Tamagotchis, Action Figures, Happy Meal Toys as Art #ArtTuesday
Artists mine everything for their work. For Jeff Rubio, that includes Tamagotchis, action figures, and friendship-bracelet-esque crafts. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:
Invoking queerness, nostalgia, and joy, the artist taps into childhood experience by creating large-scale versions of the youthful pastime. Based in Philadelphia and working out of the historic Bok building, [Jeff Rubio] first molds dozens of ceramic pony beads, substantially oversized in comparison to the typical craft material. They then introduce vibrant rope to string together each piece to form the evocative, recognizable lizard shape. Rubio also fashions large steel paperclips onto several of their pieces to transform them into keychains, again connecting to the act of crafting as a kid, scrounging around for materials, and working with the most accessible supplies.
“In my studio, I find myself surrounded by tokens of my childhood—Tamagotchis, action figures, and Happy Meal toys. While these artifacts hold great sentimental value, they’re often a lot smaller than we recollect,” Rubio tells Colossal…
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.