At the Dwell sofa shoot we did on Tuesday, they were using backdrops made of wallpaper. This one we really liked: Chinatown Toile by Dan Funderburg....
This toile features all sorts of a-typical toile scenes like a Chinese delivery truck, a fellow stretching in a park before a soccer game and some folks in puffy jackets looking to buy vegetables in a Chinatown grocery. A Brooklyn artist, you can check out Dan at his website and buy this paper and more at Flavorpaper.
"His patterns, prints and installations are varied in content but all demonstrate an unabashed love for decorative arts. With influences ranging from 14th century Moorish mosaic to 60's American op art, the work is a repudiation of the fabricated schism between art and decoration."
>> Dan Funderburgh
>> Flavorpaper
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Comments (4)
On the one hand, I think it's cool seeing a toile with updated scenes...
...but on the other hand, I'm wondering if there aren't more than a couple stereotypes depicted here - such as the guy in the puffy jacket and thick eyeglasses, the (homeless?) dude sleeping on the park bench w/ a beer can on the ground, or the piles of wooden palletes?
I wonder how we'd feel seeing a "Suburbia" themed toile - perhaps with rows of identical McMansions, SUV's lining the curbs at the school, kids playing video-games and Soccer-Moms pushing oversized strollers through the mall while talking on cell-phones and drinking a Starbucks Latte?
Eerily reminiscent of the "Harlem Toile" that caused such an uproar a little while back, if you ask me. *Sigh*. This idea has been done, and was executed in a much more exciting manner (politically and artistically) than this particular "Chinatown" example.
Here is the Harlem toile by Sheila Bridges that's mentioned above. A similar idea of the Glasgow toile by Timorous Beasties. Personally, I think all of these contemporary toiles are interesting -- depicting cliche scenes is sort of what this genre has been about. Look at historic examples of pastoral scenes in old toiles and tell me that they're not, in some ways, cliche and perhaps offensive.
And then there's
http://www.towntoiles.com/
They have fabric, wallpaper, and lots of other fun things.