Quyen Dinh, 32, doesn’t want you to analyze her art. She doesn’t want you to look at it and think about what kind of statement she is making concerning the role of women in society or the immigrant experience in America or The Way We Live Today. That’s not to say that she doesn’t want to you to think about anything when you view her art. She does. Mostly she wants you to think about her.

In her artist statement Dinh, who sculpts and paints her acrylic-on-canvas pieces when she isn’t working 40 hours a week as a parking-control officer in Orange County, California, writes, “Making art for me has always been pure catharsis … The characters in my paintings are, for the most part, self-portraits of my inner self. So when people see my work, rather than wanting them to think about them, I’d like for them to just feel the very things that bring me nostalgia from what could be memories from past lives, things that give me peace, and also the things that make me melancholy.”

Viewing Dinh’s art is like viewing a visual autobiography of her triumphs and her losses, of her frustrations and her joys, of her very real human emotions, which she inevitably shares with our own. But she didn’t start telling her story until 2004, when a birthday gift she made for a friend inspired her to transition from black-and-white “hyperrealistic portraits” to acrylic paints.

Click the link below to see more of Quyen Dinh’s work.

Handmade Detroit hosted the first craft fair of the Metro Detroit season with the Craft Revival on Saturday April 17th 2010. This wasn’t a polyester pant suit wearing community center craft show with handmade holiday themed dresses for your fake plastic lawn goose to wear. Handmade Detroit’s Craft Revival, like all of its events, has been dubbed an “alternative” craft show with vendors selling things like hand grenade soap and paper action figures.

Handmade Detroit is a crafter collective that puts together craft shows, events, and an online community with a blog, DIY calendar, how-to videos, and a resource list of all the best craft places in Metro Detroit.

Here are some of my favorite artists from the Detroit Craft Revival.

Photo by Reebob

Up from initial claims of “No Oil is Spilling”, the Coast Guard now reports that 210,000 gallons of oil are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico each day from the destroyed BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon – and presumably have been since the rig exploded on April 20.

With the total amount of oil spilled during the 1969 oil rig blowout off the coast of Santa Barbara, CA being surpassed every single day, it is difficult to fully comprehend the sheer quantity of oil – and destruction – involved in this disaster. This is the first of several infographics we’ll be posting to convey the amount of damage BP, Transocean, and Halliburton have done to America.

Download the full sized version: [pdf] [jpg]

Stay tuned to Tango Echo for more on the spill – news items in the Twitter feed and infographics and commentary in the articles.

In a recent project created by designer Matt Brown — a former expat, trained at Sweden’s Umea Institute of Design and currently based in Boston — he created a futuristic world in which we’d print our own food from our home printers, marinate beef from the inside out and grow fruit that would look like an ordinary apple but, when chopped, would reveal an alien core of strawberries, grapes and cherries.

He wrote the booklet for this visionary project on a crappy old typewriter that lacked both a working space bar and an @ symbol.

There’s a saying that goes, “If you’ve got one foot in the past and one foot in the future, then you’re pissing on the present.” But I wouldn’t really call what Matt Brown is doing “pissing.” Hell, I’d call it art.

I use our @TangoEchoZine feed for the news items and oddities that we come across in our travels. Since our focus is on original content, we don’t republish posts about these finds. Instead, they go on our Twitter Newswire.

This was the week of April 12, 2010, in the Tango Echo News:

A Transparent Car Factory, A Death Metal Louis Armstrong, the death of Peter Steele, and a #RockBlock. Read on for the details.