Untitled, 2007. Erick Swenson. Polyurethane resin, acrylic paint, MDF, polystyrene 30″ X 181″ X 280″

Considering the numerous types of protest that will occur in Toronto over the next 48+ hours, here’s something that could be interpreted as stop BP and save the whales ‘climate activism’ art. Don’t be fooled by Erick Swenson’s hyper realistic polyurethane resin, polystyrene, MDF and acrylic sculptures. Check out Ne Plus Ultra, a decaying deer with a skeleton covered in a scrimshaw of ancient mariner charts. Who comes up with this stuff?! …Erick Swenson…

Have a look at Amy Fleisher’s work. Among other things, she’s done a series of work for Penguin Books to celebrate their 75th Anniversary. She’s made a fun little series of book covers featuring the penguin books logo thematised to that particular book’s content. It’s quite cute and playful yet as a graphical device it gets right to the point. I would be nice to see a few more examples to really show the potential of the idea though.

[Amy Fleisher]

Check out this Tumblr blog; Movies in Frames. It aims to distill movies to four-frame summaries. The results can actually be pretty effective commentary on the movie, not needing any supplementary text. As they put it; “One movie – four frames. That’s it.”

[Tumblr]

The Philadelphia Zoo has just opened a new exhibit featuring some animals … kindof. The difference is that the animals are made of Lego brand toy building blocks. Thirty Four endangered species have been built by Sean Kenney and placed in zoo enclosure habitats. The zoo has commissioned five more Lego-certified builders for future exhibits to be held this year as this one is already proving successful in drawing the crowds and raising both awareness and revenue.

[Creatures of Habitat]

Paul Tassi has put some illustrations up on his site for an alphabet book. As expected there is one page for each letter of the alphabet beginning with “A is for…” Does he follow up with ‘apple’? No. He gets a bit more into it. He follows through each letter of the alphabet with the most bad-ass alliterative combinations he can come up with, complete with illustrations to boot. Enjoy.

[Unreality]