Cheap Monday

Cheap Monday are a denim brand which originated in Stockholm in 2004. Since then their jeans and apparel have taken off to a huge international audience. As is quite self explanatory from the brand's name, the brand aims to offer "cheap" jeans to a fashion forward audience.

For their spring summer 2010 collection, they feature tape as a key design detail.


Alongside rips, tears and bleaching, the tape is placed on like patches repairing holes and tears underneath and give the pieces a grungy, punk feel.


Could tape be the next safety pin?

JOE PENROD TALKS TO JACQUI MA

Artist Joe Penrod talks to Jacqui Ma about life, art and tape.

Where are you based (geographically) where did you study/ or start doing your art?
I live in Olympia, Washington. I grew up in Southern California and moved here from Denver, Colorado about four years ago. I studied painting at BYU in Utah but didn't start doing the tape installations until I moved here.


What made you first start using tape in your art?
I actually was working on a different project and was using the tape to outline a shadow so I could then bleach it out and realized the tape looked great on its own.

What made you decide to use only that one particular blue colour in your art?
There are quite a few different colors of tape available, and I have tried out a darker blue and a purple but always come back to this one. It reminds me of the shade that the impressionists sometimes used in their shadows.


Do you have a name for that colour?
It is just standard Scotch-Blue Painter's Tape


Where do you buy your tape from?
I pick it up at hardware stores. I usually carry some in my bag with me, but if I forget it I can always find it wherever I go.


What kind of tape is it ? What made you choose that particular type of tape in your work?
It is painter's tape. I chose it due to its familiarity. I had it on hand since I sometimes use it in my paintings to mask out areas and I was painting my house at the time so I had several rolls.


What do you like about the qualities of tape which make it work for your artwork?
The main reason I use tape instead of paint is I want my work to be temporary. Painter's tape is made to be peeled up without harming the surface below it. Because of that I don't worry about where I put it. No one can get too mad about finding one of my pieces on their shop wall or sidewalk because it is so easy to remove. In fact, the police have watched me make a couple of pieces and haven't tried to stop me.

Paint would actually be faster. It is really time consuming to tear little pieces to make curves in the shadows and it can take forever to fill in a large shadow, but I love the finished look. From far away it looks like paint and as you get closer you can see all the individual pieces like brush strokes. And I love not getting arrested.

JOE PENROD

Artist Joe Penrod contacted me a while back introducing himself and his artwork, i have just re-stumbled upon the mail and can't believe i didn't post this earlier. Joe uses tape to create shadows cast by random (or maybe not so random) objects. I hope to interview this artist soon for this blog, so please stay tuned for some more info.

In the meantime, check out these amazing pieces.

MY PILE OF CLOTHES

Enough blogging now I have to get folding. By the way, this is me trying mobile blogging for the first time, i reckon it will really come in handy, got to get savvy with the technology huh. Sorry about the show of my clothes on my bed.

The photo quality is pretty shite huh, this is the iphone camera for you!

... and yes, they ARE my new pink L.A gears in the background! I AM a child of the 70s which make me love the 80s and 90s!

MINI MOUSE TAPE

I recently had to say bye bye to my friend Jewelle who is finally leaving london and going travelling the lucky girl... this is my farewell gift to her - the wrapped up version before i gave it to her last week.



Its from a mini roll of tape with little panda's and apples on it. very cute i think. I've started actually using my tape collection, i know, crazy, but as i explained ages ago on this blog, i used to have sticker collection when i was young and i never used the stickers... "saving" them for a special occasion... the special occasion never came and before i knew it i was all grown up. So on my last visit to australia, cleaning out my childhood room, and stumbling on loads and loads of old stickers i used to obsess over, i vowed that i would use the things i love and not just save them.


But, becuase deep down i am pretty obsessive and haven't completely let go of this strange habit of collecting things, I am taking photos of whenever i use my tape so at least they will be recorded here on this blog.


So, here i really like the contrast of the tacky mini-mouse tape on crumpled brown paper. Actually the brown paper is recycled stuffing from my latest Amazon order, so thanks Amazon for providing this lusciously waxy paper with built-in perforations for my present wrapping.

Ok back to folding the pile of clothes on my bed...

Anything tape dispenses

Hi, check out these tape dispensers, they are the high rise buildings of the dispenser world. They are sleek, minimalist and where else could they hail from than.... Japan. This cool little company do a variety of similarly minimalist products, check out their website: http://anything-design.com/product/index.html





I know these pics are all the same but i just couldn't resist showing you the blocky, slightly 70s inspired colours.

Thomas Hirschhorn WALKING IN MY MIND

I just got back from seeing this fab exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London called Walking in my Mind: Adventure into the artist's imagination. It explores the processes and imagination of ten artists including Thomas Hirschhorn, Yayoi Kusama and Yoshitomo Nara.


Now this guy, Thomas Hirschhorn, has really seriously gone to town on the packing tape. He must have a fetish for tape like me. Its a cave made from brown packing tape covering the walls, floors and pretty much everything inside.


Throughout the cave, which you are free to wander around and explore, are various different rooms (all covered with brown packing tape). Some rooms such as the one pictured above has black graffiti scrawled over the walls and figures made from aluminium / tin foil held in various positions using what looks like wide red electrical tape.


As you wonder around the cave you basically just come upon more and more taped up items. I didn't really have a chance to ponder too much on the philosophical or artistic message in this installation, as , to be honest, i was too wrapped up in the whole usage of tape... masses of it.


Scattered all over the floor are thousands of "pebbles" which look like shapes are cardboard cut out and covered with .. packing tape. In some ways it feels as though you had entered a fake nature filled with objects made from synthetic materials.


There is other room which was quite strange which was, again, filled with loads of packing tape rocks and aluminium foil figures and then right there was a huge pile of oversized books. When i came across this I was pretty freaked out as these are pretty much two of my favourite things in one room. Oversized objects, and things made from tape. aghhhhhh bliss.


Sorry about my crappy photos, i wasn't sure whether i was allowed to take photos or not so i was trying to be a bit under cover.


I have just read a snippet from the little booklet you get when you buy your ticket.. it describes this as "some of the tunnels are papered over with photocopied excerpts from philosophical writings and articles about social justice." Don't ask me what this was about.


Thomas Hirchhorn was born in 1957 in Bern Switzerland and lives and works in Paris, France. The exhibition is definitely worth a visit if you are in london, its on until the 6th of September 2009 at the Hayward Gallery.

I was really impressed with Chiharu Shiota's room called "After the dream" which is made up of millions of strands of knotted black wool. Really worth a visit!

I was recently in New York and visited a very cool little flea market in Brooklyn with my friend Sally... and totally out of the blue, this jumped out at me. well it didn't really jump out, i sort of found it amongst loads of other odd and ends but anyway, i had to buy it.


It is the ORIGINAL SCOTCH splicing tape. I love that they call it splicing tape, like what the hell is splicing anyway. Lets look it up in the dictionary.


I couldn't find exactly what it means... i have to admit i didn't really try that hard, but when referring to 'rope splicing' its "joining two pieces of rope or cable by weaving the strands of each into the other." Which makes sense. So this would be tape to join other pieces of tape together. Sort of like creating one giant piece of tape. This must have been what they thought they had invented before they realised all the other amazing things they could do with this 'splicing tape'.


Anyway, back to the point, This tape dispenser is made of pressed metal with nice rounded edges. I imagine that maybe thousands and thousands of rolls of this would have been made using this very efficient manufacturing process.


The centre panel of the metal dispenser even has integrated saw teeth to cut the tape, how ingenious!! The other noteworthy thing about this tape is that it still has the original tape in it, and guess how much i paid for it...


Only $5 bucks! pretty good huh. I really love this little guy, i will need to build a vintage cabinet to house him especially.

Adventures in Duct Tape - Duct Tape Diana

I came across some cool pics of a duct tape creation in Flikr uploaded by Mark-B. I'm not really sure whether this little camera case contraption actually serves a purpose, but it certainly looks pretty cool.


The camera is named Diana - and duct tape diana is diana's home made cover.


He describes the piece as "The duct tape Diana cover is like a two-piece suit. It's designed to cover light leaks, and to somewhat protect the camera from scratches and harmful u.v. rays." and goes on to warn makers to also use a hard covering if you are actually planning on using this as the main camera case.

Apart from everything else, great photos! Could it have been taken by another Diana?

Bread and Butter Berlin

Live from Bread & Butter in Berlin this year, Firetrap had their very own tape artist doing a piece. I wish i had got the name of the artist putting together this piece and i'm looking forward to seeing the progress and getting a few more snaps today.