Jenny Holzer

Visual artist Jenny Holzer's work focuses on bringing text-based visual art out of the museum and into the world where the viewer (like it or not) is forced to interact with it. In her early days, this took the form of wheat-pasted "truisms" such as "Protect Me From What I Want," plaques and collages. Her more recent work retains this idea of speaking to (or at) the viewer as a means of interception, but on a larger scale utilizing LED banners, projections on to buildings, and "ticker"-style banners to interpolate the viewer. The humor and wit of Holzer's words gives these spaces a new personality that removes their perceived passivity.

La vieille dame et les pigeons

Adding this film by French animator and director Sylvain Chomet to my "to watch" list (also adding The Triplets of Belleville). Here is a clip and some stills from the film. Synopisis: When [an old man] sees an old woman feeding pigeons, in desperation he hits on the bizarre idea of dressing up as one, replete with grotesque, oversized head, and passing himself off as one of them! More from IMDB...

Paper Dresses

Popular in the 1960s, paper dresses, perhaps spurred to fame by Andy Warhol's classic soup dress were very basic, stocky things. Only recently have designers returned to this trend. While many paper dresses are one-time-only wearable items or impossible to wear, they provide stunning examples of visual art combining fashion, origami, and paper-making techniques. The examples below are some of the ideas modern designers and artists have come up with on how to re-interpret paper as a material that confronts themes of stability and fragility, structure and process, the permanent and the ephemeral.