Today on Mistigram, another painting (“Smoke and Mirrors”) by the hugely talented Delphine Hennelly from MIST1116 – another piece in her series exploring the phenomenon of women and selfies. Woman posing for a painting drawn by a man = fine art, woman posing for a self-portrait = vain and shallow, right? That’s the standard breakdown. These paintings challenge that narrative. Sisters are doing it for, by and of themselves.
Today on Mistigram, a painting from MIST1116 by Jenn Ashton entitled “Capacity”. On a first viewing, it might look like a map of ski runs at a resort, but this is secretly computer art of the highest degree: those are capacitors, and this is a circuit diagram on a breadboard!
Today on Mistigram, another painting from the recent MIST1116 artpack. This one is by Finnish painter Antti Minkkinen aka Unseen Fate, of pen15 (among other affiliations). I assigned it a flippant filename involving saunas trying to make some sense of what I was seeing, but only Antti knows for sure what’s going on in this busy scene.
Today on Mistigram, an oil painting tribute to the Thin White Duke, if he were a small piece of green citrus fruit, as released in the recent MIST1116 artpack collection. The Mythical Man did this oil painting rendition of a bit of David Bowie wordplay, taking his song “Life on Mars” from 1971’s Hunky Dory album and tweaking a letter, turning it into … “Lime on Mars”. As one does!
Yesterday Canada’s Prime Minister put the nail in the coffin of Northern Gateway – but he gave government approval to two further pipeline projects, Line 3 and Kinder Morgan’s twinned Trans Mountain, the latter of which will be running quite a bit closer to Mistigris HQ. This is not what we voted for, and we, also, do not consent to this action.
Today on Mistigram, we feature a painting by Maeve Wolf from last week’s MIST1116 artpack release. While she drew some ANSI art back in the Mist Classic era, in more recent years she’s taken up painting and employment in the field of architecture – which leads us to today’s selection, one of her two paintings from that collection blending elements of all three realms!
It gives us great pleasure (and enormous relief) to announce that MIST1116, the Mistigris computer artpack collection for which we’d been gathering submissions since the end of April, is finally out following a series of delays.
With a strong current of pieces dealing with themes of technology, transhumanism and cyberspace, there’s also plenty to enjoy to suit camps old and new alike – several varieties of textmode artwork, including typewriter masterpieces and an unstoppable parade of teletext, plus the “real-life” art forms historically absent, including drawing, painting, photography and collage. (Still no dance! We’ve got to have something to strive toward, I guess.)
And keeping us relevant despite our celebrating the occasion of our 22nd anniversary, the kids will enjoy an unsettling SnapChat face-swap and an canonical literary work transliterated into emoji.
(Also, at least three accordions. They’re made to fit in there thematically somehow, but huh – go figure!)
If you’d like to download the entire collection in one 185-meg go for local enjoyment, please point your web browser to bit.ly/MIST1116 ; if on the other hand you’d like to wander through a garden of thumbnails via a web gallery, textmod.es is hosting (most of) it at bit.ly/MIST1116gallery
Painter Delphine Hennelly is in the middle of a series of works exploring the theme of the selfie, but none of them carry a more unsettling subtext than this, the “Bathroom Selfie” featured in MIST1016, enshrining one girl’s attempt to (optimistically? foolishly?) squeeze beauty out of a context of larger-than-life squalor. (That’s funny, I’ve lost my appetite!)
Leaping lightly from medium to medium, the next dollop of cream skimmed from yesterday’s MIST1016 artpack is this oil painting by The Mythical Man entitled “Strange Weather”. Rumour has it here in Vancouver we’ve just set a record of 27 rainy days in October, but that is not as extraordinary as luminous airbornejellyfish… that only happens during El Niño!
Trick or Treat! Our Hallowe'en-styled 22nd anniversary (!) artpack (you may recall its awesome teaser trailer from a couple of weeks back) is officially released, and is now available for local download at http://bit.ly/mist1016 … there is some ANSI and ASCII art, by old hands and a few new names to boot, plus our ongoing investigations into other genres of textmode art (PETSCII, Shift-JIS, and a ton of teletext!) Also lots of #inktober sketches, drawings and paintings, plenty o’ varied hirez, even music… and of course it wouldn’t be a Mist pack without some lit!
Mar 10
I passed a man.
He wasn't human.
(Featured in this post: FILE_ID.DIZ by Nail, Ambush by Raqel Meyers as ACIDT*, Happy Helloween by reNM8R, Albina by Elin Jonsson, Hellboy teletext by Horsenburger, Strange Weather by the Mythical Man, Haunted House #inktober sketch by Bonemouse, Click or Treat Shift-JIS by Kalcha, Just Because You Are Afraid Of Me Does Not Mean I Am Dangerous #inktober sketch by Theresa Oborn, Castlevania by Whazzit. (Oh yes, and the poem is by Crowkeeper.) But everything in this collection is Hallowe'eny, this is just a sampling to demonstrate its incredible diversity!)
We’ve had a number of artists involved in exhibitions – Jenn Ashton is basically perpetually exhibiting non-stop, and it’s a substantial failure on our part to not manage reporting on any of them (but fortunately, there are also many chances to pick up the ball). We’ll try to do a better job in the future, as we are only but one minor outlet artists have to get their works seen.
Not long after the call for submissions opened for MIST1015, it became clear that most of the former Mistigrivians who had emerged from their long slumber for MIST1014 had, upon seeing their gloriously 16-coloured shadow, been scared back underground and would not be joining us for another kick at the can. No problem, I thought, I’ve moved through plenty of creative circles in the meantime and maybe I can tap some of them! My first stop after the Mistigris train ground to a halt was The Living Closet and my inquiries to the former principal players of that (similarly long-defunct) concern resulted in some interest – most of which didn’t pan out (observation: present company excepted, people with children seem to be less vulnerable to the predation of nostalgia on their scanty free time). But one person – Claire Roberts – expressed interest which bore through all the way to a work submitted (and released) in MIST1015 at the eleventh hour.
Back in the ol’ LC days, she was a fire-breathing, belly-dancing painter, and in the meantime she had burgeoned her creative skillset (I know: painting, belly dancing, fire-breathing – you thought she already had all bases covered!) in all directions simultaneously, especially in our traditional field of computer arts during a long stint at local code shop Relic Entertainment. (Isn’t that always the way? First you stop releasing computer art, then everyone you’ve ever met becomes a computer artist. Fortunately for us I got back on the wagon.) Additionally, she had ascended through the ranks of an entirely different underground art community, one based out of the Black Rock Desert for a few days every year.
Claire had never been part of the artscene back in the day, but something about the call for submissions piqued her and she diligently boned up on all the treasures of our past, watching hours of demos and reflecting to herself how easy those neat-o effects would be to achieve using her workplace toolchain (which would, doubtlessly, find it easier to crunch those particular numbers being hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the machines the demos were made to run on 8) She lined up an old computer nerd friend (we can be handy to have around, especially when you need a stereo system hooked up) to collaborate with her on a musical experiment, but he didn’t end up being available in time. The reason, however, that I am profiling Claire here today is not because she let that obstacle stop her, but instead she boldly went forth without her seasoned collaborator to create something in a wholly new-to-her idiom without any help or past experience: bringing art forth through sheer force of will alone – sheer force of will and Audacity. (That’s Audacity with a capital A.)
We released her musical piece, “It’s Like A Collage”, in MIST1015, and in homage to the gutsiness of its circumstances (Claire is gutsy: after I proposed to Mistigris’ collected music department that we put together an album for FAWM, we have nothing and she has made big inroads into one of her own), we have made its constituent recordings (assorted vocal noises and sounds from the kinds of musical toys you might find in your belly-dancing gig bag) the grist for our imminent Tracker Fix mill. She didn’t know what she was doing, but came up with something anyway; surely those of you who do know what you’re doing, given the same materials, can do no less!
(And in a neat case of synchronicity, just as her turn to be profiled was coming up in the queue here, a free mobile game she was working on was released to the public – you can find out more information about it here: The Fourth Phase, the snowboarding movie, the game.)
Antti Minkkinen (aka Unseen) contributed two of his paintings (and an ANSI logo for his scene project PEN15 whose name I am regrettably unable to satisfyingly explain) to the artpack, and now (and indeed, since November 25th… and until December 20th, so you still have a chance) you can see some of his other paintings hanging on a wall in an art gallery. That is, if you happen to be situated in or near the town of Tapiola in Finland. (If I know the computer underground, definitely that applies to a few of you!)
The exhibition has a website whose blurb I was invited to translate:
“This exhibition is of my most recent works. I rarely sketch during the process and I hardly think anything while painting. I never pick themes consciously while working but I often find myself exploring similar topics. I’m interested in honesty, authenticity and humour, and try to search for beauty, as mundane as it may sound. I want my art to, at some primitive level, narrate my experience with authenticity.”
Antti Minkkinen is a fine artist from Espoo. He has graduated from Vapaa Taidekoulu with a BFA degree majoring in painting. He works mainly as a painter but also in other medias like sculpture, video and digital art.
Antti Minkkinen reflects on the challenge of the concept of beauty
by Anneli Tuominen-Halomo
Artist Antti Minkkinen mostly paints, but also makes sculptures, videos and multimedia. His paintings raise a smile – there on the Studio Aarni wall next to a portrait are a couple of still lives of flowers. “The face started to look like an evening rose, so I painted it between two tables covered in flowers,” the artist explains.
The exhibition includes Minkkinen’s latest paintings, from which eyes, noses or tongues may emerge: Minkkinen has used “everything that can be found on the floor” to make the protrusions. “People have a dull perception of beauty - I have deliberately chosen random themes, but I see them manifesting the same topics.”
Through a lens of his interest in honesty, authenticity and humour, he has begun to explore beauty. Inspiration is all around – when he sees colors running together from garbage in the gutter, he remembers the shades and hues, then subsequently applies the color scheme to a painting.
The paintings in this show are all quite small in size. “A small canvas concentrates an idea down to be stronger.” Minkkinen says he makes quite a lot of drawings and some of the paintings emerge from the sketches. He always carries a sketchbook to take notes in case he sees an interesting subject of study, but with mobile phone use on the rise he finds more often a quick digital photograph is made for reference instead. “The works are often syntheses. If a part isn’t working, paint over it – you can’t afford to fall in love with your own work.”
For his own influences, Antti Minkkinen points at the Dutch Karel Appel, as well as Espoo visual artists Tycho Elon and teacher Tarmo Paunu.
Antti Minkkinen is an Espoo-based artist who graduated from the Free Art School in 2012. He is up for election as the representative for the Painters’ Union board.
The exhibition of Antti’s paintings at Studio Aarni in Heikki’s Square, Tapiola, will continue until 20 December.“
Unseen isn’t the only Mistigris contributor to exhibit his works in a gallery context; he probably isn’t even the first. (At least one of us is currently curating a gallery space!) Someday, we hope to curate and mount a textmode art retrospective gallery exhibition ourselves! (That’s an aspiration that’s been in the works since 2004, pre-dating any notion of reforming Mistigris, and which actually set everything that followed in motion.) Stay tuned for more highlights from our recent (and distant) back stacks, plus shout-outs to ongoing achievements by Mist folks past and present!
We open with Sara Ciantar’s “Red Sky At Morning”, the traditional omen of foreboding to oceanbound sailors. I really appreciated her pixelart aesthetic, and only moreso when it was revealed that she had merely taken a photograph through a screen door. To its right, a piece of PETSCII – the textmode of the Commodore 64 – by its rock star artist Raquel Meyers. (It has a name, but I have tentatively given it a new one: “Dead Kids of Instagram.”) Do look up Raquel, as she is curently crowdfunding to support similar work on a similar theme – textmode illustrations of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
Next is a mean little skull logo by Nail that you might have missed in the artpack proper, hiding out at the bottom as the footer illustration to the pack’s infofile.
On the following line is Freelance Pete’s detailed take on the nuclear family’s suburban fantasy, followed by another early-'90s Amiga pixelart piece from the portfolio of $too.
Onward, we get two paintings, the first by Mythical Man – which seems ominous but not too grim until you look a little more carefully at the running man burning in the background – the other “Heart Goes Here” by Jenn Ashton. All the skulls nonwithstanding, this painting demonstrates that there’s nothing necessarily creepy about mere bones… after all, as the pithy quote has it: “You’re a ghost driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust, what do you have to be scared of?”
This (small-e) eerie gallery ends with the fabulous header to our memberlist, a networked PabloDraw ANSI art session jointly drawn by numerous contributors, notably the logo by the bothersomely talented enzO of Blocktronics (not just a fabulous letter M, also note the spooky skulls beneath it – sorry, Jenn, maybe the skull is just the scariest bone in the body), followed by a menacing Frankenstein’s monster sketched out by Sudden Death, with contributions from Whazzit and Sephiroth.
OK, that’s almost it for the spooky stuff – next time I’ll see if I can’t squeeze in some spooky tunes and make Tumblr sing!
