The Best of Creative Sugar by Creative Sugar Magazine

CREATIVE SUGAR AN EMERGING ARTIST MAGAZINE

THE

BEST Of

ISSUE

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Creative Sugar Issue 13 Editor-in-Chief Sabrina Scott Art Direction Sabrina Scott Thank you to all who made each and every issue possible.

FROM THE EDITOR It ’s amazing. Soooo many talented and devoted artists and creatives who spend countless amounts of hours perfecting their craft. Why? Because it ’s a passion. Art is great because it ’s subjective, and makes its own relationship with the viewer. It can be beautiful, distressing to look at, or simply inspired.

Evoking

emotion is good. The most important aspect of it all, and what led me to appreciate art, is the capacity for one to express themselves. It can be an expression of a thought, an action, or simple appreciation of beauty. Whatever the form, whatever the technique, we’ve got to allow for this form of expression to exist and develop within individuals--not mass society. It may be the only thing left that we can truly claim as our own. Art may be the only thing in this hypersensitized world that allows you to express opinion, hope,

desire,

dreams,

controversy,

oppression,

strength, and voice. I’m sure some of the artists that are included in the following pages may have at one time faced adversity, lack of representation in the art world bubble, or sometimes had to make the decision Contact: sabrina@creativesugarmagazine.net web: creativesugarmagazine.net facebook.com/creativesugarmagazine twitter.com/creative_sugar © 2016 Creative Sugar Magazine All rights to art, words, photos, design and copyrights are the property of the Artist. All work in this publication may not be used without the Artist’s consent.

between art supplies or rent. The point is, they did not compromise what they believe in, or what makes them truly feel happy or at peace. We’ve got to appreciate art. Support art + creativity. It makes a much more beautiful world.

Sabrina Scott

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

New York, New York

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not your

SAMO, SAMO

T IST R A Y B D E IR P S IN

L E H C I M N A E J B A S Q UI AT Model: Amira - New York Models Photographer: Gavin Rea Stylist: Sherah Jones Hair: Aleksandra Sasha Nesterchuk Makeup: Colleen Runne Photo Assistant: Yves Francois Stylist Assistant: Jade Ford Cardigan: Handkerchief Shorts: American Apparel Shoes: Jeffery Campbell Necklace: Philippe Audibert Paris Makeup: Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics, Lip Tar Colors

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SAMO AS A NEO ART FORM - BASQ UIAT

Jacket: Vintage Vinyl Trench Bodysuit: American Apparel Shoes: Alexander Wang Necklace: Forever 21 Bracelet: Philippe Audibert Paris Makeup: Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics, Lip Tar Colors

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SAMO AS AN EN D TO PLAY ING ART - BASQ UIAT

Jacket: Handkerchief Denim: Buffalo David Bitton Belt/Shoes: Stylist â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Own

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Hand beaded Romper: Eredappa Shoes: Rag and Bone Hat: Uniqlo

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Jacket: Vintage Leather Motorcycle Jumpsuit: Buffalo David Bitton Shoes: Jeffery Campbell Belt/Glasses: Stylist's own

SAMO AS AN END TO MINDWASH RELIGION...

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...NOWHERE POLITICS AND BOGUS PHILOSOPHY -BASQ UIAT CREATIVE SUGAR

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Artwork: " Tumbleweed" Hexagon knit leather jacket: Sunghee Bang "Sade" layered chiffon maxi skirt: Ra'mon Lawrence Wood horn with pentagram necklace: Stylist's own Military StĂź 16boots: BedCREATIVE SUGAR

Kevin William Reed CREATIVE SUGAR

ARTIST Artwork: King Drag "Digby" zipper vest- Ra'mon Lawrence "Lowell" raglan boxy tee: Ra'mon Lawrence "Alastaire" drop crotch twill trouser: Ra'mon Lawrence Shoes: Bed StÃ¼

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by Sabrina Scott I visited a group show called Anatomically Incorrect in Brooklyn, a few weeks ago. It was there that I saw Kevin’s work--discarded materials restructured to create layers and shapes, hanging from the warehouse walls. Pieces that were once throwaways were revived, revisited and brought to new life as 3-D installations that had creature characteristics. Simply put, Kevin’s inspiration is the usage of industrial waste—or trash. He said, “The concrete walls of the warehouse were particularly challenging to hang on, but the space was exactly what the work has always been looking for and it felt really at home.” This home was at the Alternative Arts Association’s annual big show. The AAA is a not-for-profit arts organization whose platform is to bring many different forms of art together. Dance, music, performance, video, two-dimensional, three-dimensional, you name it. It was all inspired work. What’s your name and where are based? Kevin William Reed, based in Brooklyn, NY (Bed-Stuy) How do you describe yourself? Artist. Which inevitably leads to the question “what kind of artist?” But for me the specification isn’t necessary. Artist suits what I do without restriction. I’m a creator of things but no longer limit myself to one discipline or structure. What do you use to create? While I can’t specify a medium I can certainly tell you what I use to create. I’m really into trash. Specifically industrial waste/scraps/ leftovers and the possibilities therein. I’m really interested in a Baroque sense of drapery, folds upon folds upon folds, aesthetic elegance/ornateness. However, I tend to find this in the mundane, the wasted. I’m excited by the uncanny valley that is created when two polar opposite aesthetics (garbage and Baroque sensibilities) combine to create an object or a space that is at once beautiful and full yet also derelict and uncomfortable. I think that puts the viewer in a really crazy place. I also love acrylic paint, spray paint, woodblock prints (there’s something really crazy about using a chisel to carve an image rather than just drawing it… Makes drawing seem wimpy. That said I’m also an avid drawer, but chisels, man. How do you describe your work? Sustainable, aggressive, creepy, billowing, excessive, raunchy, rowdy, dangerous (six-foot, razor-sharp, coiled saw blades), loud as fuck, mindful, unimpeded. What inspires you? Scumbags (and their environments), Legends of the Hidden Temple, sewer rats, R. Crumb, Hellraiser, sunlit forest floors, raging water, Versailles, hallucinogenic memories, dive bars, T-Rex, velociraptors, Mario ghosts, queer culture, the 90s, Ki-L, my tattoo artists (Becki Wilson & Jason Flanell), getting home covered in dirt, swarms, razor blades, bowl socks, my Grandma, porcupine quills, platypi, Bed-Stuy, Where the Wild Things Are, the Subway, abandoned places. What motivates you when you may not be inspired? Eg, music, etc. My own sense of stagnation, of not

doing enough. There are definitely some bands that I’ll throw on if I’m not feeling it at the moment (Handsome Furs, Cold War Kids, Django Django) but the only thing that really gets me going when I’m out of it is my need to constantly create and one-up myself. Why do you create? As a way to cope with my brain. Lots of detrimental and circular thoughts up there. When I begin to create something, even if it’s trivial at first it always sorts out my thinking. Then my work is able to serve as the medium with which I can communicate those thoughts… So I guess, in a backwards sort of way I create to articulate my thoughts and vantage point, but out of necessity (peace of mind) not out of a need to be heard (necessarily). Describe any elaborate activities, rituals you may have done while seeking inspiration. Weird question. I don’t think I perform elaborate rituals to seek inspiration, I think the rituals come from being inspired. I used to walk about 20 blocks of Brooklyn bordering the Navy Yard 5-7 nights a week in search of some sort of discarded material that I could bend, float, drape, pinch, break or paint with and it eventually became the strangest thing I did as I would get waist-deep in a dumpster filled with human trash (the majority of which is half-eaten food I soon found out) fiendishly throwing materials to collect. The few individuals who got to witness it never really saw it in the jovial light I did. To them I was a dirty gutter kid with a fiery glow of excitement in his eyes and armfuls of trash. When did you know you wanted to be an artist? I don’t know if I ever knew. There was just never any other option. My life is very up-in-the-air and I have very few constants, but I think that is what I always knew from the time I was a self-cognizant child. I never saw one concrete thing for myself or an endpoint or a settling. I guess I always knew I would be living the life of an artist, I just didn’t necessarily know that’s what it was until later. What do you hope to accomplish in 5 years? To make the best damn chocolate chip cookies anyone’s ever tasted, make an exorbitant amount of work, take over an abandoned church for an art space, show in Eastern Europe, and take over the world. Which is your own favorite piece or body of work? Describe why. Right now my favorite piece is the giant 3’ x 8’ woodblock print I completed after the trash work you’ve seen. This is both because it’s my most accomplished print and the newest direction I’ve moved in (hypersexual) but also because it got STOLEN in the last show that it was in (after it had already been sold) so there’s a weird enigma surrounding it… the most backhanded compliment ever? Who is your favorite artist? Describe why. That’s a nearly impossible question to answer. There are so many artists that I am inspired by and naming one or even a few would do injustice to the league of inspirational artists I’ve come across. However, if I could be any artist throughout history it would be Hieronymus Bosch cause that dude was crazy and did whatever the fuck he wanted within a ridiculously Catholic and controlled society.

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Artwork: "King Drag" (tail) Cocoon wool coat: Sunghee Bang "Lowell" raglan boxy tee: Ra'mon Lawrence "Alastaire" drop crotch twill trouser- Ra'mon Lawrence Spiked chain necklace: Topman 20Shoes: Bed StĂź CREATIVE SUGAR

Artwork: “b.u.g. #9” Cable knit sweater: Rodebjer Suspenders: Rodebjer Bone necklace: Neqo Habibi “Bradley” lurex denim trouser shorts: Ra’mon Lawrence Boots: Bed Stü

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Artwork: b.u.g. #3 "McGuiness" hat- Sunghee Bang Round framed glasses: Artist's own "Emma" dress: Ra'mon Lawrence "Elrick" engineered twill trouser: Ra'mon Lawrence "Tomas" reversible leather belt: Ra'mon Lawrence Boots: Bed StĂź 22 CREATIVE SUGAR

(continued from page 21) Any words to live by for an aspiring artist starting out? Hear everyone. Listen to few. Follow none. And do whatever the fuck you want. Check out: kevinwilliamreed.com

Artwork: "Roaring Expletive" "Fountaine" metallic brocade blazer: Ra'mon Lawrence Wool vest: Rodebjer "Elrick" engineered twill trouser: Ra'mon Lawrence Bono hardware necklace: Hitch Ring Shoes: Bed Stü Artwork: "The Guardian" Skull plate necklace: Michael Spirito Raw edge mesh vest: Ra'mon Lawrence Cascading sweater vest: Sunghee Bang "Morgan" cocoon tee: Ra'mon Lawrence "Rafferty" drop crotch challis trouser- Ra'mon Lawrence "Tomas" reversible leather belt- R a’mon Lawrence Military boots: Bed Stü

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Denim On Denim A G I N G E R B R E A D B O Y I N N A Z I S PA C E

F LY B O Y S H O O T S H I S L A D D E R

MARS=VENUS

SISTER NANCYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

Photography by Olena Shkoda Fashion Direction by Sherah Jones

Models: Souhela (MC2 Model Management) Vladimir Gvozd

Hooded Denim Vest: Buffalo David Bitton Vintage Denim Overalls: Lee Jeans

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Chambray denim shirt: Buffalo David Bitton

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S- “Dinasty” T-Shirt Dress: MUA MUA Vintage Levi’s Jacket- Urban Renewal V- Motorcycle Denim Jacket: Buffalo David Bitton Bowler Hat: Forever 21 Bow Tie: Stylist’s own Navy Straight Leg Denim: Buffalo David Bitton Belt: Model’s own Shoes: Vans

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Vintage Bleached Flannel Shirt: Stylist's own Black Skinny Jeans: Buffalo David Bitton Leather Collar: Handkerchief Shoes: Vans

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Leather Fringed Top: Sylvie Schimmel Vintage Gold Earrings: Stylist's own Blue Acid Wash Skinnys: Buffalo David Bitton

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Out of the

Blue S- Flared White Denim: Buffalo David Bitton V- Wide Leg White Denim: Buffalo David Bitton

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Esther Neff talks

Panapoly Performance Lab

& documentary opera

Esther Neff photo by Laura Bluher

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By John Thomas

atching the operas of Panoply Performance Lab is always an enlightening experience. Their work forces the analytical faculties and the imagination to come alive in equal measure. The result, in the author’s experience, may lead to some startling questions about how art, learning, and music can be created and received. For instance, why couldn’t Devo be a free jazz band that played educational songs a la Schoolhouse Rock? What if critical theory professors threw strange objects at their pupils instead of putting them to sleep? Or why shouldn’t a scene like the virgin sacrifice from Rite of Spring be performed not as a ballet, but as an LSD-informed brawl? The associations vary from viewer to viewer, so deep and unsettling are the style, content, and methods of the group. Central to this largely collaborative collective is Esther Neff, who has emerged as a kind of institution in the Brooklyn arts community. She is notable not only for her extraordinary work with Panoply Performance Lab, but for her smaller-scale work, which has the immediacy of PPL’s operas, and for an adventurous, risk-taking curatorial spirit that has brought disparate artists from a number of fields to participate in various venues and collaborations. Throughout all of her endeavors Esther has remained committed to nurturing a community of artists who desire independence from the art establishment and share radical, countercultural values. If you, dear reader, find any of this appealing, and you wind up in Brooklyn, chances are you’ll cross paths with Ms. Neff in no time. JT: How’d you get into performance art? What are the benefits of this art form over others? EN: I studied theater directing in college in the Midwest and got obsessed with Joseph Beuys, both his performance work and his ideas of social sculpture, also with Ranciere and his “emancipation of the spectator” and conceptions of “sense” and so on. When I moved to NYC and started experiencing much more performance art, experimental music and theater, I got more rigorous about considering the acts of performance-making; getting groups of people together for the event, practicing, groups working together in different ways, individuals playing alone, speech/the voice, memorizing (composer friends passing around Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory), forms of public oration, language, ways of theorizing…I started seeing as much performance art as possible because it was the context that framed my interests situationally and seemed to have the most awareness of itself.

political and economic situations as a medium within social structures. I don’t think performance art is its own “art form.” It shares its situations, concrete operations, and materials (hammers, drums, flour, white boxes, black boxes, seated and unseated spaces, public spaces, musical notation, vegetables, stretchy legs, facial expressions) with performance at large, so performance art’s benefits for me become about how I subjectively experience it as a directly theoretical form. For me, its intentions involve performing in a hyper-situational context, being a way of perceiving/ seeing while being conscious of those ways. JT: It seems your group, Panoply Performance Lab, is equal parts troupe and method. Could you explain the workings of Panoply Performance Lab? EN: PPL is a flexible collective that forms around projects that we call “documentary operas.” These involve different social situations in process, including public Focus Workshops for collective theorization, conferences, rehearsals, sets of short-form reactive and site-specific performances, participatory performances, curated and non-curated exhibitions of performance, and varying cast and team development of material. At the core of almost all of these projects is an opera, which we then perform when ready. We attempt to relate the form of each project’s development process to the theorization it practices/what it is theorizing on. I think this could be called methodization, but there is no mimetic single method from project to project, only a vocabulary or way of framing performance (which is made evident by my way of talking about it here) and this act of relating. We are into absurdly formal attempts and the absurdity of formal attempts. Right now [07/16/2012], a more regular PPL team exists because we’ve been performing the NATURE FETISH opera. The project overall has been going on for a long time; the public components, including Focus Workshops, individual performances, etc., started in October 2011. The performance team is Jessica Bathurst, Arla Berman, Matthew Gantt, Katie Johnston, Natasha Missick, Brian McCorkle, me, Michael Newton, Ellen O’Meara, and Dave Ruder. Cory Bracken and Devlin Goldberg have also performed in the opera, and other participants are numerous. 20+ artists are also part of the performance exhibition, performing their own work.

In my mind, performance art as a discipline is more aware of its situation in terms of different relationships between artists, audiences and participants, use of objects and space, as well as performance’s

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Brian McCorkle and I also perform shorter-form performance art pieces under the collective’s name, and others sometimes join us for these, like the 4-hour performance PPL Help the Water that we did along the Gowanus Canal earlier in July. Most fundamentally, it seems PPL is formed around the act of theorizing-as-performancemaking. JT: Do you think the collective and aleatoric techniques that you’ve employed to compose your work have a political basis? EN: Yes, if one defines “politics” as structuring of the authority of certain individuals and groups to construct and disseminate reality. Collective and aleatoric modes also structure authority; they can serve to de-hierarchize or hierarchize, disseminate, practice, and/or etc. PPL’s performances are not trying to simply disrupt existing power structures, we are practicing different sociopolitical situations, structures, and ways of being and seeing.

JT: Theater and performance art have always had a tenuous, yet symbiotic relationship with one another. How do you locate your work within this divide? EN: This relates to the first question. The rhetoric goes that performance art as a discipline evolved from the need to make post-product art, something that couldn’t be valued within existing industrialized economic schemas; unrepeatable/situational, authorized by a marginalized subject, ephemeral, emergent, while traditional theater tended to pose itself as a mirror to a universal reality, a way of capturing or commodifying a shared human experience or event, a saran-wrapped slice-of-life pie with a recipe that can be followed again and again

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(reinforcement of this paradigm is called dramaturgy). Right now, the theater industry continues to see and use theater solely as a dramaturgical form, even though there are so many other ways of “theatricalizing.” The word “theater” is ruined by the theater industry even though it’s really useful as it shares the root “the-” (seeing) with “the-ory” (ways of seeing). I use the word “theater” simply to mean “way of seeing while being somewhere” or “site of sight.” Due to all this semantic surgery, I guess my location is the same as the Fool’s on the Rider Waite tarot card, perpetually poised to fall right over the cliff into the divide. JT: Your “operas” stage works in a lot of different mediums as a total, immersive composition. How do you trace your work to the more or less Continental tradition of opera? Do you find yourself feeling more like P.T. Barnum or Richard Wagner most of the time? EN: In my wildest and most presumptuous imagination it goes: Wagner>Brecht>Robert Ashley>PPL. Music is at the core of what we do. While its different modes of improvisation, notation, and so on have different operations and can also theorize, a lot of the music Brian throughwrites and develops with performers tends to also be MUSIC, replete with ear-worming melodies and complex harmonies. Circus is interesting too; the populism of it is desirable and preferable to the elitism of grand opera… I’d rather be Jennifer Miller than P.T. Barnum though. JT: You mentioned your newest opera, Nature Fetish. What is it about? How have the performances gone? EN: NATURE FETISH: A Public Opera performs clusters of theories about “the nature of nature.” These theories were identified, alluded to, imagined, invented, aligned,

Esther Neff and Brian McCorkle performing BABY BABY BABY at ACUD’s Serendipity Gallery (a performance with Anya Liftig as part of MPA-B, 2012). Photo by Glen Stoker.

associated, impressed, elected, organized, and so on throughout the process, from the early Focus Workshops with the general public at University Settlement on. At University Settlement, the piece ended up as a kind of musical for children; in Berlin, the fragments and frameworks got more sexual and violent. At Grace Exhibition Space we performed it the first night as we had at U Settlement and it seemed like an experimental theater piece from the 1960s. We had to move some of it out onto Broadway (in Bushwick/Bed-Stuy) and perform in concert with the J/M/Z. JT: You recently acquired a new space in South Williamsburg. What are your plans for it? EN: PPL organizes and curates experimental/conceptual time-based performance across disciplines, often with an emphasis on social arts practices and participatory forms. We also make huge messes and a lot of noise, and we build things. We plan on using this space for these endeavors. There is certain work being done that really excites us and we

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ABOVE: Esther Neff in PPL Help the Water, a 4-hour durational performance with Brian McCorkle, Jessica Bathurst, and Michael Newton, Gowanus Ballroom/Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn (2012) Photo by Geraldo Mercado LEFT: Esther Neff performs solo piece Onionono at Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn (2011) Photo by Anya Liftig NEXT PAGE - top right: Esther Neff and Brian McCorkle performing Birdhouse Home Craft Project for Fathers and Daughters #1 at IV Soldiers Gallery, Brooklyn, 2012. Still from video documentation. NEXT PAGE - bottom right: Esther Neff performing NATURE FETISH: Anima/Animus at KuLe Theatre in Berlin, 2012. Still from video documentation.

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want to support these artists and groups in any way we can. Right now, Chloe Bass is holding one-on-one consultations as part of her Bureau of Self-Recognition here through August 3rd. In August, we will be starting a performance art open-mic MC’ed by Matthew Silver and we are currently hosting a meeting every Sunday at 11am to organize and curate non-competitively as artists, discuss work, and share resources. The space is also home to Valerie Kuehne, who does a lot of incredible music curation under the banner The Super

same place and time and have $0 + access to lots of trash are having some similar experiences right now, and some different ones, like always. PPL exists in relationships with some identifiable aesthetic and practical communities; these clumps of individuals, spaces, events, and practices involve cycles of influence, concrete mutual support, interpersonal conflicts, dialectical construction, and various forms of collaboration. There are certain habits, aesthetics, and traditions that come out of consistent social contact and certain realities that result in aesthetic similarities between groups and individuals.

Coda. We also take proposals at any time; anyone can email us with an idea at panoplylab@gmail.com. JT: The national DIY underground has exploded since the ‘80s, when it was mostly related to hardcore and only occasionally art. Now there are venues catering to music of all types as well as there being art galleries, printmaking workshops, food cooperatives, even yoga studios that could all fall under the DIY banner. Do you feel a part of this cultural milieu? Do you feel any relation to the other progenitors of DIY that focus more on music, be it pop or noise, and more traditional visual art? EN: I was born in 1984 in Indiana so I’m not sure about the history of the DIY movement…the story I hear most often goes that the DIY movement was catalyzed by Reagan’s initial cuts to the NEA and a turn against public culture, etc., but it’s been a strong ideological/aesthetic direction for a good long while. Jerzy Grotowski/Ludwik Flaszen wrote Towards a Poor Theater in 1968…I’m not sure that hardcore was the source of “the” DIY underground, but maybe our difference in perspective on this proves that there’s really no such thing as a single DIY underground and that human beings simultaneously construct and are constructed by their political, economic, epistemic, and private situations…so right now those of us who live in the

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B aby S kin G love "the art of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the service of womyn" -pinchot Photography by Charley Parden Creative Direction by Bailey Nol an Creative Assistant & Wearable Sculptures by Ellen Robin Rosenberg Fashion by BabySkinGlove Collection Models: Bailey Nol an, Charley Parden, Viva Soudan, Kathleen Weigand, Marta Borazanian, Annie Goodfriend, Wesley Fl ash (not shown), Marissa Mickelberg, Wabs Mickelberg, & Bertha

BY JOHN THOMAS

BabySkinGlove is a group unique in the performance art circuit for their devotion to glamour and spectacle, and for their larger-than-life personas. Whether inspirational ballet students one night or abused country superstars the next, their trail of trashed camp and digital detritus leads the NYC counterculture continuum to father out territory. Their shows seem heirs to Jack Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hermetic drag culture or No Wave cinemaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s iconoclastic identity games. But precedents are hard to peg when a group mutates so casually. As a unit, their collective polymorphous perversity knows no bounds. Historical eras get turned inside out, and hopelessly dated concepts like gender are left at the door. Audiences are osmotically drawn into the group dynamic while the cult-like charisma of their leader, Bailey Catherine Dorothea Nolan, suggests total control. Throughout all the transformations the group may navigate, her unifying vision is the most consistent facet of the group. Here she answers questions about BabySkinGlove in fabulous detail.

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What is the goal of BabySkinGlove? “Someday time travel will be as passé as home phones but in the meantime there’s BabySkinGlove. Ultimately transportation is my goal, a full body motion from one real space to another psychic space. I want to remove every viewer from that cold hard gallery chair and drop them smack dab in the center of the Olympic rowing team paddling through the Arctic Ocean circa 1933 with little bits of ice on every nose hair as they leave the show. Every time someone explains the Internet to me I have to sit quietly in a dark room for a few hours to readjust my pupils to the size of my new brain. BabySkinGlove is the same thing as the Internet both in after-affect and complicated definition. Really I’d like to systematically erase all things definitive spanning from time through gender. With each performance, I provide a platform for a person to think about something that they don’t want to or don’t know how to or a place to not think at all. I’m providing empty space so we can all get together and redefine empty. Eventually your Christmas shopping list will read BabySkinGlove Barbie for baby, Margiela x BabySkinGlove for Mama, and the Ford BabySkinGlove for Daddy; in the year 2072 when my great grandchildren’s lungs have evolved into carbon dioxide pumps and the sky is a regular purple, BabySkinGlove will be to them what Pee Wee Herman is to me: a faux pas and a good memory but in the meantime I want a private jet and a house big enough to give each cat a bedroom.” What do you consider BabySkinGlove’s most ambitious actions? “Being a woman in this day and age is still a radical move. Suffrage wasn’t even a century ago and I can barely say the word abortion in this country without hearing a gun cock. I live in a moment of constant truth and do not bend my ideals for anyone regardless of how many bridges I’ve left smoldering. BabySkinGlove is the vagina that you’ve always wanted to look inside but were too shy; I’ve splayed everything out for your convenience. I consider myself to be the keeper of female energy in the tri-state area as if I was an estrogen-bound sun and surrounding me are solar rings of every womyn form. I have been known to pop the dull cherry of an audience just on sight. I am interested in that which functions on the borders of life, the destitute, the lonely, the yearning, the drag. I am interested in speaking a language that is not easily recognized but immediately understood.”

What do you think the role of glamour in performance art is? “All performative arts are expressed through the body. How a performer chooses to decorate one’s body equates what a painter would spread across a canvas. I will look at your color scheme before I see your haircut. Susan Sontag talks about how people can be categorized by their response to bodily peripheries. Those more in touch with their hygiene, e.g., blinged out mani-pedis, will undoubtedly waste hours of their lives on the details but ultimately be more prepared for human connections while those disgusted by fingernails and fallen hair are destined to spend more energy on questioning the human condition. Glamour is a state of mind. I have never been rich and my income is almost comical but I am in a constant state of richness. The universe has a way of delivering exactly what is asked of her. Presenting myself as someone with money is the same thing as being someone with money. As an artist, I offer people a show through not only my body of work but also my body itself and avidly await your read.” How do you feel your work fits in with your peers? What artists do you feel camaraderie with? “A few years ago BabySkinGlove hired a limo and abducted Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch, and their entire entourage of boygirls. There was a moment that night when I was in the pool talking about Raven Symone surrounded by people just a few years older than me who were making art that moved me deeply, people I consider my artistic heroes, when a locked door in my head came unhinged and the universe delivered a message to me ultimately about how I was cosmically BFFs with them and like them I have a duty to strive for personal artistic perfection. I’m at a moment in my own history where anything is possible. I’m basically Martha Stewart after prison. Following the advice of another Martha, the pioneer of performance art Martha Wilson, I go to and apply for everything that interests me. The key to success is sometimes as simple as follow-through. I’m not one to look over the urinal to the gentleman next to me and giggle. As always there is a lot of good and bad art happening right now but it’s a matter mostly of cultural taste buds. I have a laundry list of Facebook friends who I admire and often digitally stalk including Raul de Nieves, Labanna Babalon, Ann Liv Young, and Colin Self who have unknowingly contributed to my growth as an artist in New York. Additionally

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I have my pride and joy: BabySkinGlove comprised of the people in my life who are the driving force behind everything you see, the hammer and nails themselves.” What sources does BabySkinGlove draw inspiration from? “Google images is my homepage, my inspirations are infinite. Currently I’m working with Miss Piggy, the forestry industry, extreme layering, female country music stars, red food, Anne Geddes, holiday cards, corporate marketing, and all the things that microscopes make. As a Taurus, I’m mainly concerned with the things immediately surrounding me such as top Instagram users and what’s new on Hulu. Most of my endeavors begin with an image in my head, a color or an outfit or a character, and take on new life forms as I birth the image from 2D to 3D or at times 4D and obviously 4G. Additionally, every project speaks to me from a different level of the animal kingdom. Recently I’ve been really in touch with my whale spirit animal after spending part of the summer in Nova Scotia. I have a strong connection to all things too large to hold, specifically all bodies of water. I am eternally interested in that which came before and my earliest bodies of work could easily be labeled historical reenactments, always 100% accurate according to the Internet.” At your performances you take on a guru or guide role. What are your qualifications for this if any? What is the attraction to taking on this persona? “I recently had my aura read and the reader told me that I have dominant energy, meaning my biological make-up allows me to literally activate the energy of the people around me. I think we’re all just masses of energy walking around exchanging little particles of ourselves with each other. Being a performer is a matter of crowd control. I have spent years prodding and pruning my energy so as to deliver my best self in all circumstances; I have worked deliberately to be able to pick and choose who or what I allow in and out of my person. Most people have this ability but rare is the instance when I find a counterpart to this thinking. It is our quintessential duty as good humans to acknowledge each other’s energy because without it, we wouldn’t be able to grow or change. Personally, during performances I am able to separate from my shadow self or my everyday persona and access my higher self thereby literally taking on the role of a spirit guide.”

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To what extent is your work a parody or pastiche of self-help techniques? “Nothing I do is a parody and my aim is never to mock, only to respond to the things the world is telling me. Although elements of humor are littered throughout my work, I am reaching much deeper to relate to the most base level of humankind. Art helps people in just as many ways as therapy or reading. I provide a service and I give a part of myself to everyone who embarks upon that service, sometimes unbeknownst to them. I fully believe in self-help methods and the communities people build in order to better cope with the complications of living. My work is a tool to aid in all forms of improvement. In a way I am studying the art of selfhelp.” BabySkinGlove performances recall the utopian promises of cults and only hint at their sinister dimensions. What is the BabySkinGlove conception of utopia? “It is very easy for Person-A to look at a white floor and say to Person-B Hey, this floor is blue. Then Person-B, an upright average self-deciding citizen will look at the floor and say to Person-A, No this is a white floor. That happens all the time everyday. But let’s say Person-A invites Person-B over for a cup of coffee…then Person-A bakes Person-B a homemade strawberry rhubarb pie and braids Person-B’s hair and shows Person-B the right way to put on liquid eyeliner and then gives Person-B a little grey kitten named Cookie to keep Person-B company in the wee hours of the night, Person-B will love Person-A forever. And next time when Person-A says Hey, this floor is blue, Person-B might say, You know, Person-A, I never thought of blue in that way! In utopia, BabySkinGlove is the eternal Person-A.” How would your work function as mass media? Do you ever dream of courting a very large audience? “Aside from the incredible psychic following I have now, of course. I dream of a world where RuPaul and Kris Jenner birth the ultimate momager guru for me to keep courtside in the event of any and all emergencies—fashion, medical, legal or otherwise. I’d love to eat gold with Marina Abramovic and James Franco. I would love to be able to access the larger community that I draw from, a privilege that often comes alongside a hard-earned reputation or a trust fund. However, I am truly focused on personal inter-

A G I N G E R B R E A D B O Y I N N A Z I S PA C E

F LY B O Y S H O O T S H I S L A D D E R

MARS=VENUS

SISTER NANCYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

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actions with individuals. My most successful performances have been staged in my house in Ridgewood where the level of spectacle involved in the transformation overshadows the headcount. I wouldn’t mind being a reality television star or allowing the world to access my unmasked self as I have a unique gift of nearly infallible self-confidence. It is important to me that I reach the world in person, I think I’ll be more interested in video once holograms are available for home use. In the end, my goal is to leave a lasting impression on all the people I encounter far and wide.” What projects can we expect from BabySkinGlove in the future? “For the past year, I have been researching a colony of women in North America who self-proclaim themselves to be mourning the death of over 100,000 Cardinal birds that were massacred in 1853. The women have lived secluded on an island since then wearing only red and maintaining a matriarchal society. I have developed a complex relationship with their community and am working towards a museum exhibit to showcase their incredibly inspirational culture. Alongside these women I have been working on a series of customized red wool dyes used to make one-of-a-kind fashion pieces created specifically for deeper zodiac expression. On November 30th I am debuting a collaborative project with artist Jay Critchley at a new exclusive spa and/or gallery in Bushwick where we will offer people the opportunity to escape historical judgment and enter into an antiarchive treatment. And as always, I’m working on my cult.”

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“O ¨ R I N ” - V I E W 1 WORK IN PROGRESSE PLANK M I X E D C O M P U T E R T E C H N I Q U E , D I G I TA L P R I N T, 2012

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THE ORGANIZATION OF DESIRE: WRITING AND ART BY PIERRE EMMANUEL FILLET by jeff grunthaner

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“ L A D E R N I È R E B ATA I L L E D E N A P O L É O N ” ( N A P O L E O N ’ S L A S T B AT T L E ) D E TA I L S , M I X E D C O M P U T E R T E C H N I Q U E , D I G I TA L P R I N T, 2011

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The Organization of Desire: Writing & Art by

Pierre Emmanuel Fillet by jeff grunthaner Pierre Emmanuel Fillet is something of a rarity in contemporary art. Both artist and writer— as well as an actor and filmmaker—Fillet’s sensibility cannot be confined to an easy rubric or reduced to a single genre. His intelligence is an intricate web of transferences from one region of experience to another, culminating in a mathematical formalism that everywhere verges on the mythic. As he says in L’art numérique: hybridation, an unpublished manuscript: “We could understand digital matrices as a kind of animism, an animism whose gods would be conceived as systems and structures, each god warring against the others, while forming itself out of objects and functions.” In paintings such as Neural Receptor Head and o¨rin, Fillet manifests a hidden vitality in the minutest details of Picabian, machine-like structures. An upsurging psychical quality binds their intricate tessellations: a momentousness portending a fully realized utopia, which at this stage of human evolution is only visible diagrammatically. Detailing the virtual schematics of a world where intelligence and form are soldered tightly together, Fillet’s paintings redefine with unique expressivity our notion of “system.” They present a vast interrelatedness of parts and render freedom spatially eloquent. The works included here are organic, gestural responses to the ubiquity of digital mediation, portraying an a priori reality saturated with functional configurations that resemble structures of the visible world. Examining Fillet’s work closely, one notes a complex weaving of collage elements with gestural brushstrokes, assembled with a mathematic elegance that questions digital media itself, making visual space an arena of vectors in motion. Fillet engages both his pallette and the extension of spatiality on their own terms,

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confronting his medium as a set of questions to be experientially answered through his practice and the production of individual paintings. The result is an atmosphere of nervousness not to be confused with anxiety. It’s simply what happens when we realize that the matter we shape through our technologies is the concretized extension of our human bodies.

T O P : N E U R A L R E C E P T O R H E A D, M I X E D C O M P U T E R T E C H N I Q U E , D I G I TA L P R I N T 2011 L E F T: G E N E R AT O R C E L L 2, M I X E D C O M P U T E R T E C H N I Q U E , D I G I TA L P R I N T 2012 R I G H T: LOVE C O N S P I R A C Y, MIXED C O M P U T E R T E C H N I Q U E , D I G I TA L P R I N T 2011 ALL WORK BY THE ARTIST

photo by melissa robin photography

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From Digital Art: The Making of the Chimera

Excerpted from Fillet’s manuscript, L’art numérique: hybridation. Translated by Pierre Emmanuel Fillet and Jeff Grunthaner.

The human figure, viewed as part of a vast matrix, its individual destiny residing within it, allows us to analogically approach the connection between the digital artist and his work. In the matrix, the value of space is not the same as in traditional pictorial space: the walls are displaced, distances are dematerialized, the computer screen takes on a new quality of depth shot though with intricate gestural trajectories. Like superimposed non-linear neural pathways, the artist’s goals, artistic tools, and the figures he shapes already express a measurable interval between action and perception. His hand does not directly touch the figures, but mediately, through mouse clicks, keyboard and screen. IV Cybernetics, the science of purposeful control, has proven a philosophical as well as aesthetic ideal: life as perpetual extension, which can be used to structure people’s behavior and develop new pictorial shapes. This idea was strong enough to interest the ruling hegemony who created the controlling class. VI The artist is a voyant. But what exactly does he see? This is especially what interests us when we observe him using his medium. VII With diagrammatic thought, we have the impression that the potential structure of space is comprehended like a plan, a map, with this specific difference: the diagram dynamically defines the map as a volume of n dimensions. XIII The global production of screens of different kinds and sizes—iPhones, TVs, computers—before yielding to the domination of the spectacle by images, initially presents a «built-in» transfer of the act of seeing. Shapes, choices, the pitfalls of vision, are already determined, already activated by an unconscious transformation, a recasting of vision by different types of digital devices. The raw information of reality anticipated by the cognitive system of the individual is already constructed by the computer out of trajectories and filters. These technical processes allow us to understand the computer as a commutator, in which the imprint of vision is doubled before being qualified as “seen.”

L E F T: N E U R A L R E C E P T O R H E A D D E TA I L , M I X E D C O M P U T E R T E C H N I Q U E , D I G I TA L P R I N T 2011 WORK BY THE ARTIST

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uantum radiance: Artist andrew salgado by Kenneth Lundquist, Jr.

London. It’s a dark, moist evening with an above average amount of bustle in the city. Andrew Salgado peers down from his studio window onto the streets below. His eyes focus not on the honeybee activity, but on the rain smearing down the window and how the faces of those hurrying by are altered. Andrew’s astounding perception is directly expressed in his paintings. He captures an essence of his subjects, a vulnerability that is today rarely seen in abstract expressionism. His quintessential accent streams across the choppy Atlantic as he explains why art is simply his Universe. “Art finds the avenue to articulate the things I can’t adequately express in any other way. I have realized recently that I define myself first and foremost as an artist: this is the formative aspect of my person; all other things are tangential to that aspect as my core. It’s how I know where I am in the world, how I understand stimulus and how I relate to others.” I ask Andrew what attracted him to his current style and how his work stands out among other artists. “I think this was a long process of understanding how to respond to the imagery I was drawn to, historically and contemporarily. I think style is an open-ended question, and not something that ever needs to be understood fully...I like to think of it as a porous entity, and I would assume

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U N D E R S T U D Y, 2013, O I L O N C A N VA S W I T H S P R AY PA I N T, 125 X 105 C M

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T O M , 2013, O I L O N C A N VA S , 194 X 135 C M

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A C T O R , 2013, O I L O N C A N VA S W I T H S P R AY PA I N T, 160 X 120 C M

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that how I work in 1, 2, 5 or 10 years should change quite radically. For instance, I’ve taken some large departures recently with the works for my most recent solo show but these might be minute occurrences, or subtle changes that only I’m really aware (or not so aware) of. I think that’s what keeps studio-work exciting - the notion that nothing is set in stone. It’s all about a large process of exploration. “My work was once criticized as being schizophrenic, which I thereafter adopted as one of my strengths because I think that even within the confines of what I do, and how I paint, I tend to be something of a chameleon. I’m always looking to change, challenge, and work outside of my comfort zone, so involving newness and experimentation in the studio is key to me. I really have no specific process; everything changes from painting to painting. I recently moved into a new studio which allows me to work on a body of work concurrently, as opposed to consecutively, and this is doing interesting things to the formation of the paintings and how I am beginning to create cohesive bodies of works, as opposed to just ‘individual paintings’. The rest is up to happy accidents and an attempt to continually push myself into new territory. I will say that my work comes from a very personal, passionate, and highly motivated source. I’m extremely involved in what I do and have genuine belief that what I’m doing might invoke some sort of positive change.” Truly interested, I ask Andrew what his favorite color is. He snickers and elaborates. “Ah, the most simple questions are still the most exciting. I love Prussian Blue. Burnt Umber. Naples Yellow Light. Those are my top 3. However, for my last show I made an arbitrary rule: no blue. I played with purple, which I hate, just to see what came of it.” Wondering what or who would inspire Andrew, he explains that rather than people or parts, it’s a principle that sustains him. “Bjork once said that it was her ultimate desire as an artist to create the perfect piece of music; that she was aware that this is an impossible feat, but

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that she’d keep on trying, over and over… It’s the obsession that pushes one into the studio to do the same thing over and over with the hope that some beautiful flourishes might occur along the way.” Being so eloquent, I’m sure Andrew has some advice for the emerging artists of today. “I see a lot of younger artists who are too hard on themselves. I know; I’ve been there. But when you’re 24 and you expect everything to happen to you in an instant, you’ll burn out. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and artists need to focus on their own individual careers and the trajectory that will allow them to accomplish their own career at their own pace. You are not in a race against your peers. Your colleagues are not your enemies. I had a miserable time in my MFA because it felt like everyone was hoarding resentment toward everyone else. Fred Tomaselli has a brilliant quote about his career being something of ‘slow drips and long burns’ while others around him have flashed up and fizzled out. Now that I’m a little older, and experienced some modest successes, I’ve gotten a bit of clarity on the subject. I don’t want too much too soon. I want to control my career and the pace that I reach certain goals because I want to mature gracefully into the career I’ve chosen. Young artists worry too much. Chill out and work hard - harder than everyone else - and things will happen.” The painter’s painter- Andrew Salgado. Visit his website for more: andrewsalgado.com “Like” him on Facebook: facebook.com/andrew. salgado.artist

P E R F O R M A N C E I I , 2013, O I L O N C A N VA S W I T H S P R AY PA I N T, 70 X 55 C M

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DRESS: CAMELIA SKIKOS HAT: KELLY CHRISTY GLOVES: DANIEL STORTO EARRINGS: DELICATE RAYMOND VINTAGE COLLECTION

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Ar tist & Muse PHOTOGRAPHER: EDWIN CHAD FLOREZ MAKEUP & HAIR: EVE KLEIMINOVA WARDROBE STYLIST: TARA DENMAN WARDROBE ASSISTANTS: CHRISTIAN RILEY AND ANDREA JONES MODEL: OLGA KUBRAK AT MAJOR NY

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SHEER BLOUSE, PANT AND JACKET: DAVID TLALE - BRA: LA PERLA - HAT: KELLY CHRISTY SHOES: GIAMBATTISTA VALLI - EARRINGS: DANIEL SUDAR

photo by richard kern

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COAT/DRESS: DAVID TLALE - YELLOW TOP UNDERNEATH COAT: SAMANTHA PLEET SHOES: GUCCI - HAT: GINA SCHIAPPACASSE - BROACH: DELICATE RAYMOND VINTAGE COLLECTION

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DRESS: CAMELIA SKIKOS - BANGLE: HEADBANGER - SHOES: BE & D

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JACKET: NATHALIE KRAYNINA - BLOUSE: DANIEL SUDAR -HIGH WAIST PANTY: WOLFORD- HOSIERY: LEVANTE - BELT: BURAKUYAN - HAT: ERIC JAVITS BROACH: DELICATE RAYMOND VINTAGE COLLECTION SHOES: JOHN GALLIANO

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TOKYO

TROPICS PHOTOGRAPHER: JOSHUA SCOT T RETOUCHER: MANDY STRONG S T Y L I S T: S H E R A H J O N E S M A K E U P/ H A I R : T E $$ M O N E Y F O R H E Y S L I C K ! C O L L E C T I V E M O D E L : M I K A F U R U YA AT A G E N C Y M O D E L M A N A G E M E N T

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T O P : D A N I E L L A K E L L M E Y E R - PA N T S : P I A PA U R O - J A C K E T: U K E - H AT: W E A R I S R E X N E C K L A C E : V I V I E N N E K E L LY - B E LT: M A R Y M A R Y - S H O E S : J E F F E R Y C A M P B E L L

T O P : S E R I A L C U LT U R A - S K I R T: D A N I E L L A K A L L M E Y E R - S C A R F : S T Y L I S T â&#x20AC;&#x2122; S O W N - B E LT: B - L O W T H E B E LT B R A C E L E T: V I V I E N N E K E L LY - N E C K L A C E : W E A R I S R E X - S N E A K E R S : L I N D S AY DCREATIVE E G E N SUGAR

TOP: DANIELLA KALLMEYER D R E S S : P I A PA U R O SCARF: UNIQLO B E LT: B - L O W T H E B E LT J E W E L R Y: V I V I E N N E K E L LY

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D R E S S : P I A PA U R O TOP: STYLIST â&#x20AC;&#x2122;S OWN J E W E L R Y: V I V I E N N E K E L LY

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B O D Y S U I T: U K E DRESS: MANDARIN & GENERAL H E A D W R A P A N D P I N : P I A PA U R O A N D W E A R I S R E X R I N G : V I V I E N N E K E L LY SOCKS: H&M

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photo by john watts

CARDIGAN: UKE S H I R T: P I A PA U R O D R E S S : S E R I A L C U LT U R A B E LT: B - L O W T H E B E LT B R A C E L E T: W E A R I S R E X S H O E S : L I N D S AY D E G E N

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IT’S FUN TO BE VAIN by MAGGIE BUCHMANN There’s some ridiculous study out there claiming people with easy to pronounce names are more likely to succeed. Evidently, the likability of something is in direct correlation to its comprehensibility. Wait…whut. No comprendo. If there is any truth to these scientifically based findings, then there’s no hope for mixed media artist Hranfnildur Arnardottir. With a name like that, Arnardottir will be voted least likely to succeed in just about everything. But in the world of art, where success is an exception and not the rule, she’s mostly been the exception. So how does Arnardottir do it? “I don’t limit myself.” The artist/performer/mom simultaneously breaks all the rules while replacing them with her own. She is the exception to the rule. RULE #1: ASSUME AN ALTER EGO REPLACE IT WITH: FIND THE HUMOR IN AN ALTER EGO

Arnardottir is more publicly known as Shoplifter—a comical yet somehow appropriate mispronunciation of the artist’s first name, Hrafnhildur (APN-vilder). “I saw the humor in (the mispronunciation of my name) and how people remember my real name,” Shoplifter admits with a slight Nordic accent. I can hear the smile over the phone. And although I’ve never met her in person, she gives me the impression she would be the really, really cool aunt you tell your secrets to. “I just learned not to take myself too seriously. My pseudoname [sic] allowed myself to free up a little bit and be more experimental. It’s almost an alter ego.” RULE #2: MOVE TO NEW YORK CITY REPLACE IT WITH: MOVE TO A CITY THAT INSPIRES YOU Born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1969 (which explains why her name ties one’s tongue in knots), Shoplifter moved to New York, where everyone is continually moving, creating, living, and breathing, and she’s been doing all of those things for nearly twenty years from her Brooklyn apartment in Greenpoint.

HRAFNHILDUR ARNARDOT TIR AKA SHOPLIFTER K N I T T E D A U R A 2002 PERFORMANCE PHOTO BY SPRAGUE HOLLANDER

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“I always felt that in New York, there was a possibility for more freedom. I envisioned myself in black and white in Europe. But when I imagined living in New York, I saw myself in color. It just makes sense for me to live here.” RULE #3: CREATE A PERSONAL BRAND REPLACE IT WITH: ASSOCIATE YOUR PERSONAL BRAND WITH YOUR ROOTS It just makes sense, because as an artist, designer, and performer, where else would she be, really, other than the City of Dreams? And in the City of Dreams, where everyone thinks their dream is the dream, Shoplifter found a niche that would make her dream a reality. “It’s tough,” “Shoppy” divulges. “You have to be a little stubborn to do what you want to do. You get the wind in your face; you’ve got to keep at it to make it work.” And after making it through the wind tunnel, she emerged somewhat notorious among the hair fetishists of the world. Just kidding. Sort of. A trichophiliac would certainly get err…titillated from perusing her work. The artist is most famous for her work with hair, both the synthetic and human varieties. “I’m not only working with hair, but it has become popular,” Shoplifter admits. “It’s a fascinating medium for me.” And it’s easy to see why. Sculptures and haute couture gowns knitted, woven, or braided (almost) entirely of hair is different, avant-garde. Each of her pieces is like falling down the rabbit hole into an alternate universe of…well, hair: fluffy cotton candy hills and feathered stalagmites reaching for a braided sky. It’s dreamy and hallucinatory—a phantasmagorical eruption of self-discovery and self-absorption. “A lot of my work is about humanity and fantasy,” Shoplifter explains after I mention that there seem to be common cultural themes in her pieces: a mixture of ethereal beauty, high fashion, and vanity. Shoplifter’s work forces the viewer to confront one’s ego, for buried deep within the ruff are questions dealing with personal identity and hypocrisy. Each piece subtly critiques a world consumed with narcissism—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because self-love is love nonetheless and we could all use a little more love…right? It may be naïve, but that’s what makes

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HRAFNHILDUR ARNARDOT TIR AKA SHOPLIFTER N E R V E S C A P E AT C L O C K T O W E R G A L L E R Y 2012 S Y N T H E T I C H A I R I N S TA L L AT I O N PHOTO BY MICHAL JUREWICZ

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HRAFNHILDUR ARNARDOT TIR AKA SHOPLIFTER H A I R S C U L P T U R E W I T H B J O R K 2005 SYNTHETIC AND HUMAN HAIR MAKE UP BY ANDREA HELGADOT TIR STYLING BY EDDA GUDMUNDSDOT TIR PHOTO BY EREZ SABAG

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Shoppy’s work so charming. She’s playful and silly, yet somehow weaves the simple desire for beauty throughout her handicraft. “We all have to deal with our hair and we are constantly trying to contain it. My work is an ode to Scandinavian textiles and working with the threads and fiber to create necessary things and beautiful things. [Scandinavians] have been known to use hair for survival when nothing else was available. I was intrigued by that because when hair is detached from the body it’s disgusting.” I’m thinking about cleaning the hair out of my shower drain, and I’m gagging over my morning coffee. But taking a look at the artist’s most recent installation, displayed at the Summer Solstice Reyka event on the rooftop of King & Grove in Williamsburg, hair is the most beautiful thing on earth. I want to eat it and roll around and play in it. The installation was an homage to the foundation of all life, both beautiful and ugly: the sun. Celebrated on June 21st, the holiday Reyka marks the beginning of summer and the longest day of the year. It has a rich history rooted in Scandinavian culture, which is another reason why Shoplifter was drawn to working on the project. That and the vodka. Again, kidding. Sort of. “I wanted to recreate something intrinsic with Iceland and its culture,” Shoppy explains. “The sun became the focal point of the entire event. It just makes sense to have the presence of the sculpture made out of neon hair; there’s a presence and energy in a ball of fire. It’s euphoric and there’s just so much energy from having the sun out all

the time. People coming together and drinking and partying into the night.” RULE #4: KNOW SOMEONE FAMOUS REPLACE IT WITH: COLLABORATE WITH SOMEONE Shoplifter has had installations all around the world (“I’ve lived in a trailer for a PS1 MOMA colony project and I’ve had a solo exhibition in a gallery in London”) and she’s collaborated with a number of famous artists and designers, the most notable of which include Victoria Bartlett’s fashion label, VPL, and Shoppy’s singer/songwriter counterpart, Björk, on multiple occasions. Confession: I listened to Björk while flipping through an archive of Shoppy’s past work before sitting down to encapsulate her life and soul. The combination of my three cups of iced coffee, neoncolored and pastel-tinted hair, and Björk’s surrealist notes wafting in the background made for the most beautiful alien abduction scene. It was kind of like reading a Jane Austen novel from the future where cyborgs fall in and out of love and Sigmund Freud psychoanalyzes the blend of conscious, unconscious, and self-conscious love-making. “It’s very high profile,” Shoppy says about joining forces with a musician with a Twitter following of 458,348. “It’s fascinating because I’m inspired by identity and vanity and pop culture.” Which makes sense because our hair is a large part of our individuality and pride. We have the option to tame it, grow it, dye it, brush it, tease it. It’s an extension of our identity that allows us to distinguish ourselves from one another.

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HRAFNHILDUR ARNARDOT TIR AKA SHOPLIFTER I M A G I N A R Y F R I E N D ( B O M B A ) 2008 SYNTHETIC HAIR AND WOOD P H O T O B Y S VAVA R T R A U S T I

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Her art, her livelihood, her collaborations—whether in fashion, music, or with other visual artists—feed Shoppy’s inner animal. They may satiate her appetite for a while, but she will always be on the hunt for more. “A collaboration is about finding new ways to do something creative in the collective and I like that—to get into another’s head.” It’s a classic case of putting things into perspective. Shoplifter is continually experiencing identity growth, whether it be through her original pieces, or teaming up with other artists. She thrives on creating and sharing the beautiful with the ugly—a sweet juxtaposition she can achieve only by working with an ugly medium to make a beautiful piece of art. Her work has collided with reality to form a personal concept of opposites, extremes, and exploring other worlds, even if it’s just the one in her own head.

you want to call her (Hair Girl? Trich Bitch?) is a success no matter what her name is. Because sometimes, you can’t always believe everything you read on the Internet. (Oh the irony!) But just in case you don’t believe me, do a bit of your own digging.

(ABOVE) PHOTO OF SUMMER S O L S T I C E E V E N T I N S TA L L AT I O N , 2013 (LEFT) ART BY HRAFNHILDUR A R N A R D O T T I R A K A S H O L I F T E R , 2013

So sure, maybe John will get promoted before Caoimhe (KEE-Vah), merely because his supervisor can pronounce his name without looking up the pronunciation. But Hrafnihildur Arnadottier, or Shoplifter, or whatever

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LO S T T H E H I G H , B Y PA U L B E N N E T T

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Illusionary Intimacy BY KENNETH LUNDQUIST, JR.

awn. The wondrous vibrancy of the Atlantic coast. Colors abound. Isolated, wandering in the rich wilderness, Paul Bennett stops to bear witness. In a moment, the sun breaks through a castle of clouds, creating a magnanimous display that is imprinted on his painter’s mind. He has ventured here to discover all this – sheer beauty, nature’s landlord.

couple of years I signed up to a part-time college course in Art and Design. I had some great tutors and everything just clicked into place. The most important thing that really got me going was the freedom involved and the chance to explore and break boundaries. Art school was a bit stricter and the main focus was more centered on conceptualism, which is not really my thing. I had no ambition to try and be the smartest guy in the room or to give the super rich something to talk about while stuffing swan down their throats.

In a rare opportunity, I catch Paul in between canvases. He is currently working on a new figurative piece – a stark departure from his abstract seascapes. I ask the most obvious question that comes to mind:

“After leaving education I fell into graphic design for a while and it took seven years for me to get back in the painting studio. I’ve never looked back. But why painting? Why not? We’ve all got to make decisions, at points in time, and painting just happened to be mine. The key is to keep at it if you love it.”

Why art, painting? “I’ve always been creative, whether that was with words, music or visually. Street art was my first encounter with the visual arts. That and album covers. “I had no direction once I left school. After a

It’s quite evident that creativity resides well in Paul. I inquire about his particular style. “I work in two or three different styles – figurative, semi-abstract seascape, and abstract. The figurative is the one I find the most challenging, but the

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most rewarding. It’s also the subject that is seen (from the outside) as being more contemporary and provocative. The audience and response to the portraits is a lot different to that of my other styles. “The abstract paintings offer their own set of challenges and I was attracted to this style because it is more approachable. The abstract work is also more focused and suitable for a more corporate market as well as the home. It also offers more diversity with scale. The best thing is having a variety and being able to jump from one the other. It keeps it all fresh.” I’m always interested in how artists work, what makes their process special… “The tools I use are pretty standard. Brush, canvas, knife and oil, and occasionally gloss resin. I like to

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create a lot of texture but balance that out with calmer and flatter space. The most important thing is to just get stuck into the canvas. Just create. The rest will follow. Plenty of tea and the radio switched on is also a must.” What is your inspiration? I ask, and without skipping a beat his response is as brilliant as his work. “Inspiration is not really part of how I work. I will go and visit locations to get a feel for a place, but the work produced is a product of the process. I think Chuck Close sums it up better than I ever could: ‘The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you

wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

O P P O S I T E PA G E : E N D O F S T O R Y, B Y PA U L B E N N E T T A B O V E : T H E S E C R E T, B Y PA U L BENNETT

Naturally, I wonder how he sees how his work differs from his contemporaries. “It’s important for the work to be unique, but

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where the uniqueness comes from, well I’m not sure. I try to get a result that comes direct from myself rather than external influences. The journey I take when painting is to get Informed and motivated from what I have previously created. A single mark might be all it takes to dictate a whole piece of work or even a series. However, I am beginning to notice that I might be inspiring other artists a little too much, as I am beginning to [see?] work that is very similar to my own. Probably unavoidable in this day and age, unfortunately.” Such an aware artist, surely Paul has some advice to extend to emerging artists worldwide… “Just keep at it and get the work in front of as many people as possible. Marketing is a very important part of the job. Just like any other carrier or industry, you have to get out of your comfort zone and put yourself in situations and places that are not quite natural to you. Also, create something that is yours. It’s important for the artist as well as the audience to know that they are looking at something that only you would have created.” …And the future? “To be honest, I have no idea. I think that’s up to other people to decide. I just have to keep on doing what I’m doing until I do something else.” For more about Paul, visit his website: paul-bennett.co.uk

LO S T A N D F O U N D , B Y PA U L B E N N E T T

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BUSHWICK STREET ART THRU THE EYES OF JP GRECO 88

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K, BK

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W I T H S U M M E R C O M E S H E AT, A N D T H E NEED FOR RELIEF L I K E TA K I N G T H E L O C A L T R A I N J U S T T O SOAK UP A/C SMOKE IN THE STREET FROM THE BBQ AND WEED THICK GIRLS SHOWING SKIN IN BIKINIS AT T H E B E A C H JOHNNY PUMPS BRING CONEY ISLAND TO THE STREET L I T T L E K I D S I N W I F E B E AT E R S , S AT M A R S IN TZITZITS

REMEMBERING BROOKLYN SUMMER WORDS AND PHOTOS BY JP GRECO

G E T T I N G G I R L S N U M B E R S A N D I C E AT CIRCOS, C U C H I F R I T O S O R D E R I N G M O R C I L L A AT THE WINDOW UTICA IS LINED WITH SMOKING DRUMS W H I L E T H E PA R K S F I L L U P W I T H DRUNKEN BUMS G I R L S S U C K I N G O N M A M I TA S PA S S I O N CREAM GUYS ON THE CORNER NOTICE, READY TO SCREAM C O P S O U T I N F O R C E F O R T H U R S D AY NIGHT SWEEPS OLD TIMERS BITCH ON HOW THINGS USED TO BE SENSORY OVERLOAD FROM SUMMER’S INTENSITY A N D F O R T H O S E W H O C O N S TA N T LY WISH FOR WINTER… KISS MY FUCKING ASS, AND LEARN TO TA K E T H E H E AT

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Ballet Pointe Shoes: J. Bloch Corset/One-piece: L a102 Maison de Fashion CREATIVE

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ONE HOT CITY

A SUMMER STORY

Photographed by: Keith Bienert with Jason Maddox Makeup and Wardrobe Styling: Angelique Cerniglia Hair: Tay Sims Model: Christine Ann Juarbe of Q Model Management LA Stylehouse: L a Maison de Fashion

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Bolero: L a Maison de Fashion Bodysuit: DKNY

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Red Wrap Dress: L a Maison de Fashion Tap Pant: DKNY

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Bl ack Bustier, Bl ack Skirt-Belt, Tap Pant: Damsel

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Dress: L a Maison de Fashion Shoes: Speed Limit 98

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UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH PAINTER ALEXANDER YULISH By deena atkinson

lexander Yulish is many things – an actor, a model, a native New Yorker, an Angeleno, and a student of everything life has to offer. But first and foremost, he is an artist. The son of a famed illustrator and sculptor, art has always been in his blood. You can check out his oeuvre online here. Looking at the website, I was blown away by the immediacy, the raw energy of his palette and lines and I couldn’t wait to visit the gallery. In person, the paintings are even more visually stunning, at once playful and brutal, gripping, anarchic, intuitive; some are emotional to the point of being soul-crushing. I mean that in a good waythe kind of aesthetic soul-crushing that reminds you of something inside yourself, or teaches you something you didn’t know, the kind that taps into a primal part of the human spirit, the chthonic, sub-material that resides in the depths. I sat down with Alexander in KM Fine Arts Gallery in Hollywood to hear about his new show ‘Unquiet Mind’ and find out more about the intriguing and charming man behind all the semi-myths I read on the internet. Deena : So, I stalked you online a bit before coming up with these questions. Your background seems really interesting…you grew up in New York, correct? Alexi: Yes, I grew up in Manhattan. I grew up on MacDougal and 8th. And then I grew up in Chelsea. D: I read that you grew up in the Chelsea Hotel, did you live there? A: No, I grew up right next to the Chelsea but people always write that I lived there because it sounds more romantic! But yeah, I was around people like Patti Smith and that whole group on multiple occasions, so it was definitely exciting growing up there. This was before the neighborhood changed drastically; it was still Chelsea.

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D: Your mother, Barbara Pearlman, is an artist as well? She hasn’t shown her work for almost 30 years. To what extent was your art influenced by her? A: She was a famous illustrator for Vogue, and she travelled all over the world for her career. Then she got into fine art and that was her next progression. At one point her illustration career was skyrocketing and she just quit. She came back from a show in Germany that she had sold out and she just quit. She said “This isn’t what I want to do right now,” not in the sense of quitting art, but she only wanted to paint. She didn’t want to deal with the business part of art anymore, she wanted to make things really beautiful and pure. We had a studio in the back of our house so she would go and paint there; later she got into sculpture. Recently she has come out of hiding. We’re going to have a show together, actually. We don’t know when or where, but a lot of people want us to have a show together and we are planning it, so that will be a great extension. If you go to Pearlman Art you’ll get an idea of the environment I grew up in. D: Was it during your formative years then, that she decided to just pursue painting, and do all this art for herself? A: Yes, it was when I was around 6 years old. D: So you grew up with the impression that art is for self-expression, it’s not something you do in a commercial sense, in order to sell things for profit? Art for art’s sake, if you will. A: Exactly. As a kid I would spend hours literally just watching her paint. She taught me everything from drawing to color, but in a sense you can’t really teach someone to be an artist. I feel like it was in my blood. Part of it I think is genetic – it’s just in you. And the other part is

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putting in the work, so she taught me the craft. D: Did she instruct you at all? Teach you color theory and give you advice? A: To a degree. When we used to draw together what she would tell me is “Just commit to the first line, whatever it is. Put your heart into that first line. And then the second line, then the third line…” Really, there is no such thing as a painting, it’s just a bunch of lines. But at the end, if you’re lucky, you might get a painting – and that’s great. Sometimes when I don’t commit to something I’ll throw it out, because I’ll realize that although I technically see a painting at the end, my heart isn’t in it. The paintings in this show, ‘Unquiet Mind,’ I feel my heart is in it. The rest, that I didn’t put my heart in, they were hung in the garbage. So maybe some homeless person is using it for a blanket. D: Were you exposed to a lot of art growing up that influenced you? When I look at your work I see a lot of de Kooning, maybe early Picasso... A: You know, I get Bacon, de Kooning, Chagal… but when I look at myself I really don’t see any of that. I can understand the similarities in composition or in color combination and I take it as a compliment. But my favorite compliment I guess would be when you see an Alexi you just know it’s my work. It’s not self-conscious, though. People will go on and on about what they think inspires me. But I don’t even go to museums that much because I don’t want to be influenced. Things like memories influence me, like this conversation, maybe this will end up in one of my paintings. D: Besides memories, what other types of things inspire you outside of the world of fine art? A: Everything. Gravel. Trees. People. Cities. I don’t think there’s anything that at the end of the day doesn’t inspire me. You have all these experiences every day and it just starts to seep

( T O P ) T O G E T H E R A LO N E , B Y ALEXANDER YULISH ( B O T T O M ) A Q U I E T M I N D, B Y ALEXANDER YULISH

into your bones. If you take a shower some of it wipes off but most of it’s stuck in you. It’s really hard for me to talk about my paintings because essentially they’re just conversations and the conversation shifts. D: Speaking of being inspired by cities and the environment you’re in…you moved from New York City to Los Angeles. Did that change in atmosphere affect your creative output in any significant way? A: I moved here because I had already done New York. At the age of 25 I thought, “Okay, I grew up here, I was going out when I was 13 years old.” So you experience those things, then all of the sudden you want to experience something new. And I did. And I hated it here for the first 2 years, but then I stopped comparing. Once you stop comparing you can actually appreciate LA for what it is. I made peace with it and I fell madly in love with this city. Plus, I have room to work here! In New York it would be almost impossible to have that much studio space. D: So you can work on a larger scale than you would in Manhattan... A: This show is a little bigger than the last show; I just feel like I had a lot to say and it came out. ‘Emperor of New York’ was similar but different. They all have the same conversations but they’re different. I don’t even know how to name my paintings. I have friends name them sometimes, just because it’s like..the experience we’re having here and talking. Imagine you had to name this conversation...it would be the strangest thing, what would we call this? D: It would be hard because there are so many subjects, there’s just a lot of content there and so many things going on… A: Yeah, so that’s like when I finish a painting… how do I possibly name it? Sometimes some of them can be more figurative, like this one I called ‘The Empty Chair’ because to start there actually was an empty chair, although later I switched it, but that one was a little easier. It’s messed up because you can have a painting with a really cool name that isn’t that good and vice versa. Or the name can influence you; for instance, a painting might be called ‘Sunrise on the Moon’ or something, but if you named it instead

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D: Have you ever tried to work backwards, come up with a name first and then paint based on that? Like a writing prompt.

they get excited and sometimes they’re saying they don’t really like it. But you can’t let that affect you personally, the business part of it. The business part is so important and that’s the scary part because I just love painting and want that to be separate. I think the idea of identity is just the weirdest thing, having to say ‘I’m a writer” or “I’m a painter.” What does that even mean? It’s so limiting.

A: No, I haven’t done that! It’s a cool concept though. Sometimes I give myself scenarios, such as, “Today, I’m going to do a black and white piece.” Giving yourself restraints like that can be fun.

D: You want to do what you love but you also want to make enough money from it that you can continue to do it. You don’t want to spend your day at a soul-sucking job that leaves you with no free time to pursue your passions.

Going to the studio is like going to war, but it’s a war you really want to win. You risk everything knowing that you can lose, even at the last moment. Sometimes I get to the end and I’ll be like okay “I got it, this is almost done” and then all of the sudden at the last minute, you end up doing something at the bottom of the canvas that just doesn’t work.

A: Oh god, yeah. I’ve done the weirdest jobs.

‘Battlefield’ that’s what people would see and take away from the painting when they looked at it. Subconsciously it’s amazing what naming does for a piece. I don’t want to name anything “Untitled #5” or “Series 2,” or “Man Walking Down Stairs Holding a Staple Gun..” I just don’t do that.

Everything’s a puzzle. If I do this blue line at the bottom it has to balance with something else. It’s like ping pong. So you can lose a painting at any moment. And that’s what I love at the same time – it’s unpredictable. And that unpredictability is what makes me want to paint. If it isn’t a bit unpredictable or dangerous I don’t get interested. Some people think because I use so many colors there’s a really happy energy….look a little deeper. It’s a dance. A lot of these paintings change every time I see them. D: This kind of malleability and flux, is that something you are hoping people take away from your art? A: That’s what I would like people to experience, to see something different every time. At the end of the day, you have to paint for yourself and you just hope it translates. I feel lucky people are buying my stuff and getting inspired and the show is doing well, but at the same time, if it didn’t, I still would have to paint. Even though there’s nothing really romantic about doing something that people don’t appreciate. D: Art is inherently subjective. A: Yes, there are certain things people like. I saw someone just get pounded in their stomach when they saw this particular painting (“Closer”) and then the next person walked by without barely glancing at it. You’ll overhear people; sometimes 14 116

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D: What’s the weirdest job you’ve had? A: I’ve been a food delivery man in New York City, that was a really strange one. I had to ride a bicycle and bring food from this place called ‘Live Bait’ and I would go to the weirdest homes and people would invite me up. I would literally just sit there and talk to people while their food got cold. Or sometimes I would crash the bike, spill everything, and I’d have to reassemble their food. When I first came to LA I worked for this reality TV show called “Change of Heart” and the premise was I had to find people and then these couples go on a date with the other people and then have to decide if they still want to be with their significant other. So I literally would go up to people and ask if they wanted to make $500 to be on this show but technically I would break couples up. People would call me afterwards and yell at me, saying “Why did you put me on this show? You made me look like an idiot!” So that was one of the strangest…really, really odd. But yeah, I’ve done everything. When I got out of school I started modeling and I went to Europe and I didn’t like it at all. I lived in Milan for a while and it was so strange but I would do it all again, I just love experiences. And I like watching people…I get really curious about people. I need people. Just as much as I need to be alone. If you’re a painter you spend a tremendous amount of time alone, it’s very introverted. But at the same time when you’re alone there’s only so much you can learn. It’s so good to actually talk to someone. D: You get to bounce ideas off of people… A: Yeah, and get excited! There’s nothing too PHOTO BY GRAHAM COPPIN

THE EMPTY CHAIR, BY ALEXANDER YULISH romantic about being tormented in your home. Wearing sunglasses and telling no one to come see you or look in your eyes. Having your assistant say ‘Only speak to Alexander Yulish when spoken to,” or something like that. I mean we’re all eccentric in our way but there has to be a balance. D: Speaking of the artistic process, I read youhave a place in Mexico? Is that where you go now to paint? A: I’m starting to. My mom and I are moving to San Miguel, and we found the perfect place but it ended up getting bought literally right before we made the offer. It was our dream home, with these huge studios. We ended up finding a place further away. D: San Miguel, that whole area is a big expat artist community. A: It is! But it’s weird, I don’t like hanging out

with other artists that much. I wish it was the time of Picasso and Modigliani, and that whole crew back in the 20’s; they all bounced ideas of one another and they all critiqued and it’s just not like that anymore. Everyone always says they want to create that kind of a space again, they want to re-create Warhol’s factory, but no one’s ever going to recreate that. D: Growing up in NYC during that time must have been interesting. Warhol was still alive then. And you got to experience the height of graffiti before they really cracked down and stopped running the trains with tags on them. Did you ever do street art? A: Oh yeah, we would tag any place we could. D: What’s the coolest place you tagged? A: On a church..Just kidding! That would’ve been really bad. We would literally just dare each other, we would tag the sides of police stations,

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I’ve gotten chased. We used to get in bad fights, cross out the wrong person and they’d know you! It was a little more innocent, people didn’t just shoot you, I mean down town…but that wasn’t my personal form of expression, there were people who were complete masters, geniuses… Street art is a very strange thing right now. It was the height and now…There’s a group of street artists who will go down as unbelievable. Everyone likes street art right now but not everyone’s a street artist. There’s a difference. Some of them are going to be in permanent collections of the biggest museums in the world and will be appreciated. Someone will do a throw up and it’s not nearly as profound but sometimes you just see something and you can’t even express it, it’s just insane. Sorry, sometimes I have trouble with words. Saying something is “insane” doesn’t really describe it. D: I know what you mean, I say “awesome” or “rad” all the time when I really like something, and I don’t know why those words even comes out my mouth because things are always so much more nuanced than that and we have this whole rich vocabulary at our disposal… A: Exactly, because at the same time a color will express it, like “Blue!” or “Ultramarine Blue” that’s like how I feel and then other times, that’s not how I feel. I have to create a whole new blue. But then you realize you can never create a blue, everything’s been invented. D: Well, Yves Klein made his own blue and he patented it. A: Oh, you’re right, that was a bad example with the blue…now you’re like ‘You’re an idiot Alexi you need to do your art history!” Ha, I hate art school. D: You mean when you went to college? A: Yeah, I just hated it. My mom was my real art school. And that was essentially years and years just watching her and experiencing that. But in school I hated my art teacher. I remember once I had to render a chair and when I was done I decided to elongate everything because that’s how I felt. But my professor was upset because it wasn’t what he instructed us to do. It was a constant battle. At the end I remember I said to him “I’m an artist” and he said, “That’s a pretty bold statement. People spend their whole lives before they can call themselves an artist.” And I looked at him and I said “Well, that’s their fucking problem.” And he just looked at me, and that was that. It was bad 16 118

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so I quit. It was just such an awful experience. D: Because it was limiting? You didn’t have full freedom of expression? A: Basically. I could render something if I wanted to, exactly life-like. But at the same time, I remember drawing with my mom and she taught me to just extend a line until it emotionally stops being relevant to you. When the emotion stops the line stops, so a chair or an arm may go out all the way across the canvas and then all of the sudden it ends. But there has to be a dialogue, you cant just take it all the way out for no reason. So you may do that but other things have to balance. In a sense, there are no rules. You create your own rules. There’s an alphabet, just like if you were to write a book, you would have to use an alphabet. Here, the alphabet is colors. Sometime the colors may not be enough so you grab a branch off the ground and stick it through the canvas. That may not be enough, so you start using everything around you. Some people use cement bricks, and they build a brick wall in the middle of a gallery. That works emotionally for some people. For me it doesn’t. But everyone has their own form of expression. D: Speaking of forms of expression, you’re an actor as well. You were in a David Lynch movie? A: Yeah I was, it was such an interesting experience. I wanted to meet him, so I did and it was at the end of his movie “Inland Empire” and I remember getting a phone call the next day asking if I wanted to be in the film. They just told me to show up on set. It was towards the end of filming and it was a fun experience. I love acting but it’s not something I share that much. Sometimes people want to know the story; yes, I did acting…and I did a lot of things…then they’re like “Oh, you came to painting later in life,” but, no, I didn’t. I’ve been painting my whole life. I just decided to focus on it, and I got really fortunate. It’s funny, acting doesn’t do it for me the way painting does. D: Because you’re following someone else’s script? A: Yeah, I don’t like people directing me how to do things. The only thing I have to worry about now is the guy who created these colors and put them in a tube. D: Well, hopefully that guy knows what he’s doing! You’ve mainly done acrylics so far?

A: Yeah acrylics have gotten just unbelievable, they’re very different from oil in a sense but at the same time it’s very immediate, and that’s what I love about it, the immediacy of it. D: Do you always use a really bold palate? A: Sometimes. Sometimes I won’t use them, and I’ll only use a blue. Or a black. I don’t paint for the sake of using a lot of colors. I use colors because that’s how I express what’s going on. But everything changes. I’m curious to see where I go in the next 3 years, 4 years. Every show is different not for the sake of being different but because the vocabulary, the language changes. D: I read something about someone seeing your cellphone background and that’s how you got discovered? A: I was at the Chateau and I had just gotten my first show here but I was sitting and this guy who is a friend of a friend sitting at our table saw my phone background and he asked who did the painting. It turns out he collects art, so to make a long story short, so he bought a bunch of my stuff and told the Annenberg family about me, then they contacted Leila Heller at her gallery in NYC. There was a show called “The Young Collectors Exhibition,” and that went really well so I started having bigger collectors. I was just fortunate but I worked very hard. Really there’s no correlation between working hard and doing well on the business side, a lot of that’s just circumstance. You just have to be in the right place at the right time. And the work has to be good. D: Your paintings are abstract, but they do have recognizable things in them, such as a chair, or a vase, or a body. When you make the first line, that line you commit to, do you have any foresight that eventually, it’s going to become a human, or a lamp, or whatever? A: Not really. I commit to a shape whatever it is. Then I’ll start to disintegrate the shape. Like this one painting, the shoulders were out to here. And it felt right, but then you realize it’s not balanced. At least for me. Sometimes it works when you have huge proportions. This one all of the sudden started getting very compact and very it felt like everything started to get squeezed in.

not that figurative. There was a desk I think, which I completely erased. It just constantly changes. This one was called “Family” and now it’s “Alone Together” like how you can be surrounded by people and be very much alone. It’s very much about being in the city. I had just gotten back from NYC and this kind of came out from it. D: I’m really glad I can ask you these questions in person and we can point to the individual and paintings and talk about them. Because I had this whole list of questions, but it changes when I meet you, and when we are actually looking at the paintings as a point of reference. This sounds odd to say as someone who writes about art for a living, but what do we talk about when we talk about art? There’s a Gerhard Richter documentary on Netflix and at some point, I’m paraphrasing here, but he says something like “To talk about painting is not only ridiculous but beside the point. Painting is another form of thinking. Words are only capable of expressing words and painting has nothing to do with that.” And I just thought that was so beautiful… A: Wow, yeah! You completely get it. Painting is another form of thinking. I completely agree with that, I didn’t say it as well as that..I’m not good at speaking and that’s why I paint. It’s difficult and pointless too because our conversations are completely different. It’s also that, to me, painting is another form of thinking that can be very ethereal. I think it’s another form of expression. When words aren’t enough I paint. Well, there you have it. Alexi Yulish is a truly incredible individual and a talented visionary; you should check out his work in person if at all possible or check out his gallery online. alexanderyulishart.com/

D: So you painted over the shoulders? A: Yeah and it was just constant, you know a chair, this chair turned out to be a longcouch. And then it felt..it could be anything, it was actually a drink when I finished it. But sometimes it’s

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TRAMPOLINE RITUAL BY ELIZABETH GLAESSNER

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in the mind of a shape shifter By ignacio alexanders

hether it is for the better or for the worse, we all have a vision, an opinion on the many different ways the world could be improved. Ask anyone for their vision of a better world; there is a high probability that you shall be given a description of a utopia where humanity actually loves and understands each other. Ask that same person for a map to reach that very utopia they have most likely passionately described and the high probability shall be that a pin will be dropped three thousand miles away and you will hear it drop. There are a few exceptionally realistic people; one may go as far as to call them the school of post humanism, whose ideology of a future utopia is not one our contemporary society builds; rather it is a utopia that arises from our demise. In her first New York City solo exhibition at the P·P·O·W Gallery in Chelsea titled All this happen, more or less, Artist Elizabeth Glaessner through her extravagant and striking imaginative perception invites us to a refreshing view of what a post human utopia could be.

a minuscule lake of toxic water. The third bather stands to the right of the image as the sun rises in the distance conscious that its golden rays shine down on new life, life that has begun to find a place in this posthumanist poisonous world. The fascinating aspect of this painting is that although the viewer can understand the destruction that has occurred, no evidence of misery, sorrow or death can be found; instead one is lost in the thrill of possibilities for their tomorrow. In Glaessners’ post humanist world where modern humanity no longer exist, the remaining evidence of our existence have become admirable relics to the inhabitants of this new world. Items that were to us simple leisurely pleasures have become elements of divine rituals. In the painting titled Trampoline Ritual the viewer observes in earthy tones an intimate interaction of a creature with the simple purpose of a trampoline. The once again faceless humanlike creature interacts with the trampoline in a manner that resembles the lost innocence of our society. With all the proper uses of split and complementary colors the viewer is once again given a sense of impressive hope.

With a mixer of water, acrylics, oil paints and inks, Glaessner has created a world beyond the existence of modern man. Her post humanist paintings are saturated with the carnage of today’s society, yet with the same brush stroke these grandiose works exhilarate hope.

In Loneliest Nonfunctional Boat the viewer journeys into a scene of an almost hopeless gray sky. The object floats in a motionless body of water as though to remind us that this world the viewer has exhibited has only come to fruition through the destruction and devastation of our own society and the human race.

In Morning Swim, Glaessner introduces the viewer to a trio of faceless bathers; two of them enjoying what appear to be

Water is one of the elements continuously repeated in Glaessner’s work, whether it is part of the image as a visual or the creating

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force, the presence of water in her work is difficult to neglect. “Water” Elizabeth Glaessner said “takes a life of its own in the process of my creations.” When ask about her process of creation Glaessner replied that it all begins with a story. “No one knows my story telling more than my sister.” she said, “I use to keep her up all night with them when we were kids. These days, I keep myself up with my stories.” When asked if she has ever written her stories down on paper, “I have” she said, but explained that in her attempts to preserve her stories in the written form as she first imagines them they lose their sensitivity in the visual. “Is as though I have given life on paper and there’s no need for me to tell the same story twice,” Glaessner said. “They lose their importance to be painted once they are told in the written form.” She said, “Celeste, Donkey Face, Serpentine, and Milk Maiden are all character from my stories, each with their own personality and attitudes.” Elizabeth Glaessner’s phenomenal posthumanist surrealism is drenched in originality. Her work stands out far beyond most of today’s artist. Mainly because she is not attempting to be the next famous and popular artist, in her work one can certainly notice her homage to tradition and to the art masters that have influenced her. Glaessner grants respect to the techniques of our art masters in areas where most of todays’ artist lose their identity in counterfeiting the past.

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Although most of the works in the exhibition are dynamic portraits of optimism, the creatures and objects depicted in Elizabeth Glaessner’s work remind us of the dangers that we in modern day society have created, but furthermore sophistically ignore and that is the biggest danger that lurks in the ambience of our tomorrow. For more information on Elizabeth Glaessner’s work please contact the P•P•O•W Gallery at www.ppowgallery.com All images are courtesy of artist Elizabeth Glaessner and P.P.O.W Art Gallery.

CELESTE BY ELIZABETH GLAESSNER

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PHOTO BY GRAHAM COPPIN

RIDING AND SUCKING IN THE SUMMER BY ELIZABETH GLAESSNER

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DONKEY BEARING ROCK JELLY BY ELIZABETH GLAESSNER

ARTIST ELIZABETH GLAESNNER

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DRESS: CAROLINA SARRIA BRACELET: VERAMEAT

(TOP) ARTIST WITH SCULPTURE, UNTITLED HOPE ( B O T T O M ) W H I T E B I S H O P, B Y N O Z O M I R O S E

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SINNER PHOTOGRAPHER: JONNE JOHNSON S T Y L I S T: S H E R A H J O N E S H A I R / M A K E U P/ M O D E L : C L A R A R A E

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BODYSUIT: CAROLINA SARRIA

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GLASSES: VINTAGE VEST: KAYLEE CHO SHORTS: VOLVER

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RING: VERAMEAT JACKET: STEFANIE BIGGEL TOP: MARGAUX LONNBERG

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CAPE: XINNATEX NECKLACE: VERAMEAT

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la mujer es mi religion the jessi! wap! By emily wiest

essica Sabogal is a first generation Colombian – American graffiti artist in residence at the Galeria De La Raza in San Francisco’s Mission Area. There you can view her art until 6:00pm and there on comfy couches we sat to discuss her work. We came to the gallery in the afternoon to view some stencils for a mural Sabogal is currently designing for the Montréal based, artist’s collective she has been selected to participate in; Decolonizing Street Art: Anti-Colonial Street Artist’s Convergence. The large-scale Canadian convergence focuses on individuals of both indigenous and postcolonial settler origins and seeks to bring attention to the wide spread and specific struggles plaguing these communities. The chosen artists already disclose a political interest in their work relevant to the focus. With a fairly wide variety of on point topics to choose from, I was curious about Jessica’s direction. Though she won’t yet reveal the full scope of her plans, she tells me the mural will deal specifically with indigenous women’s rights. This is a topic that nicely marries the subject provided and her personal interests. Sabogal’s latest series, Women Are Perfect! Came to her during the birth of her nephew. She was amazed by seeing first hand the power and strength of a woman’s body and simultaneously heartbroken by the violence of the war against women’s bodies in a global setting. Her work speaks of women as an independent, self-sustaining, and powerful gender and she takes it upon herself to bring light to the violence suffered through the untold, individual stories. Through the series Sabogal seeks to “demystify” the female form and bring to light what it is from a medical-biological

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understanding. It is to detract from the mainstream vision of a robotic and inconvenient understanding of the female body and its sexuality. Sabogal’s work has always depicted a strong political influence, and through the years the message has gained in both subtlety and potency. Her strong ties to identity play a strong factor in her evergrowing body of work. Sabogal works in the Mission Area, ground zero for the gentrification conflict, a conflict plaguing communities of postcolonial settlers. It’s a battle zone between Silicone Valley and the communities that immigrated here generations ago. In contrast, Sabogal was the first female artist commissioned to design a mural by FaceBook headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. Her new age, multifaceted perspective takes into account both the need for growth and the need for roots and stability. Her roots as a first generation Colombian - American woman and her opportunities as an up and coming young artist juxtapose starkly against the backdrop of a larger and growing problem. Sabogal tells me that while she loves a variety of subjects, she finds her work to be at the height of personal fulfillment when she is able to work with subjects that excite her on a personal level. Sabogal doesn’t practice monogamy with her muses, though she is specific. Her love of the human realities of the female form is infectious. Through her mind, arms and fingertips, she sprays into existence a world in which the intrinsic and colorful differences found in the vast expanse of the female form create an innate pride. That pride cannot be ignored or hastily and intentionally forgotten, no

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matter the aim of American pop culture. She dares to challenge ideals and suggest that individualism just might be at the core of human perfection. Sabogal gives strength and solidarity to the terrors of the female flesh market. Much of her art is a specially brewed lager of raw sexuality, feminism, womanhood, and finding strength in the very nooks and crevices of unique human identity. “Yo, everything is hella impermanent.” (… Including the body) She tells me this as we discuss love, bodies and this past year. Jessica’s a hip-hop dancer, toymaker and photographer-this woman gets off telling stories that incite action. “This year everything’s been about doing exactly what I want, it has been all about drinking, loving, eating good food, being with family and making art. What I want when I want it,” she said. Standing in her haven, in her workspace, the studio was nothing short of bliss. You can see the growth of her early fantasies to the strength of a woman seasoned in her craft. With many miles still to go and a growing audience, she’s ready, willing and able to absorb her guidance. We are ready and waiting to see where the years ahead will take this young female artist and activist who incites change and creates space for those stories preemptively delegated to the periphery. It’s the antithesis of radical art; it’s the bassist version of womanhood. It’s the blood, the birth, the functionality; it’s the nature of a mother’s love, of that same woman’s sexuality, of the respect lost for the power of the woman. The death of the matriarchy and the rise of the patriarchy ushered in a time of violence not only against sisters, daughters, friends, wives mothers and lovers, but against entire cultures. With her artist’s eye Jessica brings these tales to light one story at a time.

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ALL WORK BY JESSICA SABOGAL

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ARTIST DIARY introducing painter estela cuadro I´m Estela Cuadro, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. When I start my day in my studio, I want to listen to some music. It is generally not always the same. I also like to use some incense. When I begin a new artwork I used to use a special cardboard that allows the pigments and water too react in a special way; giving textures, shapes, deformations and then letting my imagination act freely. The music always transposes me and my sensory part which takes me to an inside world – introspective. It nourishes my imagination, it motivates me. It constantly leads me to paint many of my paintings and I feel pleasure in that. I feel like I never want to stop doing this. It´s part of my life. I used lots of techniques, like pencil, small coal and oil. Especially when I was young. Nowadays I like to use more than one technique at the same time, and make different results. I use India ink with salt, and I let them act freely on the support. I use other things to generate texture, and I use oil painting, pencils and pens to realize details. If I had to pick a style for my art, it would be quite difficult. Perhaps I associate my work with surreal art. My characters and their environment have nothing to do with reality. The distorted reality is part of my inspiration, my contacts and my experiences. My artwork is based on the unconscious - all associated with my dreams, relationships & with life itself. I don´t try to tell stories in my artworks. My work isn’t the realization of an illustration for a story, book or magazine (with a text behind the artwork). There are always ideas or suggestions (of a story) but it’s not a literal sort of story. I take fun in other people’s freedom in interpretation. I feel that it is important is to feel total freedom without restriction and without much precise meaning. I like to leave the interpretation of each piece to each person, you can get carried away like I do in every piece of

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art. I think each work has something special, they are part of my “games”, my pleasures. Each work is part of a sensory and emotional expression, for sure. I often think that the power of paint lets me express myself of many things that are somewhere in my head. For example, relevant situations, dreams, experiences and thoughts that I keep (in my mind), I need to express them in some way, and doing it on a canvas is a perfect idea for me! When I talk about a “game” in relation to my work as an artist, I mean that’s the way that I have fun with the characters, animals and plants when my playfulness arise. You’re letting it flow! So you have to let go of the restrictions and really play with everything that is created, generating a new and unique artwork. My inspiration comes from music, books, a good wine, plants, dancing while I´m painting and my small garden. The narrative of an artwork is not something important for me. I want to do art without thinking, without restrictions, like art is for me. I think that the style is generated, created as one grows as an artist. Plus experience and techniques, the papers, the canvas helps form and then you feel comfortable (in that space). I listen to many styles of music; I need that every day (to have a musical change). This change produces in me an energy and mobility different in my body. I like pianist music, jazz, rock, hip-hop or ambiance. My musical panorama is very broad. I try to constantly meet new artists and new bands that are emerging. I like to investigate the soundtracks of movies and series. Besides music, I love my studio; it is full of colors, pins, my favorite library and plants. I think the place (to create) is an important point when you are creating. I consider my atelier to be full of colors and visual incentives that help open your mind. I have a lot

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of travel objects, artist books and books from friends. Music for me is like my battery to start each day, but I love where I work. And another important point is that it has an incredible luminosity, overlooking a terrace where I have a small cottage and plants that I care much for. I would say that the core passion about art, is to feel free, to have your mind open to all the new things that can appear. Every crisis is a new starting point and always the beginning of something new and not something that ends. My top list of people who constantly inspire me and the reasons behind it are: Jean-Michel Basquiat: Because of his expressiveness, his loose strokes & his liberty. Egon Schiele: His obsession for expression, postures & sexuality. His work tries to capture the sensuality of women and men. Paul Klee: I love the choice for his color palettes, his compositions & his details. Amy Cutler: Because I like her imagination, how she tells a story and her incredible levels of details. She creates strong characteristics via clothes, human expressions, hairstyles, animals and landscapes. Pablo Picasso: I admire his versatility. It’s amazing how much work he was able to create during his life. I consider him as a genius. I love watching his videos and seeing how his imagination puts his art is in constant transformation - like seen in this VIDEO http://www.picasso.fr/ es/picasso_pagina_index.php http://www.pablopicasso.org/ Frida Kahlo: Because I admire her strong personality, her passion, her ideology and her deep love for Diego Rivera. All of her art works were about her life and her physical & mental pain. She was a fighter, yet a very sensitive one who created a lot of wonderful art full of color.

http://estela-cuadro.tumblr.com/ facebook.com/estelaacuadro

(TOP) PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST ESTELA CUADRO ( B E L O W ) LO S A N O S N O V I E N E N S O LO S , B Y E S T E L A C U A D R O ( O P P O S I T E PA G E ) E M I N E N C I A B Y ESTELA CUADRO

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milkfed kid By jeff grunthaner

ompositionally reminiscent of the work of David Salle and certain sculptural gestures in the oevre of Jasper Johns (especially during the 1960s), Düsseldorf-based artist Julia Dauksza augments these precedents with a decided flare for digital aesthetics. Digitality pervades her works, where the juxtaposition of elements that only becomes visible by way of a computer screen acts as a kind of specter haunting the traditional media of oil on canvas. Whether one calls this post-internet painting or proto-digital painting, Dauksza›s artistry is distinguished by sprawling diasporas of figures fixed in mural-like space, like images suspended in pure virtuality, foisting on viewers a level of uncertainty where they have to interactively fill out each work—co-creating it, as it were.

of suburban, landscaped foliage at the upper right-hand corner. This merging of the photographic and reproducible with the abstract doesn’t so much complete the painting as give it jagged edges, supplying the requisite tension for figures to appear in the process of their own disappearance.

In Dauksza›s large-scale paintings one notes a tendency to deny any single vantage point; a compositional strategy that could be misrepresented as distraction, but which is better understood as an effort to disrupt any pretense of contemplative stillness. There is no where in her work; rather, there is a beingthere in a tactile or iconographic way. The figures peopling her canvases, revenants of assembly-line industrialization, have a shadowy aspect about them, like pools of nothingness emerging from the perspectival depths of digital space, which works to both link and separate the scenes so hauntingly portrayed by her paintings. “Milkfed” (2013) offers a particularly representative example of this. The newspaper grey tones filling out the two boys with their mother, along with the truncated waterfall beginning at the painting’s leftmost edge, indicate a life populated by stand-ins, signifiers bereft of signifieds, where the nebula of red and blue abstraction near the painting’s center contrasts vividly with the effacement of figures locked in representational space. The painting is rounded out by an item of constructivist abstraction to the bottom right and the introduction

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ALL WORK BY JULIA DAUKSZA S U C H A S VA R I O U S U N T I T L E D 2014 ( M I X E D M E D I A ) O N T H E S E PA G E S A N D M I L K F E D 2013 ( M I X E D M E D I A ) O N P G . 28

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ARTIST DIARY

amber michelle russell I am a self-taught artist originally from St. Paul Minnesota and currently based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Most well-known for creating intense and emotionally captivating works of art. I specialize in mixed-media female portraits that incorporate graphite, ink, and watercolor. I had my first art exhibit at Foster Art Gallery on the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire campus at the age of eleven. Most recent exhibits include the 2014 solo exhibition “Blood, Sweat and Tears” at gallery Sev Ven in Los Angeles, California and the 2013 group exhibition “Art for a Cure” at studio 21 Tattoo and Gallery in Salerno, Italy. I started drawing when I was three years old. Other children played outside; I played in my sketchbook. During adolescence I realized that engaging in the creative process had supported and sustained me through some darker life experiences, and it continues to do so. For me, making art is emotional therapy. I get lost in the creative process and am able to exist in the present moment where I am able to explore and contemplate the darker aspects of life in a constructive way. Artistic influences include M.C. Escher, Francis Bacon, Zdzislaw Beksinki, and the writings of Charles Bukowski. Art enables me to express what I feel inside, with great attention to detail. In addition to graphite, ink and watercolor, I am exploring coffee as a medium—I find the way that it bleeds into the paper unique and beautiful. Currently, I am incorporating fluorescents into my work and am thoroughly enjoying expanding my creative boundaries by playing with color. www.ambermichellerussell.com

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DAYS END BY AMBER MICHELLE RUSSELL

CHECKING MY BRAIN BY ACHRAF BAZNANI

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DEFYING THE ARCHETYPE BY AMBER MICHELLE RUSSELL

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ENCHANTED BY AMBER MICHELLE RUSSELL

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RIA MOURN BY AMBER MICHELLE RUSSELL

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PULSE BY AMBER MICHELLE RUSSELL

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ARTIST DIARY maria jose franco maldonado My favorite time of the week was always Sundays, my father used to give my brother and I canvases and paint for us to create whatever we wanted to, that or some cardboard houses that where going to be used for the “pesebre” on Christmas. So Sundays went by with painting. My first real painting was a small 30 x 20 cm canvas, which I used to paint my favorite animal back then: dolphins. I gave it to my grandmother and she was so proud, she hung it in her bedroom and each time someone asked about it she would tell an amazing story about her darling artist. I guess art has always been a part of my life. It could be said that I’m a self-taught artist because I didn’t go to college to get a degree, but this will be a conceptual mistake. I have had the best art teachers someone could ask for, and having an impatient and curious personality has helped me built an artist background of my own. My family was my art school by the hand of Andy Warhol, Magritte, Rivera, Haring, Modigliani, Seurat, Basquiat, and many artists I discovered on the path that influenced me. I believe your art changes when you and your surroundings change. My name is María José Franco Maldonado; I was born in Bogotá, Colombia on January 4th, 1990. Typically 90s child one might say, raised by pop culture and MTV. I left my house when I was 18 years old, and before that my art can be summed up in colors, pop art, bad

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music and basic Lichtenstein acrylic copies. I left Bogotá to study Advertising in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was alone in a big city with thousands of new things to devour. Studying advertising made me realize how much I love art and dislike everything else. But the beauty of Buenos Aires and the people I met there fed me creatively. My taste in music evolved and I had a new crush: cinema. Cinema for me is the most complete art because it combines all of the arts in one. And I enjoy watching a good film almost as much as making a new work. So my art changed, I had a new world of idols to look up to and was influenced by their way of viewing the world, sometimes in black and white, sometimes surrealistic. I understood that any kind of art could influence my drawings and paintings. For the moment I wanted them to generate the same feeling as a Godard film generated in me. I love how Lynch, first a painter then a director, describes this process by saying he wanted his paintings to move, so he made them move. Feeling the need of a canvas that talked to me, I abandoned the cloth canvas and went to the streets to find the right canvases for my paintings. So for the last 4 years I have been painting in ghost woods that I found on the streets of Buenos Aires. Black and white is my favorite

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palette, both in drawing and illustration, yet sometimes I add color if I feel that I need to. The theme has not really changed; I have always painted the human body and nature. Sometimes I got obsessed with certain parts of the body. In 2008 I had a series of blue pencil color illustrations of ears, feet and hands, in 2009 I had a fascination with feet, from 2011-2013 I painted faces surrounded by nature, and since last year I have been painting female nudes. My last series of illustrations is a group of pointillism black ink nudes. I called it “Féminin” after my fixation with French cinema and French music, and a strong feeling about Godard’s muse Anna Karina. Yes, it’s a feminist series. Hours of making infinite dots have being a meditating therapy and sometimes had made me feel like Yayoi Kusama. I enjoyed making this series and showing it.

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I’m currently living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I left Buenos Aires in order to concentrate on my art and nurture myself in the most artistic city of all, New York City. The four months that I’ve coexisted in Andy Warhol’s beloved playground, I have been devouring every museum and gallery in the City. I have “met” my favorite idols, eye to eye with “The Eternally Obvious”, contemplated Modigliani’s muses and stressed out about not finding Basquiat’s paintings. Trying to follow Patti Smith’s adventures, I have shown my work in Brooklyn Fire Proof Gallery, Greenpoint Gallery and Shervin’s Bar. I hope you enjoy my art. https://www.facebook.com/ mariajosefrancomaldonado

instagram: mariajosefrancomaldonado FEMININ CAC TUS BY MARIA JOSE FRANCO MALDONADO

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ARTIST DIARY vakseen Being a creative mind, the arts have played a major role in my life since childhood. I grew up overweight, so I wasn’t always the most confident. I wasn’t a hermit or anything, but I was insecure. Society does that to people. Especially with the importance we place on each other’s outer appearance. It wasn’t until I was much older that I was able to love myself, and express the inner voice that my childhood circumstances wouldn’t allow. When you can’t find the words, or even worse, aren’t allowed to vocalize your feelings within an accepting environment, it’s amazing how creativity can serve as a conduit for emotional release. Art helped maintain my sanity in this crazy world. It’s fitting that this same insecurity would manifest itself as inspirational subject matter in my art years later. My creations pulsate with feminine energy. Women are God’s greatest work of art and I believe life as we know it, evolves around them. Although I couldn’t fathom being a woman in this patriarchal world we live in, I open my creative process to the allure inherent to women. I aim for my art to celebrate the acute imperfections and endless perfections that exist within every woman. Today’s media rarely allows for flaws. There is an overload of perfect images that are packaged as if they represent a reflection every woman can see herself in. And that’s not realistic, because there is no balance. Young women who are spoon fed hatred of their natural selves are likely to become carbon copies of magazine covers, and find it difficult to love themselves. And that is something that unfortunately, I can relate to all too well. As quickly as the aperture of a camera opens and shuts to capture light, the unique radiance of the female image is photoshopped away. Models cut away and cover the parts that give them distinction. It’s been happening for so long that

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perfection is the new role model. I’m not against new and unfolding trends in fashion or personal enhancements. I simply do not appreciate beauty being defined for me, or anyone else. One of the wonderful things about the human experience is that we are free to explore, discover and evolve our perception of the multifaceted aesthetic this world has to offer. If I have to label it, my art falls under the surrealism category. I’ve created a signature style that fuses elements of photorealism, cubism and fashion design. Each painting is a unique portrait of an insecure soul with an incredible story to share. This clearly defines the base of my work; however the method is more complex. I attack my creative process the same way a cosmetic surgeon would. I use high end fashion and beauty magazines to clip and surgically collage the perfect features together, bringing my ideas to life. From this point I recreate everything by drawing, then painting these beautifully insecure souls onto the canvas. Initially, I would create using both acrylic and oil or water color paint. Now, I solely work with acrylics. My pieces come to fruition quickly, so I love the flexibility, depth and complex layers acrylic paint allows for. Vibrant color is my preference so my pieces tend to be loud, sensitive and vivacious. Colors demand attention. They play with our senses and evoke emotion responses within the human mind. I use that to my advantage. The colors are essential to the complete story of each creation. In essence, my art is a visual dialogue about society’s idolization of beauty and the surreal, superficial times we live in. I only hope to be fortunate enough to produce art that consistently ignites discussion, captivates the senses and most importantly, questions the importance we place on outer appearances.

R I B B O N I N H E R E Y E S B Y VA K S E E N

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C R E AT E D B Y A N N E S TAV E L E Y A N D J I L L S U T H E R L A N D O F L I V I N L A R G E P H O T O. T H E I N S TA L L AT I O N R E C E I V E D A B U R N I N G M A N 2014 H O N O R A R I U M G R A N T.

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W H E E L O F F O R T U N E I S A C I R C U L A R I N S TA L L AT I O N O F S A LVA G E D D O O R S W H I C H , U P O N E N T E R I N G , E A C H R E V E A L A L A R G E - S C A L E B L A C K A N D W H I T E M U LT I P L E E X P O S U R E M E TA L L I C P H O T O G R A P H . T H E P O R T R A I T S E R I E S O F W O M E N F E AT U R E W I L D LY U N I Q U E D E P I C T I O N S O F T H E TA R O T â&#x20AC;&#x2122; S M A J O R A R C A N A A R C H E T Y P E S . I N S I D E I S A B E A U T I F U L PA R L O R W I T H A H A N D C R A F T E D, M E TA L , O P E N - A I R G A Z E B O W I T H B E N C H E S M A D E W I T H V I N TA G E B E D F R A M E S , A C E N T R A L S E AT I N G O T T O M A N W I T H S T E P S W H I C H I N V I T E C U R I O U S V I S I T O R S U P T O S P I N A B U L L E T R I D D E N B A R R E L L A N T E R N T H AT C A S T S B E A D S O F L I G H T T H R O U G H O U T T H E S PA C E . T H I S I S A L L C R O W N E D B Y A F I R E C H A N D E L I E R W H I C H E X H I B I T S D E L I C AT E P R O PA N E F L A M E E F F E C T S AT N I G H T. H A N D MADE LINEN DRAPERY CONNEC T THE GAZEBO TO THE RING OF DOORS, PROVING SOME PROTEC TION FROM THE ELEMENTS WHILE ALSO CONTRIBUTING TO THE INTIMACY O F T H E S PA C E . A L A R G E L E AT H E R B O U N D G U I D E B O O K I S A L S O C E N T R A L T O T H E P I E C E O F F E R I N G V I S I T O R S G U I D A N C E , Q U E S T I O N S , A N D A F F I R M AT I O N S T H AT E A C H PHOTOGRAPH INSPIRES.

W E A R E F U L LY S O L A R P O W E R E D B Y S I X 130 WAT T PA N E L S H O U S E D B Y A C U S T O M L E D L I T S O L A R A R R AY O U T P O S T. T H E A R R AY C A N B E U S E D O P T I O N A L LY D E P E N D I N G O N T H E D U R AT I O N N E E D E D A N D WA S S I Z E D T O M A I N TA I N A C H A R G E F O R U P T O T W O D AY S O R C A N B E I N S TA L L E D F O R S H O R T E R E V E N T S T O D E M O N S T R AT E T H E T E C H N O L O G Y. T H E O U T P O S T P R O V I D E S T H E E N E R G Y N E E D E D T O I L L U M I N AT E T H E 22 D O O R S I N S I D E A N D O U T, P L U S T H E C E N T R A L S P I N N I N G L A N T E R N A N D T U R N S O N W I T H A T I M E D S Y S T E M . T H E S O L A R A R R AY A L S O S E R V E S A S A N O T H E R S H A D E D S I T T I N G A R E A F O R VISITORS. I N S TA L L AT I O N S P E C S : 44 S Q R F T. - 26 F T D I A M E T E R C I R C L E - 7 F T TA L L R I N G O F D O O R S - 13 F T TA L L AT C E N T E R O F G A Z E B O

Anne Staveley and Jill Sutherl and are the Designers and Creators of the WHEEL OF FORTUNE. Together they are LIVINLARGEPHOTO. they create surreal images on a massive scale such as L arge murals & multimedia install ations from their photography. they are Believers in the Power of Images to start Conversations of Change.

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paul tillinghast I have been a Still-Life Photographer in New York City, for almost 30 years; collaborating with Art Directors to shoot Advertising. Creating art is a way for me to have complete control of the image, from start to finish. Each piece begins with a photograph, which I manipulate in the computer, and then print. From there I build each one with found objects and seal it in liquid glass to create something unique. http://paultillinghast.weebly.com/

QUONSET B Y PA U L T I L L I N G H A S T

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Red Wrap Dress: L a Maison de Fashion Tap Pant: DKNY S U B WAY B Y PA U L T I L L I N G H A S T

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W I N D O W S B Y PA U L T I L L I N G H A S T

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bartosz beda My paintings explore the relation between daily life and human nature. I perceive humanity as a chocolate cake, where beneath the ‘iced’ surface are those more intriguing and challenging mixtures, with fears and social pathology. Through the application and process of painting, I cut a piece of that cake to explore the nature of these problems. With simple, yet powerful gestural strokes and mark making, I search and re-investigate solutions to bring these hidden depths to the surface. bartoszbeda@bartoszbeda.com

(RAS) PUTIN III BY BARTOSZ BEDA

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B LU E F E L LO W B Y B A R T O S Z B E D A

SOLARIS (STUDY) BY BARTOSZ BEDA

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I S S U E S S O S W E E T YO U â&#x20AC;&#x2122; L L G E T A C AV I T Y. C R E AT I V E S U G A R M A G A Z I N E . N E T

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