My father has had a mustache for as long as I can remember. It is a part of his personality, so much so that when he shaved it off for charity, he looked like a stranger to me. Thankfully he grew back the old soup strainer very quickly. Although I have never been a huge fan of my own facial hair, beards, mustaches, and sideburns can be fashionable. For those of us who refuse to let the facial garden grow, and others who simply can’t sprout a chin garden, designers Shane Blomberg and John Healy have created Pop’s Stache. Essentially they’ve created plastic mustaches that clip on pop bottles and beer cans, which give the consumer an instant ‘stache. Our favorites include the Stromboli, and the Winnipeg Special. What’s more fun than a mustache? Nothing.

Shop Dropping Montreal is a collective of designers who take part in the nouveau practise of Shop Dropping. What’s Shop Dropping you ask? It’s best described by the group’s mission statement: “The dissemination of art through institutions such as galleries and museums most often only reaches an elite group of viewers. This simple fact conjures a desire to reconnect with the general public. Shopdropping is one of the many ways this is made possible. Leaving images in an unlikely place, such as the grocery store, creates a surprise encounter with art and design in a public space. Art is not only reserved for the informed, but also for the general public. A dialogue between the two worlds is what we hope to further achieve by presenting Shopdropping Montreal at the 2009 Montreal Biennial.”

“Shopdropping becomes a form of curating at the grass-roots level, by stimulating consumer interaction with some of the most archetypal commodities found in a communal environment – the grocery store. Labeling and advertising dominate our daily lives, as well as the mundane necessity to purchase goods in order to survive. Aestheticizing a single can amongst a sea of bland labels awakes our visual senses which have been numbed by pre-meditated tasks and adverts which consume us daily. Shopdropping aims to create a mental break from the daily overload of information we receive, becoming a means to reclaim not only visual language, but also visual space.”

“While reclaiming visual space through the act of shopdropping, issues of surveillance also come into question. Because Shopdropping involves publicly ‘dropping’ images and documenting them on the spot, shopdroppers are constantly being watched by security cameras. The act of shopdropping makes us aware of the environments in which we inhabit our daily routines. These environments have become systems for surveillance which not only monitor our behaviour, but incur the obligation to conform to social norms in order to ensure control. This is most often noted when someone comes across shopdrop material – they are either surprised and excited by the effects of this random piece of art or angered by its misplacement and confused by its intentions. Shopdropping continuously invites public reaction and in so doing, the medium succeeds in being the message.”

Via Inhabitat: For those that consider themselves sophisticated designfolk, topiaries may seem the stuff of Edward Scissorhands suburbia or the artistic outlets of a housewife with hedge shears. But consider this – these carefully crafted plant forms are an eco-friendly alternative to promotional billboards or waste-making flyers, and can add to the environment rather than take away from it. If you’re in the market for some seriously impressive shrubbery, there’s no better man for the job than Topiary Joe.

Joe started out building birds and fish for garden centers, and has since created animated figures of a dazzling variety of shapes and sizes: crocodiles, elephants, flamingos, growing archways, living walls, and green signs. Some of the topiary frames stand alone as metal sculptures: some are simply stuffed with moss, and others are creatively dressed, like a Big Bird made of old fishing nets. Although the materials and methods Joe uses are incredibly varied, his masterpieces all share a living sense of whimsy that just can’t be found in a billboard.

The average topiary takes about 6 months to grow in and really become its leafy-sculpted self. They are planted with varieties such as Boxwood, Azalea, Yew, and Privet, depending on the local climate of the sculpture. Whether the end result is a dancing hippo or a giant growing archway, the pieces are part sculpture, part garden, and pure craft. In addition to his eco-conscious art, Joe is also known to encourage a kind of “reuse” by offering work in exchange for used classic sports cars which he enjoys refurbishing to working condition. Since its definitely more eco to keep an old car on the road than buy a new one, this offers a whole new level of “green” for the garden!

This print making major from Boston and co-founder of the experimental publishing and printmaking project Apenest recently relocated to Santa Fe and wrapped up a 3 person show at NYC’s 92Y Tribeca. He’s also shown at Philly’s Space 1026 and SF’s Park Life. His paintings are simply distinct, unique, and refreshing. Brian has his own voice in an age when that always isn’t common and a skill set that’s beyond most. Some exerts from his latest interview with Fecal Face: “I often have a couple of ideas of where a piece might go before I start. I write down a lot of my ideas in notebooks and usually make my sketches directly on the paper. I try to work on a couple of pieces simultaneously so that I can take some time making decisions on one piece while I work on another.”

If Brian had to explain his work to a stranger, he would do it as follows: “A cyclical creation myth based on conquest, which plays as the primary creator and destroyer. Set off by and sucked into black ether thicker than mashed potatoes, I paint weirdo Americana choose your own adventure novels in acrid colors that bleed into one another, creating vividly patterned compositions bordering on decorative, which are designed to entrance the viewer (like a siren), disguising and distorting violence. Awkward, loud, nasty, and a bit boisterous, I might call them American Miniatures.”

When we went out in search of an interview or story on James Roper, the pickings were slim. But that’s should not be an indication of his time on the scene, or his popularity. So rather than focus on external perspectives of his work, we’re reverting to select passages from a statement available on Roper’s website. “The construction of each painting fuses disparate images from a variety of sources such as fashion magazines, animation stills, comics, the Internet as well as my own photo’s and drawings. I predominantly choose images and try to create forms which I feel register a visual ‘peak shift’, a term given to the phenomena of ‘neurological attraction’ that appears in both humans and animals to an extreme characterisation of an object. Peak shift has been suggested by the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran as one of the ’10 universal laws of art’.”

It get’s deeper. “As Ballard described in such novels as ‘Crash’ and ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, I have similarly explored this theme through the structure and landscape of the body, how our bodies move through our environment and their physical relationship to architectural forms as well as the immediate folds in the fabric of our clothes. Also the fetishism of inanimate objects and the fusion of body and object or self and other which is apparent within many religious practices especially in Eastern Philosophy. This inter-connection between the internal and external can also be seen in Deleuze’s concept of the fold: “The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.” (Deleuze – Foucault)”

FormatMag recently had a chance to sit down with the amazingly talented illustrator known as Tomer Hanuka. Tomer calls NYC his home, and describes himself as a cartoonist who has worked on a number of projects, ranging from magazines, to films, ads and everything in between. Regarding his formidable years, Tomer states: “I grew up in Israel where the sun bleaches out the color out of everything, and early on got hooked on comics. This was the late 70′s and for production reasons mostly, the colors in these pamphlets where pumped to the max. I want to say it was escapism, but I had a terrific childhood. It was exotic, the whole idea of superheroes, visual icons, worlds within panels. My brother and I lived in those panels as much as we did outside of them, and soon enough we started constructing our own.

On working with his brother, branching out and re-joining forces, Tomer explains: “We have complimentary skills and no ego issues so it’s perfect grounds for collaboration. We share a similar value system and when there is a disagreement and there always is, we can zoom out and reconsider. We took what was quite a hermetic childhood of drawing together in the same bedroom, on the same desk, and sometimes on the same piece of paper, we took that and for a decade or so went to very different, even opposing destinies, trying to define ourselves through a personal aesthetic that was individual only to each of us and independent of the other. If you boil it down to the most general terms, it means Europe versus the U.S., once that was established, and each of us had his own sense of self, the road to working on the same piece paper again seemed like the natural next step.” Be sure to check out the full interview at FormatMag.

The work painstakingly produced by AJ Fosik is undeniably cool. In an interview with SwindleMag, he talks about his foray into 3D sculptures made of wood: “The first time I made a three dimensional wood piece, I was happy with it because I knew instantly that I was onto something that had a lot of meat to it. The leap was instantaneous and not at all how my work usually develops. The idea came fully formed. I began cutting thousands of tiny wooden pieces with a scroll saw, each piece carefully stained with shoe polish and attached onto an armature. You know how it is when you’re creating music, art, what have you, and you just set out down different avenues just exploring different ideas and approaches. For every 20 that don’t go anywhere maybe a handful will be interesting for a while, and very rarely do you hit on something that feels truly yours and just opens up.”

He goes on to talk about the time he wasted in Detroit, College, and his eventual involvement in the world of graffiti. “Street art became a scene, and that’s always when things of that nature jump the shark. So many kids just started producing stuff that looked like what street art was supposed to look like. It just became like, ‘If I draw this little robot alien character, then I’m in;’ it’s like putting on a uniform. It goes against everything that it was about for me. It totally kills that ‘f*ck you’ aspect of it. A lot of people saw what was going on with street art and how well it could work as a means towards gallery attention, and it became saturated with jerks creating work that was nothing more than cheap selfpromotion. I just didn’t want to be associated with that. It gave me a really good sense of just how overwhelming the number of people there were clamoring for the same brass ring, and I really tried to adjust my work ethic accordingly.”