We are all so tired of this wretched pandemic and pulling on a miserable mask to line up at No Frills. To hell with cooking every night and working out on a mat in front of You Tube with Coach Kel. To hell with the variants, the restrictions, Zoom meetings, vaccine hesitancy, Netflix and the poisonous political ideologies drifting northward from the USA. We want to be in a crowded bar listening to live music! We want to go to a packed opening! We want to linger over an overpriced coffee at the MOCA cafe! We want to push our way onto an overflowing streetcar!
Eventually, spring will come and eventually we will all be vaccinated. In the meantime, museums and galleries are shut down and virtual art experiences are hard to find online.
It is not the right time to restart my blog, except that I did stumble across some artwork that’s fun to look at and think about.
Pinterest!
Pinterest, that swampy trap of visual quicksand, has been brilliantly repurposed by a collaboration with It’s Nice That, the British on-line art and design magazine. The piece is called Thread of Inspiration and features a number of artists artists including Shamma Buhazza, Louise Borinski and Puzzleman Leung.
The endless stream of generally bland visual content (ideas for renovating my bathroom, for instance) that I once associated with Pinterest, suddenly become bold and declarative statements, found on the fascinating boards and pins of participating artists.
I admire the way the Pinterest infrastructure is efficiently used to create fresh content and how the artworks adopt the vitality and relentless novelty of the form, leading the viewer down labyrinthine paths of visual and intellectual stimulation.
As opposed to working in the pure art realm the featured artists combine commercial design, typography and photography and easily dissolve the boundaries between fine art and commercial practice.
Puzzleman Leung, who is a photographer in Taipei, created a mysterious narrative for his Pinterest project.
Looking at Puzzleman Leung’s boards is the opposite of doomscrolling. It is a joyful affirmation of the ocean of images at our fingertips! Elon Musk has been promising for a while now that Neuralink will connect the internet directly to our brains. Happily, there are still a few hurdles to overcome before it is as simple as Lasik surgery to have “the implant.”
Berlin designer Louise Borinski interpreted Leung’s photographs in a series of cryptic posters. She uses the site “as a platform to fall into deep inspiration scroll holes.” I like that!
Abu-Dhabi based graphic artist Shamma Buhazza concludes we need to decolonize design. Decolonizing has lately been a powerful sentiment in North America. It makes sense that would be true in the Middle East too. Shamma Buhazza’s Pinterest boards attempt to disrupt the flow of visuals to create pauses for reflection and the raising of generally unheard voices.
Covid-19 needs to get wrapped up soon. I feel like I lost the few social skills I ever possessed. Who knows if they will come back?
annetteandquebec 