Canadian artist Brandon Jan Blommeart’s trash monsters lumber across beautiful landscapes, happily playing with each other as if they had inherited the earth from their human creators.

All you photographers out there, a word up on one of the most prodigious emerging photographers in Australia. And if you’re nursing an inadequacy complex, seeing Nirrimi Hakanson’s folio might propel you to briefly flee your aspirations and think about getting a job at the local supermarket. Hopefully, it will inspire you. The self-taught sixteen-year-old Hakanson has been taking photos on a digital SLR since the age of thirteen, after starting out on a disposable camera. Her distinctive style is ethereal and reminiscent of photo albums filled with enchanted childhood memories.

Her subjects (both friends and professional models) are cast in romantic portraits, in sophisticated fashion shots, in scenes of teenagers posing unaffectedly in everyday realms. What stands out amongst the girlish nymphs making friendship pacts with the sunshine is a certain rawness you don’t often see in fashion-oriented photography. This is partly due to Hakanson’s preference for natural light and emotive settings and most certainly due to her visionary nature. This week, Hakanson was announced the winner of the National Youth Week’s junior photography competition.

Snapped in Aichi, Japan, at a Truck Show for kids, this photo by Roger Snider captures a customized refrigerated delivery truck with around $100,000 worth of artistic enhancements. According to Snider, on this day, some ‘300 of these Art Trucks from various truck clubs showed up to help fund-raise for less fortunate kids’.

Designed as offices and commercial spaces for creative industries, the Matchbox is the work of design team Allard Meine Jansen and ‘houses twenty-two corporate units, a rooftop restaurant and semi-underground parking in the artistic hub of Amsterdam North’. The building’s shape was derived from piling boxes of matchbox on top of each other [see the photo below] and has been conceptualized to give every company its own space and identity. In addition, ‘bridges constructed above a central atrium garden act as catalyst for the networking between companies, while distributing sunlight through the building’.

What’s in the water in Australia that all these cool t shirt labels just keep popping up? Junior Massive is the latest, a newly launched boutique t shirt label making limited edition tees using only Australia cotton. It’s street meets indie; design meets durability; edgy fashion meets … well, edgy fashion. We like it already.

Pure graphic simplicity is how Canadian illustrator Raymond Biesinger swings. Employing various textures, typography and found elements throughout his heavily conceptual creations, Beisinger presents a wonderfully consistent body of work.

Om Records are turning the big fifteen and to celebrate they’re going to release the double disc, Om:15 album, featuring exclusive tracks from Radio Slave, Charles Webster, Crazy P, Atjazz, Fish Go Deep, John Beltran and more. The art on the record was done in collaboration with urban street artist, Sam Flores of Upper Playground, and full versions of the design will also be available in a limited high quality 18″x24″ digital print. The album drops on July 2. Check out the single — Orchestrating Maneuvers In The Dark by Radio Slave below.

Oh man! Take me back. Yup, drag me kicking and screaming into those halcyon days of the mid to the late 80s when all I cared about was Archie Comics, extra full cream milk, and getting my hands the latest release off New Zealand’s Flying Nun label. This track — Pink Frost — from Dunedin band, The Chills, is a window back to a time when melody ruled, guitars were always slightly out of tune, and haircuts were just five dollars down at your local barber shop.

Who wouldn’t want to spend a night cuddled up to a koala? Well, Taronga Zoo’s overnight accommodation program, Roar and Snore, offers just that. Well, not quite, but at least you’ll be in the same ballpark (so to speak): ‘from arrival in the evening to the next day’s dawn, the cliff-top location boasts ultra-comfortable safari-style tents, each with a view of the Harbour and Sydney’s majestic city skyline’.

‘This is the base for the tours and wildlife encounters with Australia’s famous wildlife from kangaroos and koalas to emus and possums throughout the overnight stay at Taronga’. Right on! Apparently, there is ‘free-ranging wildlife living just outside your tents from kookaburras with their laughing, early morning calls to Brushtail and Ringtail Possums, which are often met during the night walks in the Zoo’. Sounds like one hell of an evening!

Lucky Dragon is a collection of limited edition and signed hand-built tables by designer Mike Lee. Like them? So do we. But be prepared to dig deep: prices range from $4800 to $12,200 and the tables can only be viewed at the Chinese Jesus showroom in Venice, California.

Walking down Toronto’s Queen Street West a few weeks back, we were momentarily distracted (if an hour or two counts as momentarily) by the cake-y delicacies that adorned the store window of The Red Tea Box. Oh boy! This place is like that scene out of Hansel and Gretel where they stumble upon the Gingerbread House, only the treats here are Tea Cakes and the decorations on them should probably be hanging on the walls of a local gallery. These cakes are stunning. Almost too good to eat. Mind you, that didn’t stop us. [photos by Alison Zavos]

May’s is an outdoor gallery in Sydney’s St Peters that is devoted to promoting a legal space in which street artists can exhibit their work. The brainchild of Tuli Balog, who runs his own graphic art business behind the colourful façade, he set up the gallery to encourage and document the evolution of graffiti and stencil art in Sydney. Based on several removable and replaceable wall panels, May’s allows artists to work on an entire wall, and to keep the parts of their works on the panels before the next artist’s work takes up residency. While this system challenges the usually temporary nature of street art, it also provides an avenue for street artworks to be protected from removal or cover-up by the local council. For this reason, it is a unique space, protected from the rampant clean-up and gentrification which is sanitising so many areas of the city.

Australian duo, Empire Of The Sun, feature Luke Steel from The Sleepy Jackson and Nick Littlemore from Pnau, each stepping our their respective shadows to create a sound and look that is totally electric. Luke Steel will be compiling a special Secret Playlist for us next week.

I used to edit a free street mag in Australia called STU, so I was impressed when I came across a similarly sized one out of Montreal called SNAP!, which expertly covers fashion, art, music and other creative pursuits with a healthy focus on spotlighting local creatives. We checked in with Hannah Byrne, who along with Shayl Prisk is one of the two founders of the publication, and asked her about the spark behind the launch of SNAP! ‘Initially the spark came when Shayl and I sat down after a long day in our kitchen jobs and decided we wanted to do something different, more creative. Over the course of several months we brainstormed over lattes and pints and talked about exactly what kind of magazine we would want to read and what kind of stories we would want to tell. It was a really exciting time, starting this thing from scratch and deciding where it was going to go’.

Have you found a place already amongst Montreal’s creative community?
‘We’ve worked with so many talented artists based here in Montreal. Many of our creative friends were willing to contribute work from the beginning but as we grow we have more and more people approaching us at our events or online asking how they can submit and get involved in what we do. We try and thank all the people that work with us by hosting regular parties and art events, and hand out free beer for our fellow starving artist friends! Our sponsor Bierbrier is great for that. We really love to have fun and to get local artists and writers published, and they seem to like that too! We are receiving more and more emails from people every day, which is really encouraging!’

How hard is it sustaining a free magazine?
‘Well, we both still work day jobs, as well as play a lot of online poker (haha). We’re slowly starting to build a strong base of advertisers but it’s hard for any new business at the moment. It takes time but for now we are also working on different projects around the magazine to explore other ways to keep it all funded.

‘Shayl and I were always adamant that our magazine would be free- yes the print world is in a crisis right now, but magazines still have that tangible appeal and when the access is free and the content is rich and local, we really believe that the product will be picked up. That’s valuable to an advertiser, our main source of revenue, so we’ll just keep fighting and hope that our hard work pays off soon’.

What’s coming up in SNAP! world?
‘We recently launched the SNAP! tee-a-thon: an ongoing t-shirt design competition through our website and the magazine. We’ve got some great prize packs up for grabs and are trying to draw in some great artists and designers. We’re happy to ship prizes and the competition is open to anyone in any country. Eternal glory awaits the winners!

‘Once our purse strings are a little looser, we’ll increase our distribution and possibly even try SNAP! in a few other cities. We’re excited about what lies ahead.’

MC Ren had a good run in the ’90s, penning the N.W.A. hits Just Don’t Bite It and She Swallowed It and performing with the gangster rap legends after Ice Cube left. His debut album, Kizz My Black Azz, went platinum, and though he sustained moderate success through the remainder of the ’90s, Ren hasn’t released a record in more than a decade, likely due to his conversion to the Nation of Islam. This year, however, the once foul-mouthed rapper is due to release Renincarnation, his fifth studio album.

We’re liking the illustrations in this Champagne Fuelled Jungle promo clip for James Palumbo’s first novel titled Tomas. Palumbo co-founded the iconic South London nightclub, Ministry Of Sound and now presides over a global muti-media business renowned for its daring ideas. It’s his refusal to be daunted by controversy that has enabled him to create in Tomas a unique image of the world which aggressively challenges the moral corruption at the centre of the present financial turmoil.

Reader, beware this book. It’s short and small. It fits into your pocket and you can read it at leisure in any public place or alone at night. It looks like so many other books. You may think that, if the author’s any good, the story will help you escape the world around you: you can drift into another place, better or worse, according to your mood. This is precisely the danger. Do not trust appearances: below these black printed words, spread page over page, lies a vision of the world that’ll alarm the majority, revolt the sensitive and obliterate the prudish.

The US Government has recently authorized a bill that allows eligible countries to trade debt for forest conservation pledges. Indonesia is one of the first to take advantage of the program, having the total of their US$30 million forgiven in exchange for conservation. This is the largest agreement for conservation ever reached. The agreement mandates that Indonesia put forward US$30 million over the next eight years into a trust fund for forest conservation and restoration work. The work could not come at a better time, as the Sumatran rainforest have been depleted by about ninety per cent, due to logging and clearing for agriculture.

New York-based illustrator, and some time Lost At E Minor contributor, Sam Weber, has a nice collection of new work up on his website, including this piece, appropriately titled Prospero.

Yacht will be celebrating the release of their album See Mystery Lights with a Manhattan record release show at Santos Party House on July 28, featuring special guest, the DFA DJs. Check out the video to their new single, Summer Song, above.

Born in the Canadian prairies, Liz Wolfe studied photography at Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts in Toronto. We asked her how much of her work evolves from experimentation and how much is carefully thought out from the beginning?
‘I only experiment in the pre-production stage, never during shooting. Occasional scenarios have arisen in which I’ve altered elements of the photograph slightly during shooting, but these situations are extremely rare. Typically, everything is sketched out, color-coded, planned in advance. I know exactly what the final photograph is going to look like before I start shooting. And I mean exactly!’

‘Not just because I’m a control freak, but also because I like to shoot on film and I try to keep my shooting ratio as low as possible. Though I have incredible respect for people who take full advantage of photography’s inherently spontaneous qualities, for me, photography is not a spontaneous medium. It is a recording device and very little else; the most practical way for me to translate the images from my mind into reality’. Read more of this interview with Liz Wolfe via Feature Shoot.