I love Ragnar Kjartansson's videos

Born into a family active in Iceland’s theatrical scene, Kjartansson, 33, likes to say he was conceived on the set of the nation’s first erotic thriller, Morðsaga, wherein his mother plays a lonely housewife and his father a plumber called to fix the dishwasher. (His conception took place the same month the love scene was filmed.) He would come home from school and sit in the darkened hall where his parents variously performed, wrote, and directed, listening to actors rehearse their lines. In Kjartansson, this repetitive toil of the stage struck unusually fertile ground. As a student at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts (he graduated in 2001), he was drawn to what he calls "performance loops" whose Beckett-like routines push toward the transcendent. 

Chris Jordan: Midway

On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean.

For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here.

Taliban by Thomas Dworzak

Fascinating project by Thomas Dworzak of the Taliban, a must see video:

Janet Biggs at the Mint Museum

After all the confused pomo ramblings and posturings of the 1980s and ’90s, it comes as something of a relief that a number of artists in the millennial years have gone back to classic existential themes. Chief among them is Janet Biggs, whose work documents individuals obsessed with attaining extreme states of being, mainly through athletic pursuits. Deceptively simple, her videos mostly alternate this documentary footage with shots of musicians performing the music heard as the sound track. In Vanishing Point, 2009, Leslie Porterfield, the world record holder for motorbike speed, races away as the Addicts Rehabilitation Center Gospel Choir sings work partly composed by Biggs herself. Duet, 2010, switches between a young violinist and singer performing an aria from the opera Lakmé and footage of the pit crews changing tires on NASCAR vehicles in the middle of a race—particularly apt for the exhibition’s home city of Charlotte, North Carolina, perhaps better known as a center for race cars, banking, and commerce than for the arts. And though we don’t see the musicians in the otherworldly Airs Above the Ground, 2007, their contribution forms an integral part in this collaboration with fourteen-year-old underwater dancer Deanna Mary de Simone, featured in the video.

Nina Berman

Nina Berman will be visiting Greensboro for student workshops and a public lecture. If you are in the NC area, the lecture is on March 18th @ 6PM in the Weatherspoon Art Museum.

Mark Steinmetz

I have always been a fan of Mark Steinmetz. Nice article here: The gray lays on top of everything like a heavy blanket. It is almost as if the suffocating gray inhabits the people and has slowly spilled out to seep into everything on the outside... covering every lie, every truth, every object and every thing... every hope, every dream. Or is it the other way around? Is it that the gray that blankets everything on the outside seeping into them? The gray that blankets the woods, that shadows the sky, that crawls over the open areas... is it them into it or it into them? http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/02/mark-steinmetz-grey-that-blankets.html

Hillbilly Heroin, Honey: Hannah Modigh

wow, i am on the fence here...here is a bit about the work, please check out her website and comment:

This project is not without its flaws. Modigh has stated that this idea came from an interest in photographing poor white people, but in a press release Modigh (or her gallery) made the poor choice of referring to her subjects as "white trash." While this cannot fairly be construed as an insult, it does point to a misunderstanding of this American pejorative if not also her subjects place in American culture. The title Hillbilly Heroin, Honey, a reference to Oxycodone, is another peculiar aspect. http://www.hannahmodigh.se/

Sorority Skin Tones by Travis Shaffer

“Sorority Skin Tones: a PANTONE color guide” is the first of a series of handmade, screen-printed  books made using PANTONE brand house paints, and physically replicates the Pantone Matching System Color Guides. “Sorority Skin Tones” contains the nearest PANTONE equivalent to the 20 most prominent skin tones in american sororities by analyzing the facebook pages of the ten largest american sororities.