At the weekend, among other things, i went to the Walking In My Mind exhibition at the Hayward. It was good in parts but overall a bit disappointing. A few things that frustrated by not being as good as they could have been or indeed just plain irritating. I enjoyed last year's Psycho Buildings better (close enough for comparison). The absolute stand-out stuff for me was by Charles Avery - sculptures and drawings making up a fragmentary picture of a fantastic island, the hunters, tourists and wildlife. His drawings are an absolute dream, i was surprised to find out how young he is - something in the way of capturing expressions and postures, line and white combined with sparse wash (or maybe it's his name!) reminds me of old-school cartoons. i also enjoyed Bo Christian Larsson's installation (squashed owls and illogical chains) and there were some impressive parts of Keith Tyson's wall of paintings.

Guardian piece on Avery
Doggerfisher - Charles Avery images and biography

i haven't taken any photos since the weekend in suffolk, 5 weeks ago. i've hardly taken any for months really. i've been looking out of train windows at beautiful fields of poppies and not carrying a camera. i carried both the Leica and the pinhole yesterday to the exhibition opening, and didn't take either of them out of my bag. i just didn't feel like it. this is odd. at the very least i should get those half a dozen exposed films i have sitting around at home to Darkside...

wandered over to Muse-ings and there were a couple of interesting things there: this quite awful sounding "machine-learning based online system of computer-based prediction of aesthetic quality for color natural photographic pictures" http://acquine.alipr.com/ - at first it sounds like an interesting sort of project, but there are things there that just sound a bit wrong -
"A rule of thumb is that if the aesthetic quality of a photo is obvious to most people, it may not be worthwhile to seek Acquine's opinion on it because Acquine may choose to assign funny scores in such cases. Please be serious if you would like Acquine to help you.
yes. we have to take it seriously. no casual family photos, out-of-focus shots, political photos, news photos, and importantly, no "etc.". right...

betterly, although i'm not a big fan of the clean modern dystopian-ish social hardware observation stuff a la Andreas Gursky i like the look of this a lot - http://www.lynne-cohen.com/

ah, non-photo related, other than i spotted a couple in the last few days on lunchtime excursions in the sun, across the Thames, everything very photogenic and yet not feeling like take photos, http://www.streetpianos.com/london2009/ it seems like years ago i remember seeing the website for this before anything had actually been organised, about a single piano left on the street and the dream that it could be more than that, i think it's the same guy, and it's nice that he's made it happen.

oh wow, i just looked at Luke Jerram's page. brilliant. not sure this is the same guy as before now... but just amazing work. love the description to Black Cloud: "This 8 metre long black inflatable cloud was made for a sad friend to help cheer him up. We used meth burners to fly the cloud over Bristol. Unfortunately the cloud caught fire at 100ft, but the event did cheer my friend up. "

while looking for a weblink to the stag scaffold sculpture by Ben Long at the elephant&castle, i came across this lovely thing: The Great Travelling Art Exhibition

Edit: Gosh that gallery info page has a bunch of other local galleries on it. cool!

browsing a blog mostly about photos - The Bartender Never Gets Killed - it links to lots of photographers/image-makers nearly all of whom i have not heard of. kewl. here are some good 'uns:
Christopher Muller - some nice collages as well as photos, i'd like to see "Pencil II, 2005" in real life
Hans van der Meer (who i have seen before) - football fields as landscape
Alfonso Brezmes - wicked stuff. very constructed.
Peter Hutchinson - not sure yet. funny-looking collages
Uta Barth - simple. lovely. photos and small photo series.

free and not-free fun happenings at the Tate Modern this weekend: www.tate.org.uk/modern/thelongweekend2008/

and continuing the theme of street art if you haven't already seen it check out this amazing stop-frame animation: www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm. coo.

actually i have a spare ticket to the Nan Goldin slide shows tomorrow night (with Patrick Wolf and John Kelly) - if anyone is keen leave a comment or call me if you have my number. i'm gonna check one buddy-o first, but he's probably doing his hair or something...

more from the If You Could... lot.
this time a pair of tasty prints available for 1 month each this year.
this month a rather attractive one by Kate Gibb. see it here
and her blog has some nice work on it also: kategibb.blogspot.com 

i'm such a sucker for a nice print. 

i went to my friend's exhibition yesterday and it was really good. y'all should see it.
it is at the Standpoint gallery, near Hoxton Square, for another 2 weeks, for free. 3 painters, 2 of whom i think are exceptionally good. 
http://www.standpointlondon.co.uk/spgallery.html

i might write some more on it later.

also, all NFT films on tuesdays for a fiver - this week Wings of Desire is on at 8.30pm.  

an online archive of Pelican book covers, by decade (if you have some lurking at home, perhaps they'd like to hear from you) http://www.thingsmagazine.net/projects/pelican.htm

old-fashioned fabric prints and clothing http://www.stjudes.co.uk/index.htm and http://www.old-town.co.uk/

art (some of it looks rather old-fashioned too in a nice way) http://stjudesgallery.co.uk/index.htm
including the wonderful Rob Ryan http://www.misterrob.co.uk/ or http://rob-ryan.blogspot.com/ (i saw a magazine article at Christmas about a new book made of papercut illustrations, i thought it was his style, but i can't find any reference to it, anyone know what it is?)
and while i'm at it - Georgia Russell is amazing 

to go and see:
I Am Ten - ten years of the East London Printmakers. showing at Bankside gallery until 4th feb.
Shadowy, 3 artists paintings (including a friend) at Standpoint gallery, Hoxton, until 16 feb. 

and lastly, this is quite cute: http://3191.visualblogging.com/

Daniel Eatock
http://www.eatock.com/
at http://www.kemistrygallery.co.uk/ until TOMORROW!

oooh bat house http://www.bathouseproject.org/competitionpage/winners/
(but why is the exhibition in Manchester?)

poetry-based art. oh damn it finishes this weekend.. and i'm planning on going away
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/visual-arts/productions/volume-13f

Spectacular Craft at V&A
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1637_outoftheordinary/