Cool Park Slope Artist Alert: Joe Bennett

Joe BennettAnimator Joe Bennett lives in a studio apartment on 3rd street. By day, he works at JWT, the global ad agency that *I'm pretty sure* Mad Men's Sterling Cooper is based on. His clients include Rolex, Bloomberg and Microsoft, just to name a few. By night, he animates for himself at home -- creating odd projects that are repeatedly recognized by popular animation news blog, Cartoon Brew. His installations -- most recently a crude animation that accompanied audio pulled from an episode of Cops -- have appeared in shows from Brooklyn to Istanbul.

What I like most about Joe's work is how often his characters are just plain gross. They have weird faces and often make disgusting, gutteral noises (see here and here). Am I less of a lady for saying this? 

From Odin's Afterbirth: Chapter 2I recently ran into Joe, and asked him the few questions I could think of off the top of my head, before he had to run out the door and straight into Don Draper's midtown office. 

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COOL Brooklyn ARTIST ALERT: Linda Zacks

Linda Zacks' work is self-described as "part poetry, part paint, part zip and zoom." Once the Design Director at VH1, this local artist now works solo, creating mixed media work for big-name clients like Sony, Newport Beach Film Festival and INQ Mobile, just to name a few. Her work is bold and beautiful, and manages to look both haphazard and deliberate at the same time. Last year she was featured in Photoshop User Magazine where she confessed her love for scanning as many objects as she can get her hands on (including ink-soaked paper towels, rusty jar lids and her own dog), which she then throws into Photoshop, which is used as "a kind of virtual glue stick." I recently had a chat with Linda, a Brooklyn rez who loves working with found materials and takes her pooch to Park Slope's favorite pet hospital, Animal Kind. 

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