ARTSY MAGAZINE by Camila Andrea Duran Galvis

ARTSY ART & DESIGN

CONTENTS Five Illustrators Share Their Treasured Finds

Kayla Mahaffey x Thinkspace “Unwind” Print Release for NAACP and Black Lives Matter

Aaron Johson, NicasioFenadez, Austin Harris and Ryan Schneider @OTI, Los Angeles

“Tell Me A Story, I Don’t Care If It’s True”: New Works on Paper by Toyin Ojih Odutola

16 Show Us Where You Live:

Five Illustrators Share Their Treasured Finds Joana Avillez, Julian Callos, Carlín Díaz, Lisk Feng, and Rachell Sumpter share what keeps them inspired.

REATIVE FUEL: Seeing illustrators hopping around different fields of art has made me realize how broad and all-encompassing “illustration” really is and how versatile an illustrator can be. I’ve seen indie comic creators transition into animation, digital illustrators try their hand at ceramics, and painters translate their work into beautiful textiles. All of that movement and experimentation inspires me to challenge myself with different media and techniques. Plus, seeing how an artist’s style transforms from one medium to another, whether it’s drastically or subtly, is always fascinating. VIBRANT WORK: I’ve been loving the work of Choo (@choodraws) for their

use of color and composition; there’s also an underlying tension in a lot of their work, like something sinister has just happened or is about to happen. I’ve also been enjoying art that’s bursting with bold colors, like the work of Molly Mendoza@ msmollym) and L A P (@lapstract).

DREAM JOB: Even though I’m not in the animation field, I love designing characters. If I could work as a character designer at Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network or Disney, that would be my childhood dream come true. /JULLIAN CALLOS//

nice that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve wanted for a while. For example, this year, after I finish my two-year-long book project, I will get myself a new guitar. FRESH DIRECTION:

After working in illustration for seven years straight, I found competitions and shows to be repetitive.

TAYING CURRENT: Mostly Instagram, but I also love art book fairs, like the New York Art Book Fair. Staying away from illustration-exclusive places brings me new ideas. I also pay attention to tech company conferences, such as Adobe 99U.

I began to go to more interesting galleries and studios, and visited music and photography friends. After that, I wanted to create something outside of the box. I am now working on some new collaborative projects I never thought I would be a part of, which opened new doors for me as a long-time editorial illustrator //Lisk Feng//.

ONE TO WATCH: Tatsuro Kiuchi is always my favorite illustrator. END-OF-DAY REWARDS: Playing video games, like Ring Fit Adventure on the Nintendo Switch and Monster Hunter: World on the PlayStation 4.A lso, if I finish a huge project after a long, stressful period, I will get some thing

HEALTHY HABIT: I’m always trying to be balanced, which is the hardest part of being a freelancer. Knowing when to stop and have time with your friends or take a walk in a park helps you start a project smoothly. Mind-blowing work: Robert Beatty is always killing it! //Carlín Díaz//

E L F - M O T I VAT I O N : While it’s true that my day always starts with a cup of coffee, it’s not that difficult to keep myself motivated and awake as I’m mostly working on projects that are fun to do. I think the secret is to keep the work you are doing “fresh.” Sometimes, projects suffer from a lot of changes requested by the client. In

that case, I will try to propose something new. INSPIRATION: I recently came across the work of William Copley again while reading Luncheon magazine. I actually discovered his work at the Fondazione Prada a couple of years ago by accident. Afterward, I immediately wanted to come back to the studio to paint.

UNDER-THE-RADAR RESOURCE: The New York EXCELLENT RESOURCES: Public Library’s Picture Collection is incredible and really great to use. You’ll find and think about imagery in a way that is different from looking up references on the internet. My friends Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford have taken over the reins there, revamping and alerting people to this amazing resource. ANALOG MAGIC: I love Carson Ellis’s work so much. I wouldn’t say she is defining a new direction—other than by her voice, which is entirely her own—but maybe the opposite: she is making illustration that reminds me of the work of some of my all-time favorite illustrators, like Garth Williams. I admire the how and why of her work; it feels like such a full approach. Her drawings feel so cared for, so intimate. Illustrations that are made without a computer have a halo that you can’t just click, drag or drop yourself into. FOND MEMORY: Thinking about my dad and all the things we would draw together during dinner when I was a child.

Fine art and comics. Those genres feed back into illustration, and the reverse is true as well. Twitter is an amazing resource—if you use it wisely. The ArtCenter College of Design also has a podcast called Change Lab, which is an informative listen. MUST-READ BOOKS: So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo and How Not to Die by Michael Greger with Gene Stone. I realize these sound like downers, but they are excellent. SECRET TO SUCCESS: Realizing that talent does not equal success. Networking, keeping a low overhead, time and money management, and grit are a large part of the success equation. Keep doing your thing, keep showing your thing, and, if you’re in it for the long haul, be ready to adapt, adapt, adapt. Also, be nice.

Kayla Mahaffey x Thinkspace “Unwind” Print Release for NAACP and Black Lives Matter Chicago-based painter Kayla Mahaffey, who recently had a show up with Thinkspace Projects, will collaborate with the gallery once again on a special timed-released print drop with the painting Unwind. As the gallery notes, “33% of profits will be donated directly to Black Lives Matter Chicago + 33% of profits will also be donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.” The print will be available for purchase starting this Saturday, June 6 at 10am PST and available through Tuesday, June 9 at 10am PST via the Thinkspace web shop.

KAYLA MAHAFFEY Unwind Timed Edition / Available to ALL for 72 hours Fine art print on Signa Smooth 300gsm cotton rag paper with deckled edges 18 x 24 inches / 45 x 60 cm Signed and numbered by the artist $250

Four-In-One: Aaron Johson, Nicasio Fenadez, Austin Harris and Ryan Schneider

@OTI, Los Angeles

os Angeles’ Over The Influence Gallery has been champing at the bit, ready at the starting gate with four shows originally planned for this past April. Last weekend, those exhibitions finally opened, with limited scheduled viewing for groups of three at a time, featuring solo presentations by Aaron Johnson, Nicasio Fernandez, Austin Harris, and Ryan Schneider. Essentially one of his biggest shows to date, the large, nine new pieces comprising Aaron Johnson’s Cosmic Devotion exhibition have no trouble filling OTI’s spacious venue with excitement. Focusing on fewer crowd scenes and hard edges, the NY-based painter maintains his dual interest in abstraction and figuration to flow in the spontaneous fluency of the paint. “This move into looser more fluid work has coincided with an interest in interstellar space,

astrophysics, the cosmos,” the artist explains. Through a process that is purposely impossible to fully control, Johnson creates more expansive abstract passages where washes upon washes of paint interact in unpredictable ways where figures wallow and disappear in the layers of an undefined landscape. The show also includes the reintroduction of a borderless format that is tondos, which fully related to the fluidity and unpredictability of the creative process. For Something’s Off, his solo debut with the gallery, Nicasio Fernandez painted several new oil paintings on linen pieces, where visual puns or pictorial images springing from common phrases lend surprising meaning to everyday objects. In his signature, long-nosed characters, he concocts visual metaphors for personal experiences and emotions activated by the freedom of surrealism. “This work

overall was definitely more emotional work than I’ve made in the past,” Fernandez tells us about the body of work. “I think also that emotions came to surface to really draw the viewer in into an ‘I’ve been there/know how that feels’ moment.” Accentuating features, the artist works with and beyond the human figure while addressing the human nature and social behaviors. The new works also introduce the artist’s fresh mark-making with the frequent use of patterns that emphasize the image and settings. MFA candidate at The New York Academy of Art, Austin Harris makes his debut with Keeps on Burning, featuring seven new works on linen on painted frames fashioned by the artist himself. Painting from memory instead of from reference material for the first time, the young painter imprinted feelings on the canvas by creating an autobiographical body of work. The linear narration is

most noticeable in two small paintings that are connected with a common subject. Showing a bottle of “sick juice” alcohol, and depiction of a boat floating towards uncertainty, the two pieces portray what can be the desperate, toxic, infectious, and artificial nature of troubled youth. Addressing the issue of growing up surrounded by hyper-masculinity, depressed behaviors patterns, and resulting emotions, Harris’ work is imbued with a much stronger emotive content than the immediately appealing surface might suggest. As inviting colors and comic elements capture the viewer, as well as utilizing a sharp, voluminous visual rendition of objects and subjects to make the stronger point, the artist tells life’s stories in a profound way.

“Tell Me A Story, I Don’t Care If It’s True”: New Works on Paper by Toyin Ojih Odutola

go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.” This quote is attributed to the late great Californian artist, John Baldessari, whose conceptual works actually seemed to be perfectly defined by his own words here. For obvious reasons, this impresses me. To be able to so perfectly define what it is you do (or attempt to do),is not an easy task. Artists, or at least a

good many of them, let their work do the talking, and perhaps leave behind only a few interviews throughout their careers that define a view on their own practice. One of the reasons I love Nigerian-born, NYC-based Toyin Ojih Odutola, cover artist of our November 2017 issue, is how wonderfully she can describe the simplest and most complex parts of her practice, either in essays or even an Instagram post. Her latest show of works on paper, Tell Me A Story, I Don’t Care If It’s True, a viewing room show with Jack Shainman Gallery, is another opportunity to experience her words, which you can read below. When engaging with image-making, suspicions around legibility and interpretation often come to mind. As with the written text, visual language has a set of symbols which can direct a reader to a frame of meanings. For instance, when you hear or read the word, “chair,” a series of images come to mind that represent an object upon which one can sit. Even with more abstract descriptors, such as “love,” one’s emotions and experiences help render a picture. How might this translate in a figurative drawing? Does seeing a

picture of a red chair read the same as someone reading that reference? What happens when an image and text work in tandem? What faculties of understanding are needed when a text reads as “chair,” but the image depicts infatuation or a loss of love? Does a third meaning arrive by combining the two?

I’m often fascinated with how miscommunications happen and what the imagination conjures in misconstrued spaces— the gulfs between what is intended and how it is received. There’ lies possibility for stories to emerge from within these spaces of missed connections. With past solo exhibitions, Untold Stories,

2015 (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis) and Of Context and Without, 2015 (Jack Shainman Gallery), I have tried and failed to explore this fascination serially: the unreliability of how a story is presented via text and/or image, which meanings prevail, and what is conjured from the juxtapositions. Sometimes an image may seem unquestioned, but its title or accompanying text renders it ambiguous. With Tell Me A Story, I Don’t Care If It’s True, I’m attempting to question proclivities towards interpretation and the degrees of bias that effect legibility. The invented stories presented in this series of diptychs and standalone works engage with variables, be they irreverent, painful, humorous, and disturbing— the many facets of life and our attempts to communicate these moments. Contexts here are anecdotal: two teenagers rambling before attending a show, a seductive monologue on a train, a woman presenting a lecture, a man questioning his desires, an encounter with a lifeless body. Whatever came to mind, I wrote and drew them out.

Show Us Where You Live: Yabu Pushelberg’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Step inside George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg’s Toronto residence, which plays host to their eclectic and everevolving collection.

With notable residences in Miami, New York City and Amagansett, George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg, of the renowned Toronto and New York-based studio Yabu Pushelberg, are no strangers to the art of globe trotting – and to the art of living. Fitting for the peripatetic design duo’s hometown haven, their Toronto residence’s modest facade, with its crisp yellow door, opens to a carefully curated assortment of design icons, global craft and an expanding selection of the who’s-who of contemporary art.

“As we’re wandering around the world, we occasionally find bits of hands,” the pair says, “and we just collect them.” Though their growing menagerie finds a comical home on a “chicken foot” side table (shot from above), similar palms have appeared in their furnishings — including as bronze details and door pulls in the charming Blink line for Stellar Works.

Avid art collectors, the duo have amassed an impressive number of works by Anish Kapoor, Wolfgang Tillmans and even Yayoi Kusama. “George met Yayoi Kusama at an event one evening and they instantly took to one another,” Pushelberg says. “The next day, we purchased this piece.” My Heart 2013 hangs behind Jacques Guillon’s 1953 Cord Chair. In 2016, they also acquired one of the artist’s distinct pumpkin sculptures, which now greets visitors to their Toronto studio.

“We live on a ravine in the middle of Toronto,” Pushelberg ex-

plains. “From the front, the house is a little cottage but, in the back, we took the roof off so that we could open it up into the forest, separated only by a wall of glass.” On sunny days, two of French designer Jean-Michel Frank’s plush armchairs appear to almost bask in the morning light. An early painting by Dutch artist Eelco Brand is mounted behind the dining table. Pushelberg says, “We like the juxtaposition of these real tulips resting, which George artfully placed in that long dish.”

Elsewhere, the duo’s eclectic collection finds surprising homes on various perches, platforms and sills, including the three heads that peak down as you ascend the staircase. “[They] are actually piggy banks in the form of Mexican wrestler masks.” Portraits by celebrated photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Herb Ritts create a gallery-in-miniature on the way to the master bedroom. Currently dividing their time between New York and Toronto while working on projects in major international metropolises, from Jerusalem to Tokyo, the pair carefully display an ever-expanding constellation of objects

“This is a vignette sitting above what I call an Italian man’s cabinet,” Pushelberg notes. “It opens up and there’s a place to cut your cigars and a place to put your playing cards.” On top, an etched antler by Indigenous artist Fnooky finds a comfortable home in front of a small drawing by the legendary Andy Warhol, both nestled amidst a selection of objects gifted to the designers over the years.

Show Us Where You Live:

Stephan Weishauptâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Deco Miami Oasis For the Avenue Road and Man of Parts founder, white walls and restored features provide the perfect backdrop to a growing collection of furniture and art.

For Stephan Weishaupt – the mastermind behind luxury furniture purveyor Avenue Road and design company Man of Parts – Miami was a serendipitous city to establish new roots. “Acquiring this home was a classic case of something finding me,” he says of the sprawling, and somewhat dilapidated, villa he purchased in 2013. “I saw the house while I was in Miami visiting friends and have never looked back.”

“This house provides a space for experimentation to mix styles, play with colour and pattern,” Weishaupt says. “Unlike the typical all-white Miami Beach vibe, I’ve had a lot of fun with colour.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the bathroom, lined in swirling Italian Rocky Mist marble. A brilliant-white, Art Deco-inspired tub by Agape and a refined table lamp by Michael Anastassiades provide a counterpoint to the vibrant stone.

Late American designer Vladimir Kagan’s serpentine sofa and two linear sconces by Michael Anastassiades complement an original oculus looking out onto the pool, one of the many idiosyncratic elements Weishaupt looked to preserve. “[It] is certainly one of the house’s most distinctive architectural features,” he says. Also in this room: a limited edition chair by Carlos Motta, the Pebbles table by Nada Debs, and a wooden console by Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld.

Weishaupt’s home office continues the distinct and charming combination of “old loves with new acquisitions.” Here, Philippe Malouin’s Alexander street chair sits behind a peach lacquered version of Delcourt Collection’s YBU desk. “The colour and playful, organic shape make it a little more interesting than your typical work-from-home set-up,” he says. “The best part of my office, though, is the connection to the outdoors, making work feel a little less like work.” Another of Katrantzou’s designs for the Rug Company and a large-scale work by Berlin-based artist Gregor Hildebrandt give an edge to the sombre palette.

Sinema Kitchen Faucet Adding an unexpected hit of art-deco glamour to the kitchen sink, the new Sinema pulldown faucet by Moen comes with an alternative handle with an etched shell motif in a metal finish that contrasts the arced spout and base.

Sinemaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s multi-function spout with two spray options (aerated stream and power-boost spray) is self-retracting and securely locks itself back in place. Easy to install via a proprietary push-button connector that negates the need for tools, the kitchen faucet series also includes a bar/prep sink version for a coordinated look.

Available in chrome, matte black, polished nickel and spot-resistant stainless steel, the faucet comes with a matching handle plus the alternative â&#x20AC;&#x201C; matte black for chrome, polished nickel and stainless and brushed gold for the matte black.