Power Ball 11: It's One Louder

The annual fundraiser at Toronto's Power Plant was dubbed Power Ball 11: It's One Louder (yep, Spinal Tap) promised "an open bar, open flames, roller girls, smashed cars to make out in, a hot tub, rolling man-caves, jacked-up women, boulders and dry ice." The biggest art party on Toronto's social calendar eschewed all recession-era sensibility and went tooth-achingly lavish for the eleventh year.

Party attendees

Dean Baldwin builds 'bar-based environments'. As in, those places you drink at. This year, Dean created The Last Drop where eco-futurist bush revelers were asked to pick from plastic bladders of red or blue punch. All served up in a recycled plastic bottle. Tres chic

Anitra Hamilton unveiled a performance/installation entitled The Adolph Loos Tattoo Parlour, inspired by Adolph Loos’ famed anti-tattoo essay Ornament and Crime.

Robert Hengeveld kept it massive with his fibreglass ‘audio rock sculptures’ boulders, outfitted with as many as 5 or 6 separate speakers.

Jon McCurley and Amy Lam AKA Life of a Craphead, the conceptual comedy duo presented Butt Photo Opportunities. Part department store Family Photo Studio, part Glamour Shots, part something else all together.

Andrew Harwood, revisited his famed Madame Zsa Zsa persona for Power Ball 11, providing personalized psychic readings to party goers.

Agathe Snow, rising New York art star Agathe Snow has been hard at work on the ‘air guitar maze’ in honour of the rock n' roll theme.

Lawrence Weiner, the screening his 2008 film WATER IN MILK EXISTS, a conceptual art soft-core porn flick was to be spied through a peephole bashed through the gallery wall.

Jen McNeely

Avery Hunsberger

Singer

Pig face

Corey Corey

Living the high life: Jesse Ship (formatmag, musebox) and Matt Weed (Steam Whistle Brewing)

Photos by Zach Slootsky

Published: Juxtapoz

Florence Deygas Gets Classy with Veuve Clicquot

Apparently, there's no end to the collaborations that come from Paris' Collette. Florence Deygas, the artist behind Caprino & Peperone (one of their best loved pairings), got a taste of the high life and has since moved on to bigger and, um...bubblier things. Veuve Clicquot is already known to be the sexy mistress of champagnes, the one with the classic yellow label that changes with the seasons. They've even got Halloween covered. Born in 1965 in France, Florence studied film animation at Gobelins University in Paris. Her work mixes illustration, drawing, photo, and animation (Winney, the animated cow being yet another Collette project). Her final designs mix linear French cityscapes overlaid with fluid brush strokes. The artwork is so pretty and refined, you may even want to take the bottle out of the paper bag before you drink it. Labels by Florence Deygas for Veuve Clicquot: Published: Juxtapoz

Kid Zoom: Street Art with Ron English & Show in Sydney, Australia

The first piece I saw by Kid Zoom stopped me dead in my tracks. The sinister black-grey owl perched in the hallway of Hibernian House definitely wasn't the work of a fleeting street art persona. A few months later, I found myself watching him work on a massive wood panel collab, literally molding shapes from a few cans of paint and it pretty much cemented his fate in my mind. So, I was fairly stoked when he wanted to pass on the first shots of his most recent projects, the first of which was a hush-hush bus shelter hijacking with Ron English in tow. "I met Ron up at the Z80 studio in Sydney, there was an unofficial Semi-Permanent after-party up there, and I just got chatting with Ron about various things," states Kid Zoom. "I mentioned that I had been working on bus shelter posters and he was interested in doing some while he was in town, so the next day he came past the studio to hang out and paint." With English on a tight schedule of Semi-Permanent conference dates, the two kindred agit-pop souls set about pilfering and re-working a stack of bus shelter ads. "Working with Ron was really inspiring," Kid Zoom continues. "Meeting and working alongside someone you've admired for a long time is always a very surreal experience - especially coming from such an isolated side of Australia, you don't ever really expect to meet and work alongside these people." This all coincided with the launch of Zoom's first solo exhibition at Sydney's Boutwell Draper Gallery, where his work was first shown during the Trailblazers exhibition in late '08. The installation opened on April 30th, 2009 and also features some new works by Melbourne’s legendary stencil master, Regan HaHa Tamanui. The entire project has taken two weeks, under the influence of some intense fumes so now that I know he's made it past the opening night, I can pretty much confirm his invincibility. Kid Zoom's solo show runs until May 23rd, 2009 at Boutwell Draper (82-84 George Street, Redfern in Sydney) Published: Juxtapoz