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These Cindy Sherman Emojis Will Do Wonders For Your Artsy Internet Game

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Are your aesthetic tastes a bit too refined to be accurately expressed by a kissy face, twin ballerinas or a smiling pile of poop? We have good news: Cindy Sherman emojis are now a thing, ready and able to communicate your deepest and most complex feelings along with your masterful understanding of contemporary art.

dinfy

Seoul-born, New York-based designer Hyo Hong is the brilliant mind behind the new emoji series, dubbed "Cindy Sherman-icons," which features the many faces and guises of the exquisite photographic chameleon.

Sherman has long entranced the art world with images exploring the many masks women wear, all starring Sherman herself rendered unrecognizable thanks to a wide array of sensual, grotesque and entertaining disguises. In one photo she's a femme fatale pulled straight from a 1940s noir film, while in another she's a collagen-pumped socialite trying desperately to steal the spotlight. She dives completely into her roles, transforming altogether into a trashy hitchhiker, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, a Renaissance Madonna, a battered woman, a nightmarish clown. Her glorious makeovers, captured in self-portraits, speak to the contemporary age of performed identities, specifically the roles women are born (and sometimes forced) to play.

Given her knack for shapeshifting, Sherman seems like the perfect artist to give us measly texters the images we need to better express our rawest emotions. "We don’t always want to convey that we’re blindly happy, crying with laughter or horizontally-lipped and nonplussed," Hyo told Hyperallergic. “Sometimes, we need something a little more subtle and nuanced from emoticons. So, I have come up with just the solution, in the form of the multifaceted Cindy Sherman-icon."

To begin inserting the many faces of Cindy into your everyday life, simply visit Hyo's tumblr page, where you can download all the Sherman-icons individually. Then post them into text message conversations as you would any other image and voila! You're texting like an art literate sovereign ruler.

In the meantime, check them out in highly enlarged form below.


A 3D Font That Reads Like Text, But Can Be Viewed Like Sculpture

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Woodblock printing and the innovation known as moveable type have their origins in China. Around 600 AD block prints appeared on the scene, perfected on paper toward the end of the Tang dynasty. You could say, then, that the Chinese innovators of the seventh to 10th centuries were some of the world's earliest typography masters.

Twenty-first century artist and professor Hongtao Zhou knows this. His recent project, "Textscapes," is as much an homage to their past ingenuity as it is a tribute to the progress made in design since.

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Unlike the printers of yore -- who used wood from date and pear trees, carving out their characters with knives before inking the block and setting the words to paper, Hongtao uses a 3D printer to craft his art. Despite the obvious differences, he sees a parallel. "Printing technology was first created in ancient China to reproduce text using woodblocks," he reiterated to HuffPost via email. Three-dimensional printing, he asserts, echoes these older methods, with its additive process used "more often to create objects instead of duplicate text."

Hongtao's font brings text to life, turning subject matter concerning landscapes, cities or figures into visual aberrations that actually appear like architectural pieces. A letter becomes a city, a story becomes abstract sculptures. Printing during Imperial times resulted in a beautifully carved block, while Hongtao's 3D printing results in "Textscapes."

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"These documents make reading interactive for a general audience... [it's] knowledge as well as art," he added. "This series of work has text variations of braille, language characters, calligraphies and number systems to bridge the text and its visuality in architecture, landscape, portraits and abstract matters."

Check out a preview of the series here and head over to Hongtao's website for more information.

Other participating artists and designers involved with "Textscapes" are Tyler Francisco, Rhealyn Dalere and Chin Fang Chen from the School of Architecture at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

This Little French Bulldog Is The Art World Darling You Should Follow On Instagram Right Now

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Don't you just hate that one art world socialite who's, like, always at every opening and fair and art party and is, like, always asking people to take her photo and uploading one million pictures to Instagram with hashtags like #thearmoryshow and #gallerydog? It's, like, woah, relax and please try not to drool all over the art. And, like, are you even potty trained?

Just to clarify, we're talking about a French bulldog here. She goes by the name of Miss Pickles. And as much as we may envy her, we just can't bring ourselves to loathe her adorable and highly cultured face.





Yes, of all the tiny dogs on Instagram, Miss Pickles is the most sophisticated, hitting up art fairs like they're dog parks and approaching masterpieces like they're fire hydrants. She most recently made quite the splash at this year�s Armory Show in New York City, where she was recruited to help launch Artsy�s inaugural Instagram event series #ArtWorldSpaces. Can you say #blessed?

The four-year-old French bulldog is the puppy child of art adviser Katie Howard, who originally trained Pickles to be able to volunteer at nursing homes. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Howard gave readers an intimate glimpse into the logic behind Pickle's refined aesthetic palette: "She loves anything that resembles dog toys."

Howard continued to explain how major galleries including Sean Kelly and Lehmann Maupin have started requesting Pickle's presence at their upcoming shows. She's also taken photos with artists including Hank Willis Thomas, Trudy Benson and Roxy Payne. And she has over 3,000 Instagram followers. Meanwhile, we can barely get into an art party without experiencing a dirty look and an eye roll from the person manning the door. Not so cute anymore, is she?

Just kidding. She's so, so cute.







































Manipulated Satellite Photos Reveal A Multicolored Universe Exploding With Geometry

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"There are many ways of traveling. With the body. With the mind. Moving physically or not moving at all. You can move around thousands of kilometers without traveling, or move the body while the mind is stuck in the starting point."

Such is the reality of movement, according to Argentina-based photographer Federico Winer. His series, "Ultradistancia," channels this whimsical understanding of travel into a stunning art project, turning the world into a petri dish of colors and shapes that requires no migration at all. In fact, his series is based on the capabilities of Google Earth's satellite camera, a seemingly omnipresent technology that allows Winer -- a veteran traveler in his own right -- to scour the planet's landscapes without ever leaving the comfort of his glowing computer screen.

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To create his geometrically mesmerizing snapshots, he plays around on the internet quite a bit -- or, in his words, takes long Google Earth trips. He hovers over neighborhoods and landmarks, busy routes and tranquil fields, in order to find something that piques his interest. He experiments with different magnitudes, reframing and recomposing his portrait subjects. Then he begins manipulating the images, playing with color and luminosity until a beautifully distorted photo emerges.

aerial

It's easy to fall inside one of Winer's kaleidoscopes, that combine the chaos of super highways with the eerie abandon of farmlands or cargo shipments. Winer emphasizes the patterns that happen organically across the globe, infusing each aerial view with saturated pigments and selective perspectives. "Common landmarks resembles paintings and topography explodes in rare colors," he explains.

"We've known for a long time that what we see is not what it is," he continued in an email exchange with HuffPost. Winer is also a professor of political philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, and his descriptions of "Ultradistancia" often wander into musings. "Basically, because we don’t know what is what it is, we only know what we see. And we call that ‘the world.'"






The quotes in this article has been edited for clarity.

The Bottom Line: 'A Little Life' By Hanya Yanagihara

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A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Doubleday, $30.00
Published March 10, 2015

The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

What we think:


After the publication of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in 2013, critical opinion diverged sharply; the book won the Pulitzer Prize, but was deemed by some literati to be poorly written, unserious, a gothic fairy tale for adults. Hanya Yanagihara’s doorstop of a second novel, A Little Life, seems primed to elicit similar reactions. Emotionally harrowing yet full of rather implausible sources of comfort, A Little Life somehow throws readers between the most unlikely extremes of horror and joy that life holds, making for a compulsively readable if artistically flawed sophomore effort.

At the center of A Little Life, which follows four tight-knit college friends from their mid-twenties to their fifties, is Jude St. Francis, a reserved, enigmatic genius. Jude’s intelligence, generosity and quiet charisma keeps his friends close, even as he remains inaccessible to them; he has never told them about his childhood or how he acquired the severe leg injuries that increasingly limit his mobility as he grows older. Willem, J.B., and Malcolm, the people closest to him, protect him by allowing him to hide himself, even as they wonder if they should.

The four are ambitious and soon become successful to an almost improbable degree -- Jude pours his logician's brain into a lucrative law career, Willem becomes a film actor, Malcolm is a groundbreaking architect and J.B. a brilliant painter. The novel, which starts in a dingy, cramped apartment shared by Willem and Jude on Lispenard Street, soon takes them to settings accessible only by the wealthy: lavishly redone loft apartments in SoHo, specially commissioned country homes upstate, opulent foreign tours. Jude even finds unlikely happiness in his personal life; his law professor becomes a mentor and father figure, and he has a family at last.

Their lives also, inevitably, grow more complicated. J.B., always the social butterfly, develops a drug problem that exacerbates his darker traits. Willem struggles to find a girlfriend who can truly accept Jude’s importance to him. Jude, meanwhile, is locked in a battle with his inner demons, which grow more life-threatening and unconquerable the longer he avoids confronting them or seeking help for the horrific childhood traumas that spawned his suffering.

As the saga winds on, however, Malcolm and J.B. fall to the side, their presence paling next to the intensity of Willem and Jude’s friendship, and the relentless agony of their struggle to keep Jude alive and well. It’s hard to believe that any part of a 720-page book could seem underdeveloped, but the practical disappearance of two characters whose centrality was so insisted upon by author leaves a weak spot in at the heart of the book. Even as J.B. remains a presence, his story becomes so sporadic that even his seemingly major incidents often vanish from history without further trace. There isn’t, somehow, enough space in this massive novel to tie up all these narrative threads.

Those pages aren’t wasted, however, if only in the necessity of drudging repetition to convey the Sisyphean agony of a life of trauma and chronic depression: the occasional peaks, which allow readers as well as the characters to indulge in unrealistic optimism, then the fall back into the depths, which wrings the heart more painfully each time.

It can be deeply exhausting to read, over and over again, such unvarnished negativity, and to see a character we grow to care for mired in self-hatred. Bluntly, repeatedly, we hear of Jude’s relapses into self-harm and read his chorus of hateful inner voices. But this granular portrayal of depression and, eventually, grief, is the greatest strength of the novel. Despite occasional bursts of lyricality, Yanagihara has composed most of A Little Life in smooth, readable prose. Yet Yanagihara captures the mundanities of mourning with piercing accuracy -- the realization that you've forgotten your loved one's voice, the conflicting desires to hear them spoken of and to never hear their name because it's so painful.

A Little Life is ambitious, and its flaws are commensurately major: the indistinctness of many secondary characters, the lapses and odd elisions in the narrative. The story's themes tend toward the trite: The past isn't really past, to paraphrase Faulkner. Most strikingly, A Little Life possesses adult fairy tale elements similar to The Goldfinch, sometimes straining the reader’s credulity. Jude’s origins are horrifyingly tragic and isolated, yet the life he discovers with his college friends is lavishly endowed with physical comforts, financial stability, and supportive relationships. So many of both the most miserable and the happiest elements of the book test our willingness to suspend disbelief, to live in the world Yanagihara has created, which looks so much like our own.

But the triumph of A Little Life’s many pages is significant: It wraps us so thoroughly in a character’s life that his trauma, his struggles, his griefs come to seem as familiar and inescapable as our own. There’s no one way to experience loss, abuse, or the effects of trauma, of course, but the vividness of Jude’s character and experiences makes the pain almost tangible, the fall-out more comprehensible. It’s a monument of empathy, and that alone makes this novel wondrous.

The Bottom Line:
A Little Life is a flawed but impressive novel that lifts the veil on the heart-wrenching consequences of trauma and loss.

What other reviewers think:
Kirkus: "The phrase 'tour de force' could have been invented for this audacious novel."

Publishers Weekly: "By the time the characters reach their 50s and the story arrives at its moving conclusion, readers will be attached and find them very hard to forget."

Who wrote it?
Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City. A Little Life is her second novel. Her first was the critically acclaimed The People in the Trees, which was published in 2013.

Who will read it?
Fans of modern-day emotional epics like The Goldfinch, and readers who enjoy cathartic narratives about tough, intractable issues.

Opening lines:
“The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking. Willem held up a hand in greeting to him, but the man didn’t wave back.”

Notable passage:
“The hyenas were still chasing him, but now he could see, very far in the distance, a house with an open door, and he knew that once he had reached that house, he would be safe, and everything that pursued him would fall away. They didn’t like it, of course -- they could see the door as well, they knew he was about to elude them -- and every day the hunt got worse, the army of things chasing him stronger and louder and more insistent. His brain was vomiting memories, they were flooding everything else -- he thought of people and sensations and incidents he hadn’t thought of in years. Tastes appeared on his tongue as if by alchemy; he smelled fragrances he hadn’t smelled in decades. His system was compromised; he would drown in his memories; he had to do something.”

Watch The Harrowing Trailer For 'Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck'

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The Kurt Cobain documentary, "Montage of Heck," doesn't premiere on HBO until May 4, but Yahoo! unveiled the trailer on Wednesday. Featuring never-before-seen home videos, family photos and interviews with his loved ones, the two-and-a-half minute clip previews a film that critics have already called "the most intimate rock doc ever."

Director Brett Morgen uses animation to illustrate Cobain's last few years, and the film also includes conversations between the Nirvana frontman and Rolling Stone's David Fricke. Most pointedly, the trailer shows Cobain playing with Frances Bean Cobain, his daughter with wife Courtney Love. (Frances is an executive producer of the film.)

This Is 2014's 'GIF Of The Year,' As Determined By The Gifys

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Forget the Emmys, the Grammys and all the other painfully long, drawn out awards shows.

For the Gifys, you only have to commit a couple seconds per award, and -- bonus! -- there's no self-congratulatory acceptance speech after.

This year's winners, announced March 5, honor the best GIFs from 2014 as determined by public submissions, voting, and a panel of GIF luminaries. In addition to a "GIF of the Year," winners were also announced in 11 other categories, including "Cats," "Film and TV," "News and Politics," and more.

The contest was sponsored in part by Giphy.com, a GIF-hosting site, and CP+B Los Angeles.

And the winners are...
Art + Design:




Can't Look Away:




Cats:




Film + TV:




Music:




Sports:




Throwback:




Weird:




And drumroll please...

Here's your 2014 GIF of the year:


People reports this GIF of President Obama "skateboarding" originated from an episode of "The Tonight Show."

Want to see more GIFs? Review last year's winners here.

H/T People

Maureen McGovern Celebrates Female Singer-Songwriters At New York's 54 Below

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Audiences hoping for Maureen McGovern to perform her signature hit, "The Morning After," when she takes the stage of New York's 54 Below might be surprised to find the Oscar-winning tune, made famous in 1972's "The Poseidon Adventure," missing from her set.

McGovern, 65, acknowledges how extraordinarily rare it is for an artist to omit one of their staples from a concert performance, but these days, she's delving down a different, and in some respects more personal, path. Her latest act, appropriately titled "Sing, My Sisters, Sing!." emphasizes the work of female singer-songwriters, including Annie Lennox, Laura Nyro, Janis Ian and Joni Mitchell, among others. ("The Morning After," incidentally, was penned by two male writers, Joel Hirschhorn and Al Kasha)

The singer-actress, who last performed at 54 Below in 2012, spoke to The Huffington Post ahead of "Sing, My Sisters, Sing!" which opened at 54 Below March 10. Speaking by telephone from her home in Ohio, she discussed her love of the female voice in rock and pop and why she still loves the gypsy life after four decades in the business.

Congratulations on your return to New York’s 54 Below. What do you like most about performing here?
First, it’s a beautiful room. Broadway’s finest put it together and designed it. It’s a warm room, I like it very much.

What surprises can the 54 Below audience look forward to in your show?
The show is called “Sing, My Sister, Sing,” and it’s a celebration of women singer-songwriters, mostly from the second half of the 20th century, but with a nod back to my early singing sisters, like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and even a nod back further to the late 1800s, the early poets who wrote poems that later became songs, paving the way for the singer-songwriters we know today.

When you put together a show like this, what is your thought process as far selecting material is concerned?
I wanted to do this idea for a long time. Several years ago, I was doing an AIDS benefit in San Francisco. Helen Reddy, who had taken a hiatus from show business for a while … she came out of semi-formal musical retirement and performed at the benefit. I was watching her rehearsal, and she just recited the words to “I Am Woman” with no music … and it was absolutely brilliant. It was chilling. That was kind of the genesis of it. I just thought that was the seed for [a show].

It’s time for women to have their due, because it’s a very rich chapter of the American pop songbook, and they write from a very introspective and intimate point of view. Very rich lyrics and very powerful lyrics.

Are you able to find ways to explore yourself through this music?
I always have. “West Side Story” got me through junior high, The Beatles got me through high school and Joni Mitchell got me through my divorce. I can’t imagine my late teens, early 20s on into my 30s without the canon of her music. She’s a goddess to me. She’s amazing.

Why do you think that this material stands the test of time as much as it does?
It stands the test of time because it’s about time! (laughs) I don’t tend to do a museum piece, I always find what’s relevant about this music today, whether that’s James Taylor, Paul Simon or Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian … Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” is just a masterpiece. What to leave out was hard!

Do you find that contemporary pop music has the same resonance for you, or has that changed?
I’m a dinosaur, somewhat, but I know I will be looking for more songs into the later 2000s. I tend to gravitate back to the songs that represented my coming-of-age. These are the songs that affected my life for the rest of my life, so that’s where I am right now. But I just scratched the surface knowingly with this show. There are several shows I can do and plan to do.

What do you like most about performing in New York?
What I love about cabaret in New York is that you can pick the most obscure song and somebody in the audience is going to know it and where it came from. It’s just a very sophisticated, wonderful audience.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Maureen McGovern performs "Sing, My Sisters, Sing!" at New York's 54 Below through March 14. Head here for more information.












Parents Photograph 5-Year-Old Portraying Iconic Black Heroines In This Incredible Photo Series

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Two parents on a mission to teach their daughter the value of self-empowerment reached their goal which resulted in the coolest photo portrait series since the launch of Because Of Them, We Can and #WeAreBlackHistory. Plus, it's just in time for Women’s History Month too.

“In starting this project my main focus was my daughter, Lily. My wife and I wanted to change how she saw herself,” photographer Marc Beshelle told The Huffington Post.

Bushelle and his wife, Janine Harper, have been styling and photographing their 5-year-old as some of history’s most impressive black heroines, alongside the original iconic portraits. Josephine Baker, Toni Morrison and Mae Jemison are among the powerful women selected for the series.

jospehine baker lily bushelle

“We decided to focus on women who were pioneers whether that is in entertainment, literature or outer space,” Said Bushelle. “We hope to give our daughter confidence to venture into unchartered territory.”

The photographs of Lily embody the power of the past's influence on the future when the two meet in the present. This idea is an important one to Bushelle -- and is something he hopes his daughter will also come to value.

“All history is important for the future and Black history falls into that. I think it is important to acknowledge what happened before, learn from it and improve upon it.”

Does Buschelle intend on continuing the series?

“We have not run out of women that inspire us," he said -- so we'll take that as a yes.

Check out all of Lily Bushelle's portraits below!

[h/t NPR]

'Dueling' Siblings Perform Spot-On 'Frozen' Mashup On The Piano -- With Their Hands Behind Their Backs

Toro Y Moi Is Going To Save Rock 'N Roll Even If No One's Asking Him To

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toro y moi





Chazwick Bundick is happy to let you label him. Better known as Toro y Moi, the stage name under which he rose to indie fame, Bundick's quick to shrug at "chillwave," the winky Hipster Runoff-invented genre he helped make popular in the late 2000s, and is in no hurry to give his new album, "What For?" a definitive identity. "I’ll leave it to other people to label," he told The Huffington Post.

The 10-track LP is his fifth studio album under the Toro moniker, and relies on heavy guitars and articulated lyrics to grant a swift departure from his earlier bedroom-produced records. It’s a welcome change for Bundick, who started his career as a graphic designer and only veered into music somewhat by happenstance in 2010 with his debut album, "Causers of This."

"I felt like what was holding me back was genre constraints," Bundick said over the phone from his Berkeley home. “I felt like I could only sing a certain style." That style relied on repeated phrases, synth beats and a general seriousness.

When talking about "What For?" Bundick admits to giving himself more freedom, having more fun with tracks like the album's first single, "Empty Nesters." “When I hear these songs back, I’m not cringing at the lyrics and they make me smile,” he said. “With the earlier stuff and because of the genre it was in, I wasn’t able to be that playful without it sounding cheesy. That genre has so much heavy melancholy emotion in it and this one is so much more playful. I can say silly stuff. Even when we’re playing some of the old stuff live, I’m like, ‘Oh man, this is so funny.’”



"What For?" comes two years after his critically-acclaimed fourth album, "Anything In Return," and shows an even further migration from electronic music's boom, which has for the most part crested. (Despite being a $6.2 billion global industry, EDM made up just 3.4 percent of total consumption and 6.8 percent of streams in 2014, according to Nielsen's year-end Music U.S. Report.) Toro y Moi's particular brand of electronica is buoyed by pop and funk, and free of bass drops. But with "What For?" he's taken a classic rock approach, shielding himself physically with a guitar, and taking cues from bands like the Talking Heads and The Band. On the album’s fifth track, “Ratcliff,” Bundick sings clearer than we've heard him before: “Rock and roll is here to stay.” It's an homage to Big Star and a not-so-subtle call to arms against Top 40.

toro y moi

"There isn’t really anything that’s making me into pop music right now," Bundick said. "I really appreciate what Drake does, but then again, I’m really bored of Drake and Kanye being the only ones to do something different. I’m really hoping someone out there will push the limits of pop music. For a second I thought The-Dream was going to take it further once he got a little bigger after 'Love King', and then he sort of went missing. Nothing right now is really appealing. I kind of wish there was a band that was big on Top 40 -- like a legit band. Even if it was a one hit wonder. Where are the Third Eye Blinds of right now? It’s strange that there’s no one doing a solid rock song either. It just seems like everyone is going electronic right now."

Making music backed by instruments is his version of staying ahead of the curve. “I like to go opposite of what is popular,” Bundick said. “That’s what I’ve always tried to do. I’m not saying that I’m successful at that. I’m just saying that’s what I aim for.” Though he still uses the sounds and trademarks that got him noticed -- low-fi, laid back confidence -- "What For?" is a big see ya later to chillwave's short-lived legacy.

"I always saw myself in the music world as a more behind-the-scenes, the musicians’ musician," Bundick said. "I like to think that even though Kanye’s not working with me, that the producers he work with just like Toro, you know?"

Toro y Moi's "What For?" is due out April 7 via Carpark Records.



Andy Warhol's Family Is Trying To Kickstart A Documentary About Its World Famous Uncle

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He was Andy Warhol to many, Andrew Warhola to a few.

Yes, the Pop artist known for screen printing soup cans and memorializing Hollywood's flavor of the week in hypercolor was in fact a real person, with a real family. And that family, the Warholas, are now attempting to pay homage to their Factory-working relative with a documentary film named, of course, "Uncle Andy."

Warhol's great niece Abby Warhola and partner Jesse Best are behind the feature-length project and are currently raising funds on Kickstarter. They hope to collect $175,000 by April 2, 2015 -- and they're currently skirting $20,000. "Uncle Andy" is not, according to the campaign, meant to be another conventional portrait of good ol' Andy. The film is instead striving to paint a bigger picture of the "modest" Warholas, a clan that consists of people like Paul Warhola, Andy's older brother and a chicken-farmer-turned-artist.

"Andy’s family were with him from his very beginnings in the smokey steel-mill city of Pittsburgh," the Kickstarter page reads. "They witnessed firsthand his unprecedented transformation from a humble son of a working class family into the world renowned Pop artist that he became."

andy warhol

Warhola and Best claim they've been documenting little Andreko's relatives for years, compiling raw footage of family members speaking on his biography. The filmmakers are hoping to add animation and music to their ongoing project, turning to Kickstarter in part because they believe Warhol himself would have loved the spirit of crowd funding.

"He was from another world," Anne Warhola explains in a teaser for the project, shown above. "You know what I mean? He wasn't part of us, he was from... out there."





"No one ever told us he was a famous painter," Marty Warhola adds. "So to me he was just Uncle Andy, and it was really a cool place to go, his house in Manhattan. He would have all these objects in one room, you'd think you were in an amusement park."

The film, not sanctioned by the Andy Warhol Museum or his foundation, is currently without a distributor or editor, so the family has a way to go before "Uncle Andy" becomes a reality. While you all watch the Kickstarter counter rise over the next few weeks, check out our roundup of the 17 best Warhol-made films. Or you can just watch Andy devour a hamburger in the video below.

13 Artists You Should Fall In Love With This Spring

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splash


Armory Arts week is over, leaving New York a bit of time to recover until, well, May rolls around and Frieze comes to town. While we relish these moments of solitude, it seems as good a time as ever to look at ahead at a new season of shows, exhibitions, and emerging art.



So, in the wake of our Armory Show enthusiasm, we've rounded up our favorite artists from last week's festivities, most of whom are planning big things this year. Whether the artist is relatively new to the scene or fairly established, they're touring the globe with solo projects and group shows worth checking out. From the Iraq-born painter Hayv Kahraman to the moving image master Brian Bress to the sculptural oddities of William J. O'Brien, behold: our guide to the artists you should watch out for this spring.



hayv kahraman
Wattania. This image recreates a scene from Kahraman's childhood Wattania, or History, class. Photo courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.



1. Hayv Kahraman The Baghdad-born artist explores her Middle Eastern ancestry in a project aptly titled "How Iraqi Are You?" In the series of paintings, Kahraman physically inserts her face into art history, creating figures that resemble Renaissance paintings, ukiyo-e imagery and Persian calligraphic manuscripts. Past projects have focused on the floor plans of domestic homes in Iraq, the intrinsic beauty of a dodecahedron, and women rendered as marionettes.



Her work is on view at the Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri this year, as well as Jack Shaiman Gallery in New York.






2. Brian Bress Brian Bress is a Los Angeles-based artist whose portraits, often moving images staged on flat-screen monitors, are like the contemporary lovechild of Monty Python, Nick Cave and claymation magic. A favorite of his on view during the Armory Show presented what appeared to be a cartoonish, buck-toothed man slowly erasing a chalkboard -- except that board was the fourth wall between the mop-headed stranger and the viewer.



You can check him out at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in 2015, in an exhibition that will travel to the to Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver the next year. Bonus: he'll also be on view during the Palm Springs Art Museum group exhibition, "Personalities: Fantasy and Identity in Photography and New Media."



john
Photo taken during Armory Week courtesy of Katherine Brooks



3. John O'Connor John Jerome O'Connor's works are multicolored streams of text, including a diptych called "Love Letters" in which the artist recalls a spam email he received from someone named Beyonce stationed next to a modified version of a letter Napoleon wrote his wife Josephine. Above you can see one of a series of 26 canvases meant to document "the narrative account of an individual's passage through time."



O'Connor is due for a show at the Arts and Leisure Gallery in New York. Stay tuned for details.



avini
Andisheh Avini, Untitled, Ink on carpet, 2014. Photo taken during Armory Week courtesy of Katherine Brooks



4. Andisheh Avini Iranian-American artist Andisheh Avini is known for his silk-screened visions and Persian carpet-inspired fiber works that resemble Rorschach inkblots that eerily bleed, bunch and creep. He has a thing for skulls as well, but we are particularly fascinated with his ink and marquetry on wood -- pieces that mimic portals to another world, portals holding back masses that are attempting to burst forth with each stroke of color.



Avini was previously on view as part of the Marianne Boesky booth at the Armory Show. He'll be showing at that New York gallery in the fall of 2015.



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Aiko Hachisuka, Couch (2011). Photo via Artnet courtesy of Eleven Rivington Gallery.



5. Aiko Hachisuka Japan-born and Los Angeles-based, Aiko Hachisuka wound her way into post-Armory Show coverage once again (last year, her "Sugar Mates" series grabbed attention too). Her fabric sculpture, a couch fused from multicolored clothing, garnered comparisons to everyone from Mike Kelly to Yayoi Kusama to John Chamberlain.



Her work will be on view at Eleven Rivington in New York City from April 12 to May 17, 2015.



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Artist Trenton Doyle Hancocktalks about his painting "Flower Bed II, a Prelude to Damnation," on display, with artist Kate Rosen during a preview for the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, June 4, 2008. (Photo by Chip Chipman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)



6. Trenton Doyle Hancock The Oklahoma-born, Texas-raised artist Trenton Doyle Hancock is taking over the Studio Museum in Harlem this year, showcasing "Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing" from March 26 to June 28, 2015. The exhibition will put on view two decades worth of his drawings, which span from comic-ready portraits of monsters to sprawling landscapes presumably plucked straight from his own nightmares.



He's by no means a new artist, but his 2010 acrylic handmade paper piece, "He," caught our attention at the Armory Show and we couldn't be more excited to see his work once more in New York.



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Shiva Ahmadi, Boat, 2015, graphite, pencil and ink on paper. Photo taken during Armory Week courtesy of Katherine Brooks.



7. Shiva Ahmadi Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Shiva Ahmadi creates fantastical worlds -- painted and drawn -- that reside somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch's fictional hell and a monochromatic fairy tale filled with peacocks and primates. In her untitled work shown above, a graphite drawing of a faceless woman is made all the more poignant by what appears to be a pool of blood seeping out below her.



The Metropolitan Museum of Arts recently acquired two of Ahmadi's works. Beyond that, you'll have to follow her website for more updates.






8. William J. O'Brien Whether William J. O'Brien is working in felt, ink, coated steel, colored pencil or glazed ceramic, the artist has a consistent flair for saturated color and kid-friendly forms. His sculptures, also on view at the Marianne Boesky Gallery booth at the Armory Show, were a big hit, almost constantly the focal point of an Instagram by intrigued fair goers.



You can see more of O'Brien in a solo show at Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Michigan from March 21 to May 9, 2015.



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Mona Marzouk, Trayvon #5, 2014. Photo taken during Armory Week courtesy of Katherine Brooks.



9. Mona Marzouk Born and based in Alexandria, Egypt, Mona Marzouk tends to work in sparse colors. Her massive paintings place a few minimalist images, often political in nature, at the center of their frames, surrounded by a cloud of a single-hued pigment. Her sculptures are large-scale, echoing her interest in architectural histories. "Through imaginative studies of objects such as flags and helmets," Gypsum Gallery adds, "Marzouk tackles politically loaded themes such as war, sports, nationhood, space technology and oil industry and how they habitually manifest themselves in our daily life."



During Armory week, two of her selected works, titled "Trayvon #5" and "Trayvon #3," reflected on the courtroom as a space for "unfolding narratives," just as it is meant to be a space for the "implementation of justice."



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Rachael Champion, "Mountain Flattening Initiative." Photo taken during Armory Week courtesy of Katherine Brooks.



10. Rachael Champion New York-born artist Rachael Champion uses sculpture to investigate the relationship between humanity and nature, often in a way that results in site-specific, ecologically-mindful works that could be mistaken for an eccentric piece of interior design. A few of her favorite materials include found objects, steel, timber, wheat, barley, buckwheat grass, mosaic tiles, rigging hardware, and tarpaulin.



Her “Mountain Flattening Initiative” was on view this month during the Armory Show, and she'll be at Art Basel Hong Kong from March 15 to March 17, 2015 if you happen to be in the neighborhood.



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Carlo Massoud, "Arab Dolls: Maya, Zeina, Racha and Yara." Photo taken during Armory Week courtesy of Katherine Brooks.



11. Carlo Massoud Lebanese designer Carlo Massoud showcased the first design project featured at the Armory Show, a work titled "Arab Dolls: Maya, Zeina, Racha and Yara." The piece consisted of 40 black and white lacquered forms lined up on a stark white platform, meant to symbolize the various veils worn by Arab Women. “People tell me that they look like bullets, but I wanted to show that women are getting more power in the Middle East,” Massoud told The Observer. "They look like an elegant female army rising in strength while gaining more rights.”



You can follow Massoud's upcoming events on Twitter.



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Katharine Kuharic, "The Nipple I Never Knew," 2015, oil on canvas. Photo taken during Armory Week courtesy of Katherine Brooks.



12. Katharine Kuharic A native of South Bend, Indiana, Katharine Kuharic makes incredibly intricate contemporary allegorical paintings populated not by Aesop's hares or Dr. Seuss's turtles, but instead with psychedelic skeletons and well dressed bulldogs. To drink in one her painted universes is to sit and stare, inch by inch, attempting to make sense of the neon chaos.



You can see her available work, at PPOW Gallery in New York, here.



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Liliana Porter, "Untitled with Fallen Things," 2013, acrylic and assemblage on canvas. Photo taken during Armory Week courtesy of Katherine Brooks.



13. Liliana Porter Buenos Aires-born artist Liliana Porter has been working avidly in photography, printmaking, installation and video since the 1960s. “My work is… like watching a movie with the lights on," she once proclaimed.



Her 2013 assemblage-on-canvas creation, "Untitled with Fallen Things," pictured above, was a beacon of yellow light at the Armory Show, a piece that prompted us to see what Porter is up to in 2015. Luckily, she'll be on view at the Miami, Florida's Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in a group exhibition titled "Impulse, Reason, Sense, Conflict" until March 29, 2015, as well as in "Tchotchke: Mass-Produced Sentimental Objects in Contemporary Art" at the Gund Gallery of Kenyon College until May 31, 2015.



Watch These Dancers Capture Just How Heartbreaking 'Stay With Me' Truly Is

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Earlier this week, we praised the beauty of a stunning ballet duet set to Sam Smith's heart-wrenching ballad "Stay With Me." While readers felt the impact of the song and appreciated the dancers' stunning abilities, a few commented that the studio performance lacked chemistry and emotion.

Enter dancers Emilio Dosal and Kelsey Landers, who opted to use Boyce Avenue's cover of Smith's hit as their catalyst. The evocative dance begins at a kitchen table, when an argument between lovers caught in relationship limbo leaves the realm of language and breaks into a succession of simultaneous tortured movements. The gestures blossom into a full blown dance, as the partners turn the dining room table and the empty living room into their stage.

To put it simply, things get hella emotional.



"This concept video is simply about love," the video's YouTube description explains. "More so the hardships & decisions you make when you are in love that affect your life. Here you have two best friends who have been more than just best friends for a while & one of them wants something more. While both people love each other one wants to continue what they have while the other wants to be official. Throughout the piece you see the struggle they both face in what they truly want & in the end one makes the decision that will affect their friendship & their lives."

If this one doesn't make you tear up a little, we don't know what can break your icy heart.

See more pop songs made all the stronger with the help of a pair of pointe shoes here.



h/t Buzzfeed

Here's How One Photographer, And Her Nifty Handmade Machine, Can Photograph Your Aura

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Photographs shed light on many aspects of our external appearance -- weird shadows, stray hairs, awkward smiles, lingering food particles between your front teeth. And, in very particular cases, they can illuminate something more. Something suspended between the internal and external, the visible and the invisible, the hippie-dippie and the profoundly mystical. Yes, we're talking about auras.

Photographer Christina Lonsdale, also known as Radiant Human, captures auras on camera in all their hazy, multicolored glory. "An aura is technically an electromagnetic field that surrounds the body," she explained to The Huffington Post. This field appears, in photographic form, like a glowing cloud, a lo-fi rainbow, an Instagram filter catered directly to your innermost essence.

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Lonsdale captures her subjects' auras via a hand-built device from the 1970s, originally invented by a man named Guy Coggins. The Aura Camera allegedly uses electromagnetic hand sensors that translate your vibrational frequency (or bio feedback) into a color, and then, with a second exposure, displays that color on an instant polaroid photo.

"I really want to create a platform for people to experience themselves in a new way," Lonsdale proclaimed. "It kind of reminded me of space exploration in the '70s."

Lonsdale purchased the camera from Coggins, who told her there are only 100 in existence. The machine lives inside a collapsable black dome, ready for travel. "I have my safe space with me wherever I go," she explains.

Lonsdale's primary sanctuary, where she conducts aura readings for clients, is speckled with rainbow books dating back to the 19th century, filled with clairvoyant artworks, paths to immortality and color decoders for aura reading. Although Lonsdale's craft fits right in at trendy "lifestyle celebrations" like Topanga Canyon's Mercado Sagrado, Lonsdale's stuff goes way back.

But how does one get into the business of aura photography, you ask? For Lonsdale, the unusual path seemed to be in her blood. "My mom is a visual painter who paints auras and spirits and goddesses she sees in her meditation. And my father founded two communes back in the '60s. It's been a part of my culture for a while, bringing me to this point where I want to do this stuff in a creative way and provide people an atmosphere to see what they're putting out into the world."

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Lonsdale's readings are typically five to 10 minutes long, consisting of both the snapshot itself and a condensed reading on the possible interpretations associated with your aura color.

First, the subject places her hands on a silver sensor, which is connected through cables to the camera. The model sits still for 10 seconds as the camera snaps two shots. You can only hope that if you happen to blink, it's while your ambience is being photographed. Then, she tells you what it all means.

"That's where it gets into an interesting avenue," she explains. "We're dealing with colors here. If you want to derive meaning from color, you're opening a pretty interesting box. I've used color theory in my readings. Usually what I do is share all the research I've done for each particular color. It's really up to each subject and what she wants to take from it. I provide a kind of color decoder; a boiled down, abbreviated version of what a typical reading is."

The color hovering on top of your image, Lonsdale explains, signifies your consciousness. The lower left portion indicates your inner qualities and the right side, what you portray to the outside world. Lonsdale hands out a handy color decoder that spells out some of the characteristics -- purple is equated with playfulness and magic while yellow denotes relaxation, optimism and intellectualism. Orange and tan represent logical and entrepreneurial tendencies while white hints at spiritual clarity.

As further example, Lonsdale delved into the implications of a reddish aura to The Chalkboard Mag:

"When some people get red auras they get worried like they did something wrong, like they’re not a good person unless they get this perfect violet white. But let me tell you something: color is a frequency, its like a musical note. Just because one note is on the 'bottom' of a keyboard doesn’t make it less valuable. The cool thing about red is that it's always strong no matter what. It’s an access point to what drives us physically. Red was the first color we defined in our linguistic history and also the first color we painted with in the caves so long ago. Because of this, red can be considered a birth color; new beginnings. With new change comes strength and courage, and not without some challenge, as all you mothers well know. There is passion and desire to see you through, standing on a foundation of practicality and logic. This is a physical and energetic color that is full of powerful sensations, and when you have low muddy red, that just means you probably have a hangover."


Lonsdale explained that the constancy of an aura ranges from person to person -- some people are more fluid and dynamic depending on their surroundings, while others remain relatively stagnant. She noted that earlier in the day a mother and her young daughter both emitted the same aura, which is also very constant between married couples. Either that, or they're each other's complete opposite.

Yes, Lonsdale's artistic investigation is not for skeptics, but for those willing to indulge in a little new age mysticism, it offers the opportunity to know yourself in a whole new way. The experience, somewhere between a psychic reading and a portrait sitting, allows you to examine yourself as not just a tired person with a bad hair day, but a truly radiant human.

Do you want to visualize your vibes in a chromatic wash of hazy shades? See Lonsdale's upcoming tour dates here and, in the meantime, see some of Lonsdale's dreamy portraits below.


These Calming Waikiki Photos Are Your Ticket To An Instant Vacation

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It’s been a merciless winter, but thankfully, photographer Max Wanger is here to help thaw you out.

His “Waikiki” series of photographs puts us exactly where we want to be: floating in the tranquility of the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean.

The Los Angeles-based photographer was in Waikiki last summer when he went up to the roof of the Outrigger Waikiki Beach Resort to find "moments of quiet.”

From the roof, Wanger said, he could finally appreciate the vastness of the bustling beach neighborhood.

“It showed a quieter way of looking at Waikiki,” he told The Huffington Post.

Wanger had lived in Hawaii for eight years and admits that he sometimes took the over-stimulating and crowded tourist district for granted. His photographs, he added, helped him see the city in a new way. "It really is beautiful," he said. "It’s magical. You take it for granted sometimes, because it’s so busy and touristy. But when you step back from it all, it’s just stunning.”

Float on in the tranquility through Wanger’s photos below, and see more of his work at his website, or follow him on Instagram.

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Semicolons: How To Use Them, And Why You Should

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Does the semicolon really need a defense? The punctuation mark has seemingly won more earnest supporters than snide detractors over the years, even as its use has plummeted. In 2012, Ben Dolnick wrote eloquently of his “love story” with semicolons in The New York Times' Draft blog. In 2008, the Guardian tallied up the pro and con factions among well-known writers who had gone on the record regarding semicolons: 11 for, 4 against, 3 undecided. Perhaps not the unanimous support a period might garner (surely we can all agree on something as utilitarian as a period), but still a landslide win for the semicolon.

The real danger for semicolons comes not from the invective of great authors, despite the oft-quoted Kurt Vonnegut jab at the punctuation mark: “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Plenty of acclaimed writers use and support the semicolon, Vonnegut aside.

Although I’ve never been encouraged to use semicolons by instructors, I’ve found myself using them more and more over the years, sometimes guiltily deleting them when I realize I’ve peppered them liberally throughout a single paragraph. For some reason it feels self-indulgent, even shameful, but I can’t give them up. Perhaps explaining my own fondness for the semicolon is as simple as revealing that my favorite author is Virginia Woolf and the classic writer I’ve never been able to fully appreciate is Ernest Hemingway. Short, declarative sentences don’t speak to me as a reader in the same way as long, winding, tenuously bound together spools of thought. The semicolon represents nuance, a gray space between an unbroken thought and two entirely separate ones.

Woolf’s profligate employment of semicolons propelled her stream-of-consciousness style, allowing her to pile thought upon thought without unnatural break or studied conjunction. While more adventurous stream-of-consciousness practitioners tended to dispense with unnecessary punctuation (James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, contains fewer than 50 semicolons, many of them in a list), Woolf layered them without restraint, echoing the fluid cadences of conscious thought. Mrs. Dalloway, a slim novel, contains well over 1,000 semicolons, which hold aloft drifting, weightless sentences for impossible lengths. Woolf uses them to juxtapose seemingly contradictory feelings, letting them painfully weigh against each other, or to follow a scrambled thread of thought. Her novels draw much of their brilliance and poetry from the meeting place she finds between ecstasy, mundanity and agony, and her strategy for drawing out that highly human nuance leans heavily on the humble semicolon. What better argument could I make for the beauty and utility of a punctuation mark?

Yet the semicolon has been on the decline since well before Woolf’s day. In 2008, Slate argued that the semicolon fell victim to the telegraph, which encouraged brevity and discouraged frivolous punctuation, pointing to a precipitous decline in semicolon usage in the 19th century. The semicolon lost its foothold long ago and, despite the support of beloved authors and certain journalistic institutions, the punctuation mark has never recovered. In fact, in the age of the Hemingway App, Twitter fiction and other fetishizations of succinct, pared-down prose, the semicolon seems more endangered than ever.



A big part of the semicolon’s problem, of course, lies in its mysterious nature. In day-to-day usage, the semicolon has come to be seen as the gall bladder of punctuation marks: It theoretically serves some sort of purpose, but if it were removed entirely, everything would probably be fine. Most of us have memories of teachers dismissing semicolons and urging us to use periods instead; perhaps we’ve received graded papers with incorrectly or overused semicolons circled in red, or perhaps we never bothered using them, since so few teachers emphasize their value.

Many of us have never learned the proper use of a semicolon, and the underuse of semicolons in American publications compounds the widespread ignorance of its meaning. Is it just a glorified comma? Is it more or less the same as an em dash? Is it a colon that’s crying a little bit? Was it just invented to make winky sadface emoticons?

None of the above! To ensure we can all use semicolons with confidence, we've broken down the magical and wonderful ways you can use semicolons to clear up your lists and spice up your style. Although few of us can pull of Woolf’s generous, rule-stretching use of semicolons, here are a few basic, perfectly allowable ways for you to use semicolons in your own writing:

How to use a semicolon:

To separate items in a list with internal commas
If you ever use semicolons, you likely use them this way. When you’re writing a list with items containing commas, the list items must be separated using semicolons for clarity. Pretty simple, right?

Example: Semicolons allow us to organize lists; vary sentence structure in our writing, which improves the reading experience; express a close relationship between two independent clauses and much more.

To join two clauses in cases where another comma may be confusing
This is related, and more rare; but yes, it’s allowed! If you’re joining together two clauses that would normally be punctuated with a comma, but this is confusing due to earlier commas in the sentence, you can replace the comma with a semicolon. Boom -- clarity!

Example: My favorite punctuation marks are the semicolon, the em dash and the comma; but, if you must know, I'm also quite fond of the interrobang.

To join two independent clauses that are closely related
Now we’re getting to the fun stuff! Sometimes, you have two independent clauses that you could separate with a period or join with a comma and a coordinating conjunction, but neither feels quite right. Maybe you want to indicate that the two sentences are part of the same thought but don’t share the relationship typically indicated by a coordinating conjunction such as “and” or “but.” To be clear, you shouldn’t use a semicolon willy-nilly in place of a period; use it to indicate a continuation of a thought within the sentence, a particularly close link between two independent clauses or a subtle if undefined relationship between them.

Example: I wish I could use semicolons in every sentence; they're practically addictive.

Some clauses start with conjunctive adjectives, but unlike coordinating conjunctions, these should be preceded with a semicolon, not a comma -- for example, use a semicolon (or a period) before “however,” “furthermore” or “nonetheless.”

Example: Many style guides recommend restricting usage of semicolons; however, I find myself using them constantly.

Watch The New Trailer For 'Hotel Transylvania 2'

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Sony released the new trailer for "Hotel Transylvania 2" on Thursday, which teases the same spooky laughs that made the first film into a global hit. Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, Kevin James, Keegan-Michael Key and Mel Brooks lend their voices to the film. It's out in theaters on Sept. 25. Watch the trailer above; the film's synopsis is below.

The Drac pack is back for an all-new monster comedy adventure in Sony Pictures Animation's Hotel Transylvania 2! Everything seems to be changing for the better at Hotel Transylvania... Dracula’s rigid monster-only hotel policy has finally relaxed, opening up its doors to human guests. But behind closed coffins, Drac is worried that his adorable half-human, half-vampire grandson, Dennis, isn’t showing signs of being a vampire. So while Mavis is busy visiting her human in-laws with Johnny – and in for a major cultural shock of her own – “Vampa” Drac enlists his friends Frank, Murray, Wayne and Griffin to put Dennis through a “monster-in-training” boot camp. But little do they know that Drac’s grumpy and very old, old, old school dad Vlad is about to pay a family visit to the hotel. And when Vlad finds out that his great-grandson is not a pure blood – and humans are now welcome at Hotel Transylvania – things are going to get batty!

Artist Hand-Sews Her Own Hair To Create Lavish, Haunting Drawings

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It was an off-hand comment from a friend that originally prompted Dallas-based artist Rosemary Meza-DesPlas to begin working in her unusual medium of choice — her own hair.

Back in 2000, Meza-DesPlas was working on a large-scale wall drawing when a friend remarked that her work was so thin and fine that it reminded her of human hair. And it all happened from there. Before long, she began experimenting, initially attempting to glue the hair — “too messy,” Meza-DesPlas says — and eventually sewing it to a canvas. Though the process was very time-consuming, she was happy with the result.

“It’s a nice idea that my hair is living on, being recycled, if you will, and being given a new context in artwork,” Meza-DesPlas explained to HuffPost.

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"I'm Not Hattie, I See Red," 2013. Hand-sewn Human Hair on Canvas with red thread.


Meza-DesPlas, whose latest exhibition “I Love You, Man: I Think This is the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship” is on display through March 28 at ARC Gallery and Educational Foundation in Chicago, says that when she was first starting out using her own hair in her drawings, she typically used graphite for about half of the work and her hair for the other half. But as she’s grown more accustomed to manipulating and sewing her hair, she now presents work that is entirely her own hair, with few exceptions.

In order to source her materials, Meza-DesPlas runs her fingers through her hair every morning, holding onto the strands that fall out. She also collects her hair from the shower and, when it’s time to get to work, she sorts it from shorter hairs to longer hairs. It’s become a ritual for her.

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"Peck, not Prick." Hand-sewn human hair on canvas, 2014, 25" x 34". Below, the same piece, part of "I Love You, Man..," in closer detail.


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“I like the dichotomy of using hair because there’s the idea that hair can be sexy and engaging to people and then on the other hand it can be repulsive, like a hair in your soup or a hair on your hotel pillow,” Meza-DesPlas explained.

She also separates a growing number of grey hairs, which she said first started showing up about five years ago, from the pack. In order to feature other different shades — such as red or a darker brown — she dyes her hair and saves it so she can use it at a later time.

“I think at some point, I’ll have to switch to a dark background using my grey hair on it,” she laughed, saying she might experiment with the grey this summer.

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"Cry, Die or Just Make Pies," 2013. Hand-sewn human hair on canvas.


Meza-DesPlas says she was also interested in the biblical imagery associated with hair, such as Samson losing his strength when his hair was cut and how Mary Magdalene washed the feet of Jesus with her hair. A Donatello sculpture depicting Mary Magdalene with long, scraggly hair that segues directly into her clothes was also an inspiration.

“Hair has an unruliness to it, we try to control it and make it do certain things and hair has a mind of its own, it snakes out when it wants to and does certain things when it wants to,” she said. “It has a sense of life to it and I feel like my drawings have a sense of life to them.

As for what people make of her work, Meza-DesPlas said many viewers think from afar that her drawings are made with pencils, and only realize the unusual composition when they get closer up.

“Maybe it’ll make them think of their own mortality or about things that have died that can be given new life,” she added.

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"One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer," 2015. Hand-sewn human hair on canvas with watercolor and thread, 25" x 34".


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"Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle," 2012. Hand-sewn human hair on canvas.


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"Woman Under the Influence," 2008. Hand-sewn human hair on canvas.

5 Ancient Chinese Idioms With Modern Cachet

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By MICHELLE TANG, OZY

What do you think when you think of China? A repressive government, human rights abuse, corruption scandals, terrible pollution? Admit it, I’m right.

Here’s what you probably don’t know: China is as rich in language as it is in engineers.

Many modern, everyday Chinese idioms have their roots in ancient poetry. These idioms, which are each composed of four Chinese characters, are totally unique to the language. Chinese has 20,000 such idioms in total; only one or two thousand are commonly used. But Chinese schoolkids often spend their days reciting them in class.

Chinese poetry “is a window to a world that is very foreign and advanced,” says Ron Egan, a professor of Chinese literature at Stanford University. “By the 7th and 8th century, the Chinese [had] mastered the art of expressing themselves, which didn’t happen in any other place in the world.”

This is no esoteric idea. There’s even a hot television program called China Idiom Convention. This show, which aired Sundays from April to June, tested competitors’ knowledge of idioms. More than 30,000 people signed up to compete. Videos netted nearly 2 million clicks on Youku, one of China’s biggest online video sites.

So if you’re trying to understand the Asian giant, boning up on your Chinese idioms might help.

A Shade of a Willow and Bright Flowers

Hillary Clinton quoted the Chinese poem “A Trip to Mountain West Village” by Lu You at the Shanghai 2010 World Expo to celebrate the hard work in building the USA pavilion, which Clinton financed by raising $60 million in private cash.

“There is a poem from the Southern Song dynasty that reads: ‘After endless mountains and rivers that leave doubt whether there is a path out, suddenly one encounters the shade of a willow, bright flowers and a lovely village.’”

The original meaning? “A favorable turn of fortune will often appear just when there seems to be no way out of trouble.”

Clinton implied that difficulties came with establishing the U.S. pavilion. The Chinese use the same idiom in less vaunted settings, such as: “My new job is a lot of hard work; I haven’t found that feeling of ‘the shade of a willow and bright flowers.’”

Hearts With Magical Rhinoceros

Rhinoceros horns are powerful, supernatural objects in old Chinese sayings.

“Even though my body is not a colorful phoenix with two wings to fly [to my lover], we have hearts that understand each other immediately as though connected with a magical rhinoceros.”

So wrote Li Shangyin, a famous male poet from the Tang dynasty (7th–10th B.C.) in an untitled poem.

Today in China, people often say, “You get me — we really [have] hearts with ‘magical rhinoceros.’”

Leaving [Your] Name on Light-Green History

Sure, you want to make your mark on history — but why “light-green” history? Before paper was invented in 105 B.C. in China, events were recorded on light-green bamboo slips, which involved “sweating” bamboo over a fire to get the moisture out.

In the 13th century, ages after Sun-Tzu penned The Art of War, Chinese poets were using literature to document military ambitions.

This idiom comes from the poem “Passing by Lingdingyang” (also known as “Crossing the Lonely Ocean”) by the great politician and poet Wen Tianxiang. The poem, which Tianxiang wrote while leading an army to fight for the fate of the Song dynasty, reads:

“In history, what man does not die? [I’d rather] leave my red heart to shine on light-green sweat.”

A Red Apricot Blossom Peeks Over the Yard Fence

A pretty plant, but so much more.

“[The] whole garden can no longer confine the lively energy of spring; a spray of red apricot blossom [already] peeks over the fence.”

So wrote Song dynasty poet Ye Shaoweng in “On Visiting a Garden, When Its Master Is Absent.”

Modern readers see this as symbolizing a woman’s infidelity to her husband. The “red apricot blossom” symbolizes a young and attractive woman, while “peeking over the fence” shows her sneaking out.

Even today, Chinese people will say, behind gossipy hands: “Behind her husband’s back, she [is like] ‘a red apricot blossom peeking over the yard fence.’”

Reach a Higher Level on the Tower

The idiom comes from the poem “On the Yellow Crane Tower” by Wang Zhihuan of the Tang dynasty. After climbing the famous tower, Zhihuan writes:

“[I] desire to see thousands of miles [from this tower], [so I need to] climb to a higher level.”

To see farther, you need to stand higher. This poem is often used to encourage students and workers alike to set higher goals.

Now you know why Chinese students work so hard. You would, too, if you had to memorize idioms like this from a young age.

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