I might be a little bit late on this item, but if you live in the Bay Area, you still have plenty of time to check out this amazing looking exhibit of Residents ephemera that is running through June 17 at Johansson Projects in Oakland. Featuring album cover production art, promotional photos, drawings, scratch-board illustrations, and digital imagery from the archives of Homer Flynn, principal architect of the band’s visual imagery, the show also has some of Flynn’s private, non-Residents work on display:

Through his work, Homer Flynn has created a unique folklore composed of morosely ironic tales intertwined with the poignancy of thinly veiled emotion, revealing Flynn’s obsession with both the vulnerable and perverse aspects of the human psyche. Using a wide vary of materials, he draws on imagery from Walt Disney comics, outsider art of the Deep South, M.C. Escher and fetish pulp. Committed as much to the discovery as to the revelation of ideas, Flynn pursues his vision through a diversity of media, allowing his rich artistic output to be driven by ideas manifesting themselves through drawing, painting, print making, sculpture, digital media, photography, film and performance. Flynn’s figurative prints and drawings are notable for their intense mark making, often rendered with stark, contrasting colors. Similarly bold, his photography reveals forceful characters through stark black and white compositions as well as a vivid, often garish, use of color. While the mood of these images is often confrontational, Flynn also reveals a vulnerability that deepens the reading of his work.

Homer Flynn is best known for his involvement with The Residents, the Bay Area based art collective internationally renowned for their avant-garde music, theatrical performances and filmmaking. In the main gallery Flynn will exhibit work he created for the Residents, including production art for original Residents album covers, promotional photos, art used in print advertising and set designs.

Since his work for The Residents has taken the primary focus of his output for nearly 40 years, Flynn has thus far chosen to keep his personal work private. At Johansson Projects he will show a survey of his entire career curated by his daughter, Jana Flynn, including much work that has never been shown publicly. This work, featuring pastel depictions of natural disasters collaged from the pages National Geographic magazine, scratch board illustrations, silkscreened prints and graphite sketches from his journals, will he featured in the project room of the gallery. Finally, a slideshow will be projected in the viewing room showing recent digital work produced for The Residents.

 

 
Below, the Residents cover James Brown:
 

 
Thank you Chris Musgrave!

 
Artist aleXsandro palombo satirically attacks Italian fashion house Fendi and its creative director Karl Lagerfeld in protest of Fendi’s use of fur.

Where’s Mr. Lagerfeld’s ever-present fan?

 

 
(via Design Boom)

 
Anatomically correct(?) Matthew Barney Cremaster action figure from Mike Leavitt’s brilliant ongoing Art Army project, which will be part of an upcoming Leavitt solo show at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York City, running September 10th thru October 8th 8, 2011.
 

 
More examples of Leavitt’s artist action figures with Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Julian Schnabel, seen above and below that, a “group shot” of several artists closely associated with Juxtapoz magazine. Check out Mike’s online store here.
 

 
Below, a trailer for Barney’s Cremaster cycle.
 

 
The Jacket Lunch Box is a Japanese blog dedicated to turning album covers into bento boxes. He’s done so many of them. This enterprise looks time-consuming. All hail our arts and crafts otaku overlord!

 

 

 
More bento boxes after the jump…

 
NJ.com’s Stan Goldstein reports on the much-maligned, and deservedly so, sculpture of Bruce Springsteen that is on display in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

The bust has been put up as part of what’s called Sculptoure, which is sponsored by the Arts Coalition of Asbury Park (ArtsCAP) and the Shore Institute of Contemporary Arts (SICA).

The five-month long sculpture display will take place in Asbury Park and Long Branch and runs from May 7 until Sept. 11.

According to a story in “The Coaster” an Asbury Park weekly newspaper, the Springsteen sculpture was molded out of cement and done by Princeton trained sculptor Stephen Zorochin.

Stephen, I’m sure you worked hard on this bust, but sorry, it is hideous. Bruce with a red bandana and the nose the size of a ski slope just looks creepy.

The rendering of Springsteen is lacking a certain je ne sais quoi, to put it mildly. It makes the boss look like Abraham Lincoln if Lincoln were in a motorcycle gang.

But even more disturbing to my eye is the artist’s take on Jimi Hendrix (visible behind the Springsteen bust). He looks like Ronald McDonald extruded from the anus of Anubis.

“Scuse me while I eat some fries.”
 

 
Via The Daily Swarm

 
Redditor suziecreamcheese says she made this abstract Beatles quilt for her friend’s baby shower. Where’s the “Butcher Block” cover?

(via reddit and TDW)

 
O. Winston Link’s beautiful and haunting photographs of the last of the steam locomotives are among the most stunning black and white images ever captured on film. They’re so vivid they border on hyper realism.Every picture tells a story, truly.

From Robert Mann Gallery:

O. Winston Link (1914-2001) was born in Brooklyn, New York. He is best known for his photographs documenting the last days of steam locomotive railroads in the United States during the 1950s. He was trained as a civil engineer in the late 1930s. When the Norfolk & Western Railway began to convert its operations from steam to diesel, Link spent five years documenting the trains and the towns along the line in Virginia. He made significant achievements in the use of night photography, often using elaborate flash equipment and staging techniques to create extraordinary images. His background in engineering proved especially useful in this regard, allowing him to solve the significant technical hurdles posed by the work. Speaking of his preference for night photography, Link explained “I can’t move the sun — and it’s always in the wrong place — and I can’t even move the tracks, so I had to create my own environment through lighting.” Although Link financed the project himself, he did receive assistance in staging the photographs from the Norfolk & Western officials. Although Link’s photographs had attracted attention from the Museum of Modern Art and other museum curators, it wasn’t until the publication of the book Steam, Steel & Stars in 1987 that his images reached a wider audience. Gallery and museum exhibitions as well as publication in magazines around the world followed. From 1960 until he retired in 1983, Link worked as a commercial photographer. He died in 2001. In January 2004, the O. Winston Link Museum opened in Roanoke, Virginia. The museum is located in the former passenger station of the Norfolk & Western Railway adjacent to the Virginia Museum of Transportation.”

The American dream has never seemed dreamier.
 

 
More photos after the jump…

 
William Burroughs ponders the atom bomb, UFOs, dreams, psychedelics, astral projection, space travel, Brion Gysin and the cut-up technique in this lecture held at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado on August 11, 1980. Allen Ginsberg takes part toward the end.

In an experiment based on the cut-up technique, video of apocalyptic scenes from various Japanese monster films were randomly juxtaposed with Burroughs lecture. There are moments of synchronicity that are both humorous and bizarre and at times genuinely resonant. I think the Burroughs video mashup illustrates how randomness is often not as random as it seems and accidents often reveal hidden truths that are not accidental.

In light of recent developments in Japan, Burroughs comments on nuclear energy and the atomic bomb are particularly on point and prophetic.
 

 
Argentinean illustrator Christian Montenegro draws from his background in comics to create these rock and roll characters that combine the look and feel of Day of The Dead and Aztec imagery with Legos and Russian religious icons.
 

 
I own several Tarot card decks mainly because I like the art. So, I’m no expert regarding the accuracy of Montenegro’s interpretation of Tarot symbolism, but I sure do like the visuals.
 

 
More rock n’ Tarot after the jump…

 
If you’re out of loop on the whole HANKSY graffiti thing popping up on the streets of NYC, here’s the first HANKSY that appeared about a month ago.

(via Wooster Collective)