaunty hat. The record is pulled halfway out of the packaging to reveal an inner sleeve and its label.
Close-up screenshot of the Hello Weather iOS icon with a red circle highlighting a stroke of white on its right-hand edge
A photo of five white “tiles” (CD covers) with a design that spells out XERROX across them
View of a large (seemingly room-size) machine with an asterisk-shaped body; dozens of gears are appended to its face, and a chain runs between them
A quote shot of the following text: “English is enormous, beautiful, complex, fascinating. Language is the most sophisticated thing humans have ever used. Why wouldn’t you want to look up a word you don’t know? It’s never ever been easier to look up the definitions of words—and their etymologies. So why not do it? Who knows what you might learn?”
A small, square-format painting on rough burlap. Against a dark, seemingly nighttime background, there are a few branches of a berry bush, its red and dark-blue fruits gleaming from an unseen source of light.