Set in the love hotel rooms of Osaka and Kansai, Love Land Invaders expresses what Lagoi and Lace call 'luxurious pop':

 

  

Stills from Elle Muliarchyk's latest film project, which involved sending Megan Collinson to ten psychics in ten different disguises.

Brian M. Viveros and his doe-eyed, Marlboro-smoking ladies: quietly defiant and disarmingly sexy:

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Dirt Tease (2010)

Dirtyland III (2008)

Evillast (2008)

El Carnivora (2008)

Momma Said Knock You Out (2009)

Gladiate Her (2010)

Last Round (2010)

Mess With the Bull (2008)

Seeing Red (2010)

My optometrist took these amazing scans of my eyes today:

(My left eye)

(My right eye)

The bright orange spheres are my optic disc, where all the blood vessels converge, and the dark spot in the middle is my macula. Cool, huh? They have such a haunting, astronomical quality to them.

I tried to show them to my friend but as soon as he saw the first picture he yelped and started gagging, and my other friend informed me that he has a "fear of eyes", whatever that means.

From an Interview with Timothy Archibald on Feature Shoot:

You’ve been photographing your son, Elijah since he was 5 years old. Since then you have found out that he is on the autistic spectrum. How have the images changed or evolved with this discovery?

When I first started photographing Eli, we already knew something was up…something was different with him and the way he engaged with the world. The term “Autistic Spectrum” and all of that never came into it. But he was different, he saw the world differently than I did, was in it in a way that was curious to me. Those differences are the things that made me want to explore him, or more accurately, to explore “the me and him relationship”, with the camera. That was the key for me: it wasn’t really just pictures of a beautiful child, but images about the relationship between he and I and the great unknown at the time. The relationship had the layers and the tension and having the great unknown…this thing I couldn’t understand, that gave us the fuel for the project. The kid…oh, he was just the innocent one.

This is a very personal series, a collaboration between you and your son. What made you decide to make it public as well as release it as a book?

For me, the power of having experiences is the sharing of the experience. It can help others navigate their own situations, it can be cathartic to share on my end, it can open doors and shut doors too. So, you gotta share this creative stuff I always feel. My previous book (Sex Machines : Photographs And Interviews, Process 2005) was like social anthropology- really looking into other’s lives with distanced observation. I wanted to do something less literal, more beautiful, more personal, but with some emotional weight for people to carry with them. As this body of work started to form it seemed like I could do all those things with it.

I’ve always liked what a book can do for a story that has an arc: you can have a beginning, middle, end, work with the pairings, all those book nerd things that come into play, I love those things. But also, I thought a book, its in a home, it’s kinda private, it would probably end up on someone’s kitchen table….very domestic, like the project was. Its not larger than life on the walls of a gallery.

Do you see this as an ongoing project?

It’s most definitely not an ongoing project. I never wanted to be one of these Dad’s who photographed a kid over the entire arc of the kid’s life. It’s just not that interesting to me to see the passage of time. To me this “Echolilia channel” that the photographs were made during, really captures this time when I was really trying to look at the evidence in my kid and my life and figure out this mystery, try to understand this child that I just had a hard time harmonizing with. I thought we both felt like we were digging and mining this situation together to try to figure it out…or figure something out. And in the end we didn’t get any answers…..but amidst it all we built a bridge. Now we’ve met at the middle of the bridge and there is just no need to make these images any more.

From Tate Modern:

Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain. Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands.

Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape. Sunflower Seeds is a sensory and immersive installation, which we can touch, walk on and listen to as the seeds shift under our feet. The casual act of walking on the work’s surface contrasts with the immense effort of production and the precious nature of the material. Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.

From The Guardian:

[Y]ou can trudge over them, walk or skip or dance on these seeds, all of them Made in China. Or scoop up handfuls and let them run through your fingers, in the knowledge that someone, an old lady or a small-town teenager in Jingdezhen, has delicately picked up each one and anointed it with a small brush. Every seed is painted by hand. The town that once made porcelain for the imperial court has been saved from bankruptcy by making sunflower seeds. It is absurd.

The meanings are as multiple and singular as its form. Ai Weiwei has taken the lesson of Duchamp's readymade and Warhol's multiples and turned them into a lesson in Chinese history and western modernisation, and the price individuals in China pay for that. Every unique seed is homogenised into a sifting mass. Most contemporary Chinese art is a product made for western consumption, just as willow-pattern plates or porcelain vases were shipped out in huge quantities for the western market.

Fuelling my increasingly dangerous obsession with dioramas is Akiko Ida and Pierre Javalle's work, which uses food as a landscape:

I first stumbled upon Thomas Allen's work via Kitsune Noir's desktop wallpaper project, where he created this:

His blog is laden with a multitude of equally striking treats of the vintage pulp cut-out varietal: