Quiet Lunch | Neil Grayson. | Book N°5

Much like the seasons, the climate of the world is changing. Nonetheless, in these pivotal times, two things are vital to uphold, they must remain a constant in this, our free: the fostering of creative expression and its counterpart, the pursuit of happiness. Society will always need diagnosing— and even remedying—that is where artists come in. Artists are the observers, expressive entities who not only articulate but heal. Now more than ever, the world is in need of such entities, voices who document and translate the shift.

With this shift there is also an increasing need to look inward and find the harmony between the micro, ourselves, and the macro, the world around us; and even then the artist is key. It is the artist who leads, and lives, by example. The artist is our existential compass that guides us. This issue is filled with individuals who are intent on finding the answer—an answer that may benefit us in a unique way. These individuals encourage us to find fresh ways of thinking, which what this issue embodies. Book N°5 is highlighting artists with varying, but potent, perspectives; artists who inspire us to recognize the essentials and then use them to build new schools of thought!

Cover artist, Neil Grayson, a ‘serial savant’, is a dedicated autodidact who has found a true calling in the arts. Front and center and backed by his new piece poignantly title, “Portrait of America, 2017”, Grayson takes our world with all its potential into a striking interpretations of philosophical possibilities.

For Grayson’s shoot, we collaborated with renowned photographer Yelena Yemchuk. Yemchuk, known for her work with the Smashing Pumpkins and popular publications such as Vogue and New Yorker, captures Grayson in his element—concentrated, contemplative, content, shaping his pictorial vision with gusto and a palette knife.

The issue also includes Q&A’s with visual artists Harmonia Rosales, Kip Omolade and Emily Miller; features on Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos, Bradley Hart, Stan Squirewell, Jeffrey Allen Price and Ai Campbell; a look at Ali Cavanaugh’s Sock Arms series; and an open letter from Mariá Fernanda Leaño. We take time out to chat with some musical newcomers such as Chi Town’s own Ravyn Lanae, songstress Beccs and Mike Dean’s protege Dice SoHo. And we also put a spotlight on some young fashion labels like L’Enchanteur, WXYZ and SCOGÉ.

We’re also glad to have some amazing writers in our Literary Portion. It’s part of our continued culture building mission to pay attention to the medium of contemporary literature as a form of our deepest expressions.

So, we hope that you enjoy Book N°5! We hope the content inspires you to embrace your own journey.

Akeem Duncan Editor in Chief

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TABLE OF CONTENTS L’Enchanteur 4 The New Kid | Rayven Lenae by Niki Gatewood 10 The Virtual World of Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos by Audra Lambert 12 Infinitive Binary | Stan Squirewell by Ryan Davis 18 Showing Your Work | Jeffrey Allen Price by Evan Jacobs 22 Seek and You Shall Find | Arcmanoro Niles by Stephanie Black 26 Beccs | Restless by Matt Wilhelm 30 Beyond Collection by Lori Zimmer 32 At the Function by Olivia Wolf 36 WXYZ Jewelry 40 BWood 46 The Evolution of Serial Savant | Neil Grayson by Akeem Duncan 52 Outside the Bubble | Bradley Hart by Roman Kalinovski 60 Remote | In Conversation with Emily Miller by Diane Knarr 66 A Proper Reflective | Kip Omolade by Griselle Rodriguez 70 An Open Letter from Malinche by Maria Fernando Leaño 76 Scogé 80 Black Milk | Ai Campbell by Joe Tolbert Jr. 84 Creation in Controversy | Harmonia Rosales by Moeima Dukuly 88 Where Have All the Flowers Gone by Sam Duratovic 92 Sock Arms | Ali Cavanaugh by Akeem K. Duncan 102 The Literary Portion 107 featuring Malik Crumpler | Rob Cook | Kristina Marie Darling | Rosalinda Kaliden Rosalinda Kaliden | Alcy Leva | Maya Marshall | Hall Sullivan

Sure Bet | Dice Soho by Zachary Schwartz 115 In the End | Shani Pleasants 117

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PUBLISHER EDITOR IN CHIEF MANAGING EDITOR MEDIA DIRECTOR MANAGING EDITOR (FRANCE) CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Gregory de la Haba

PHOTOGRAPHY

Akeem K. Duncan John Gosslee

Wesley Clouden Onaje Scott Darryl “Scramz” Villegas Leon Williams

Abimbola “Bim Star” Afolabi Goënièvre Anaïs Stephanie Black Rob Cook Malik Crumpler Kristina Marie Darling Ryan Davis Moeima Dukuly Niki Gatewood Evan Jacobs Roman Kalinovski Rosalind Kaliden Diane Knarr Audra Lambert Alcy Leyva Maya Marshall Griselle Rodriguez Zachary Schwartz Hall Sullivan Joe Tolbert, Jr. Matt Willhelm Lori Zimmer

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Joaquin Castillo Jimmy Fontaine Rebecca Hidalgo Karen Jerzyk Björn Jonas Sonia Malfa Starr Oge Mark St. Andre, Jr.

Alexis Mobley

PHOTOGRAPHY

Yelena Yemchuk

ART DIRECTION

Akeem K. Duncan

PHOTO ASSISTANT

Dean Dodos

POST

Jenna Mewes

SPECIAL THANKS The Yard, Jean-Paul Mallozzi, Leanne Stella, Gustavo Guerra, Anna Zorina Gallery, Mike Dean, Jenna Mewes, Elle Ambler, Alexis Acerno, Alexandra Fanning, Maddox Grayson, Doreen Grayson, Mike Dean, Louise Donegan, David & Lauren Sussman, Stan & Janice Sussman, Yelena Yemchuk, Yana Chernova, Chris Eykyn, Susan Wallach, Hillary Thomas, Jen Rhodes, Mike Zapata, Tori Alexander, Jeff Bull, Jack Osbourne, George Dutile, Howard & Carmen Sosin, Reid Carolin, Channing Tatum, Cory & Bekah Bond, Michael Caruso, Eva Herzigova, Lower East Side, Tribeca...

For Advertising Inquiries Email Us at biz@quietlunch.com For General Inquiries Email Us at info@gmail.com

Quiet Lunch, LLC 234 5th Avenue (Suite 215) New York, New York 10001

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her

by L’Enchanteur

Photographer: Sonia Malfa @soniamalfa | Art Direction : L’ENCHANTEUR @l_enchanteur | Styling : Soull Ogun | Model : Anna Kikue

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The New Kid: Rayven Lanae written by Niki Gatewood Photo by Jimmy Fontaine Exuding a chic confidence, reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn, Ravyn Lenae, is poised for excellence. A recent graduate of the prestigious, Chicago High School for the Arts, this classically trained singer/songwriter—who is a member of Zero Fatigue, an amalgamation of area artisans—has quickly progressed from singing with choirs to inking her major label deal with Atlantic Records.

Many of Lenae’s rites-of- passage have been bolstered by success. Even before signing with Atlantic, a then 15-year-old Ravyn released her first ever single, “Greetings.” She would soon earn an abundance of regional acclaim. Catalyzed by its belief in the ascending starlet, the esteemed indie label, Three Twenty Three Music Group began working with the vocal savant.

Compelled to create, Ravyn Lenae wrote her life and it’s reflected in her début EP, Moon Shoes.

Upon Atlantic’s reissue of that 2016 endeavor, a wider audience is being introduced to Ravyn’s soothing perspective. Within her kaleidoscope of creativity, a genre-bending collision includes everything from Hip-Hop, to Pop, to Electronic, to Soul, to Funk. “I plan to touch as many people with my music as I possibly can,” an assertive innocence wraps Lenae’s words.

RL is determined. Earlier this year, while on a three-month tour with the talented MC Noname, the artistic and tatted chanteuse traversed the nation.

Chronicling an evolution of sound, the “Last Breath” artiste continued to push her pen. Back in March, she dropped her follow-up EP, Midnight Moonlight. Ever the road warrior, Ravyn has accepted the invitation to perform with SZA and Smino for the international, TDE Presents: The CTRL Tour.

Pristine yet assertive, intangible yet welcoming, pure yet provocative, Ravyn Lenae represents everything that is right about music. Check out why the New Kid may become a cherished favorite.

Please share, how did it occur to you that you wanted to make music your profession?

For one, I’m not sure if it was a specific event. So, I guess the first thing would be me singing in school and in choirs.

Generally, the love that I received from getting solos proved that I am Art. I needed to sing. I needed to dance. I needed to do all those things. Other than that, nothing else would fit me.

In my childhood, those are the main points that made me feel compelled to do music.

Initially, a South Side Chicago environment enriched and reinforced your musical aspirations. As you continue to develop as an artist, how is has that South Side upbringing influencing your material?

Honestly, I don’t think it has influenced it as much as everyone would like it to.

I’m spending most of my time on the north side or the west side of Chicago.

That’s where the music scene really is.

There’s not much happening on the south side.

But, I will say that I guess, that subconsciously that I am fully aware of the struggle. The divisions of the north and the south side does have an effect on me. It may not come out in my music, but personally I think it does. I wouldn’t say it has influenced my artistry in any way.

In the past, you’ve been quoted as saying, “I tend to take small bits and

pieces from my favorite artist, and incorporate them into my own work.”

Of all time today, what are your top five favorite artists and why?

These are in no particular order.

Outkast, because they are very groundbreaking. They were not scared to be their true selves. They mix different genres together. They even tap into their feminine side, more so Andre. Just being able to explore every single realm of art and not caring what anyone else thought of them. To me, that’s amazing. For breaking the ground in music, I really look up them, especially Andre.

for Black women. I feel that she’s given that innocence and that ego that a lot of people think we didn’t have. I commend her for that. To me, also, her for growing her duties to be much more than an entertainer. She’s able to dance and sing while able to give a very thought-provoking visual. I think that, by herself, she’s actually helped to shape the culture.

Many rites-of-passage are wrought with both right and wrong. Thus far, as an emerging artist, what lesson learned have you learned that’s best assisting your creative journey?

Stereolab, they created the sound that my mom calls Scooby Doo music. It’s very electric. They created a new wave that no one really hopped on until now.

And now, they’re still not as popular as I would like for them to be. Especially, the lead singer (Lætitia Sadier). Her voice is just super pure. She doesn’t use any vibrato. Her melodies are outrageous.

Especially, because she finds those melodies that don’t do too much. But they’re very effective. So, I really like them.

The most important lesson I’ve learned is to always put the music first. Before anything, that comes with the attention or the mini-stardom, I feel like people can quickly get away from that. I always try to remind myself to remember why I started it in the first place, and what it’s really about now. So, always serving the music before anything, is something that I always strive for.

For me, this is a really hard question because I listen to a lot of things. Erykah [Badu], because of everything! Right now, I’m really into Moses Sumney.

His songwriting is amazing. His voice is amazing and he uses it in creative ways.

He embraces himself and as an artist; he knows who he is. Also, he’s not scared to challenge himself. I hear it in his vocal arrangements. You know, some people get comfortable in their range and don’t even try to do better. He’s not a person who is afraid to push that envelope.

Whenever I talk about my music, I like to visually picture the Garden of Eden.

It’s very beautiful; it’s floral. It is natural.

There’s something very delicate about my music. I feel there’s an innocence. I like to relate it to nature and its beauty.

If my music could be a place it would definitely be the Garden of Eden.

How would you visually describe your sound?

Beyoncé she just created, I feel like this inner woman in every woman. It is amazing. She has shaped the culture

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The Virtual Rise of EsmeralDa K smat p ul s written by Audra Lambert photography by Leon Williams

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“With truths of a certain kind, it is not enough to make them appear convincing, one must also make them felt.”

-Baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters “It’s perhaps no longer important to draw the line between the virtual and the real, as the border between the two has been blurred. In the virtual land, we are not what we originally are, and yet we remain unchanged.”

-Cao Fei It was a sunny afternoon when I found myself bounding down the streets of Lower Manhattan to visit the studio of artist Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos, trailing memories in my wake. I was taking the long trek across town from the Lower East Side to the Financial District, passing by the Chinese restaurant where I’d eaten for Christmas Eve and sauntering past the bench where I’d awaited a return to jury duty. The past surrounded me, activated by a certain smell or a slant of light on a building.

In this introspective mood, I arrived at Kosmatopoulos’ studio, where I was little prepared for the fluffy stranger that leapt at me when the door opened. “Geronimo!” A warm voice called out to the canine guardian as I opened the door, and a short bob leaned in for a warm embrace. “Welcome!”

Kosmatopoulos sung as she led me to a table in her studio, chatting about our recent runin at an art event in Brooklyn, her alert fox terrier trailing in our wake. Kosmatopoulos is affable and erudite, overflowing with wit and mental perspicacity. We discussed recent art events as she gave me a quick tour around the dizzying neon sculptures encircling her bright and airy studio space. Sitting to review the artist’s diverse oeuvre, the artist pulled out her laptop to show me video artworks she’s created on the very subject I had been contemplating: the power of memory.

“These videos all start the same; they are about the different ways of dealing with memory.”

The artist’s lilting voice walked through the process of her video, “erased”, which begins with the artist preparing a piece of paper and writing down the word “MEMORY”. The word lingers for a moment on the screen, pregnant with anticipation, before the artist begins painstakingly erasing letter after letter with whiteout. “This one [video] involves erasing… the word [memory] is, to me, a fact of experience… this action indicates how we process it in some way.” Six different versions of the artist alternately erasing, covering, and discarding the word “memory” exist on the artist’s website and Vimeo channel.

In one version, she obscures the word with gold leaf, creating a sumptuous cascade of gleaming gold on a pure white sheet. The videos probe our own internal struggles with memory, embracing the pure subjectivity of emotion imbued within our lived experience.

The artist carefully untangles the emotional threads embedded within our everyday lives, continually refining the emotional core of our experiences and whittling them down

to their most plaintive form. The repetitive process of denying memory is a simple and powerful statement, documenting actions which we repeat almost daily. Yet this action is not generally made explicit in everyday life. Kosmapotolous clicks to open “Digital”, a video in which the artist takes a cell phone photo of the written word “memory” before tossing the word aside. Esmeralda intently observed the clip, noting, “in digital memory, we document it then delete it, leaving no trace. It’s just gone.”

Kosmatopolous is a conceptual, interdisciplinary artist working in across sculpture, new media, installation and performance. She is based in New York and Paris, and has participated in residencies and exhibited internationally. I first encountered images of her 2016 installation at the Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark in collaboration with artist Sean Naftel. The exhibition/TV show, entitled “Mastering the Art of Contemporary Art”, was a gleeful reimagining of the ways in which contemporary art could be viewed through an operative lens, similar to learning to cook through TV cooking shows. The “art TV show” invited guest artists into the gallery’s “kitchen” to discuss their recipes for success. In this collaborative project, much as in Kosmatopoulous’ solo projects, her emphasis on re-imagining forms of social engagement and collective action becomes evident.

The artist extends this curious approach to examining how diverse publics engage with one another in everyday life. She investigates how communication and information exchange has unrelentingly altered contemporary life. One physical manifestation of this approach lay nearby on the table in the form of a series of cast plaster hands. Upon first glance, these hands possessed unsettling similarities. Each was slightly different in size yet performed similar gestures. I began modeling my own hand after one of the casts when the artist placed her cell phone into an open hand….

Ah. “This work is about how we speak. Human interaction mediated by technology is a key aspect of Western society,” the artist explained. Holding one of the cast hands, Kosmatopoulos elaborated that while we once spoke with our mouths, we now “speak” just as frequently with our hands when we rapidly respond via text message. “Some days we speak more with our thumbs.” She expands that functions like text-to-speech complicate our relationship with communication and speech. When questioned about the intrusion of the real into virtual space through such actions as text-to-speech, and the resulting tension of unifying these two opposites, Kosmatopolous balked, responding that “real and virtual are not opposites—the opposite of real is imaginary.” These hands were displayed in the buzzy Spring/Break 2016 installation “MHOAUNTDH” as objects indicating the role of hands dominating speech over our mouths (the title itself was a mash-up of the words “mouth and hands.”)

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This lingering tension between real and imaginary is realized in Kosmatopolous’ project SIRI&me, in which the artist explored the boundaries of Siri’s programmed responses through the artist’s attempts to initiate a relationship with the software. Reminiscent of the indie film hit “Her”—less fictionalized but more pointed—SIRI&me directly reveals the limits to which SIRI’s programmers have allowed her to respond to romantic overtures. At one point, SIRI responds to the artist’s question “do you love me” with “you’re looking for love in all the wrong places.”

These repeated overtures end with the software pointedly steering the topic away from romantic subjects, advising the artist at one point to “make some friends.” These exchanges are documented as C-prints, physical traces of the evolving, complex relationship between

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humans and artificial intelligence. Siri’s responses may exist virtually, but they are certainly not imaginary.

In a recent solo exhibition the artist held on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in Manhattan, what i wanted to tell you but never dared, Kosmatopolous revealed our expanded boundaries for communication in a society centered around virtual interactions. The artist juxtaposes our current methods of communicating, exploring key problems embedded within these frameworks. One example is predictive text, a tool that can be helpful or prohibitive depending on the scenario. On one wall of the exhibition a video of a hand tapping repetitively on a notepad is shown next to an iPhone showing the results of an absent body clicking the predictive text suggestion on a text message to produce a long, and ultimately meaningless,

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missive. Directly across on the gallery’s opposing wall were a series of framed, handwritten letters from participants in a project centered around predictive text. Each seemingly unique letter and accompanying envelope featured handwritten notes entirely composed of predictive text language. The format indicated originality that the content did not contain, a curious reminder that our manual and virtual worlds can overlap in unexpected and surprising ways.

While technology is omnipresent in Kosmatopoulos’ oeuvre, the artist is not focused on tech as a subject matter.

“The work is not about technology, it’s about us: how we interact, how we speak.”

Discussing the evolution of how we communicate, we agree that our use of technology is responsive to our needs as a society, an indicator of our progress. When the issue of bias in technology arises, the artist eschews making a value judgment, instead prioritizing a need for studied inquiry into these systems. Kosmapotoulos posits the question “what does it mean”: a continual provocateur, she works to juxtapose the distilled, simple truths buried under our methods of communicating to reveal underlying systems. Society is mediated by our current reliance on technology, and Kosmapotoulos is careful to respond to social conventions tied into the geopolitical boundaries in which she is working at a given time. Her response to working at a residency in Lebanon, the artist explains, would not include the same references as work

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produced in her New York-based studio, as social manners and modes of communication vary across international borders.

Our conversation winding down, we said our goodbyes and I exited the front doors of the artist’s studio building for the slots of light delineating Manhattan’s early evening streets. My thoughts returned to a powerful point the artist made during our conversation on our constant need for certainties. This, the artist argued, is linked directly with our search for truth—a search embedded in our relationship with the internet. “Sci-fi author H.G. Wells writings in World Brain looked at ultimate peace as the result of society having a shared body of knowledge… the internet and wikipedia in particular fit the parameters of what the author was seeking,” Kosmatopoulos noted. Peace may remain evasive, but universal knowledge is at our fingertips online. The source of this information is often unclear, however, creating an uncomfortable parallel with another human institution: a universal creator. Kosmatopoulos queried, “Who is the internet? Does it have a face? It’s “they”. Where is it? Somewhere. It’s the closest we come to God.” If the internet were a deity then perhaps Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, is the best equivalent—the double-headed omnipotent guardian entryways, the starting point in a search through the virtual mirror reflecting the full spectrum of contemporary society, lingering at the exit and entry or our ongoing search for truth.

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Infinitive Binary. | Stan Squirewell written by Ryan Davis Photography by Leon Williams

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As a child, which parent did you tell what you wanted for your birthday?

While this is trivial for us now adults, the science behind this act fascinates multi-disciplinary artist Stan Squirewell. Engaged by the aspect of the one or other, 0 or 1, or the binary, this was his earliest recognition of this form of dichotomy. Through his works he has discovered this relationship is a matter of finding the right current, that aligned with your desired outcome. That current breaks down into 0-1 (or vice versa).

While Stan primarily works with the figure, through his sculpture series TesTro-Es-Tro he unveils that current that concurrently operates in all things.

Stan, born and raised in Washington, DC has been immersed in the arts since an early age. Led by his spirit to do art, he studied at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, graduating in 1996. Also, he attended Hoffberger School of Painting, where he obtained his MFA degree in 2007. Once upon a time a self-described painter (almost exclusively), has expanded his practice into a colleague of photography, installation and performance. Thus further highlighting the multilayered complexities of his interest in race and memory through the imageries of mythology, sacred geometry and science.

Like a scientist, Stan continually dives deeper into his subject, investigating scientific elements, however, creating a relationship with them and the human figure. And while much of his works incorporates basic elements such as water and carbon, Tes-To- Es-Tro, 2015 abstractly explores what they mean and their function.

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“In my opinion, art, in essence, is birthed from thought. Thought then manifests as the object or artifact. Thoughts are cyclical until we fix them. We live and interact in trillions of other people’s thoughts and imaginations. Thoughts (0), Object (1)” The symbiotic relationship between the 0 and 1 gives and takes, pushes and pulls working together to create an infinity that is reminiscent of Frank Stella’s Memantra, 2005. This is evident in the use of color and material. Black is a color that dominates this series, as well as his other works, but doesn’t limit or create a boundary. The ropes literally tug away without a pull towards any particular direction.

The materials become a game of 0 sum.

Despite the fact that these materials are conceptually built on the notion of race and identity, they gain no traction without its relation to the other. It’s easy to become consumed by the vastness of the materials that it literally feels like an infinite void as it dives deeper into its prime state. As Stan stated in our interview, “In the 1 there’s a 0, in the 0 there’s a 1. They appear to be separate;

technically they are the same.” If we can rap our heads around this notion, you realize the point is that within every 0 and 1 is a 0 and 1 thus becoming an infinite state of possibility.

By no means is Tes-To-Es-Tro a conclusion. On the contrary, they are primitive, or rather prime, as Stan and I talked at length about. He describes primitive as, “telling you what you really are.” This merely culminates the complexity of the cross-hatching relationship of 0 and 1. A relationship that diverges and converges in a way that inevitably “collapses because a 1 can be a lose just as a 0 can be a win… they cancel each other”, as Stan stated.

This cancellation is ultimately a display of harmony. It’s a fundamental equation that gives beauty to humankind, all living and nonliving things and Stan’s art series Tes-To-Es-Tro. Stan describes his figurative works as the one and Tes-To-Es-Tro as the many. To this, I add that for every prime, there is a many; for every many is a collection of prime. As Stan’s work dives deeper into the primitive state of being, Tes-StroEs-Tro advances us into the future. In this journey to and fro he says… “It’s all balance.”

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Showing Your Work. | Jeffrey Allen Price. written by Evan Jacobs

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Jeffrey Allen Price is creating order from chaos with his unique approach to art.

With a cynical eye for the monumental and a tender approach to the discarded, Price uses primarily sculpture to flip our expectations about what is beautiful.

Price spoke to me this summer from his home in Long Island, New York.

“I am trying to integrate art and life as much as possible… I am very interested in finding innovative ways of creating artistic solutions to dealing with humans’ materialism.”

Price grew up in Missouri, going to school for painting and sculpture at Missouri State University, then earning his masters at Stony Brook University in New York. Since then, Price has prolifically produced while teaching at a plethora of New York colleges and universities.

The main foci of Price’s work have come in three areas: obelisks, potatoes, and decay.

Obelisks to Price are almost divine: “[They’re] phallic symbols; they are geometric perfection, they are eternal; they are authoritarian.” But like most of his art, his work with them is an attempt to undermine the emotions these objects evoke in most people. For instance, Price’s installation OBELISCUS ENNEAS CONCISUS ET CORPUS ARENACEA (9 Broken Obelisks with Brain Sand) is an entire room filled with obelisks in various states of disrepair— they are toppled, fragmented, imperfect.

Another piece, ICEBELISK, was what Price called an “anti-monument”: an obelisk made of ice that lasted for but a single day.

To Price, the opposite of the obelisk is the potato, another object that fascinates him. “[The potato is] feminine, or rather sexually ambiguous, organic, and egalitarian,” explains Price.

Unlike the obelisk, an object Price seeks to reimagine, the potato is an object that he seems to worship. One of his largest installations was the Potato Institute, a temporary museum consisting of over five thousand potato-themed objects, such as an array of varied mashers. Price is also working on an ongoing video performance series related to potatoes as well as making music with Potatotron, his “potato band.”

Much of the rest of Price’s work is essentially a study of decay and disuse.

Two of his series are a celebration of corrosion. “Absorption modules” are

thick sheets of paper he leaves in his garden covered with metal objects to be ravaged by nature and later be “harvested” when “ripe,” left to dry, and put on display in grand murals. Price says the absorption modules are “slowly disintegrating surfaces [that] mimic the process of death.” Closely related is his series of rust on paper Price lovingly refers to as “rustagrams.” These works often focus on symbols, shapes, or patterns and let the viewer discover that rust and other types of corrosion can be used to create order, when it itself is the byproduct of disorder, a symptom of decay. With his rustagrams, Price seeks to “evoke the look and feel of archaic tablets or pages of a manuscript that were written in some now-forgotten language.”

What really sets Price aside from many other artists, however, is his work with his own work, pieces he calls “process sculptures.” Price takes “residues” from his work, such as discarded tape, sanding disks, gloves, paint brushes, etc., and “upcycles” them into pieces of art themselves, each having a connection to Price’s life yet each standing alone as its own piece. “I use objects that I feel have a ‘vitality’—that have an energy or seem to have a history that tell a story.”

The process sculptures vary wildly in medium and subject matter. He has erected two obelisks, one made solely of crumpled, used adhesive tape, the other an eight-foot behemoth made from used pens and markers. A tall stack of halved egg shells becomes the world’s most delicate phallus, perhaps a comment on male fragility. Conversely, a single warped sanding disk is suddenly female genitalia shirking softness. In another, two paint-smeared rubber gloves are joined at the wrists and propped up on their own fingers, a testament to the blurry line between work and art.

All of this is but the tip of the obelisk that is Price’s oeuvre, an eye on the potato of his work. Price is tech savvy and promotes much of the full body of his work on social media and his website. He periodically displays his work in shows and installations and is currently working on a documentary about the potato, a culmination of two decades of adoration. No matter which work of his you admire the most, Jeffrey Allen Price is compelled to challenge our notions of what is ordered and what is disordered, the beauty of decay and the decay of beauty. “I feel like I have to keep doing it,” Price says of his art. “I’ll probably continue doing it forever.”

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A Safe Place Since Birth(Sisters), 2016

SEEK AND YOU SHALL FIND. | ARCMANORO NILES WRITTEN BY STEPHANIE BLACK

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The prize, 2017

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Arcmanoro Niles’ workspace is an organizational fantasy—paints, brushes and glitter pots meticulously arranged on roller carts, rulers and T squares hung deliberately on the wall; pea-sized dollops of yellow oil paint dotted the edge of a worktable where Niles mixes and prepares his colors. These items are arranged specifically between paintings the artist had previously exhibited at Long Gallery in Harlem in a show titled The Arena. The glow of the orange-hued canvases—scenes and portraits of the artist’s childhood stomping grounds in Washington, D.C.—cast within the studio a certain warmth and familiarity.

Niles resembles his paintings in the sense that his reserved, pensive persona emits the same smoldering effervescence as the bright, burnt oranges of the subjects he paints.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C.’s North East area, Niles studied in high school at Duke Ellington School of the The Classroom, 2017

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Arts. After graduating with a BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2013, he earned his MFA at New York Academy of Art in 2015. Niles now lives and works in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a largely working-class area with bustling main drags and quiet residential streets.

From D.C. to Philly to Brooklyn, Niles is thoroughly a city kid—a biographical detail that asserts itself through the subjects he paints.

As stately as his subjects are, Niles’ portraits communicate a certain degree of knowingness that changes from scene to scene, evolving with the age group and gender of the subject; in some instances a group of young men, or two middle-aged women, or a group of children. Dispersed within all of his works are humanoid creatures with their own agendas, interacting with the scene in their own layered dimension. Niles calls these figures “Seekers”, creatures comprised of rough

Stipulations of Love, 2017

When We Played As Kids, 2016

red outlines or bulbous abstractions, aid in the understanding of Niles’ scenes— footnotes of raw feelings and desires that evade succinct description.

In “The Classroom”, a group of young children pose amidst Seeker-centric chaos. Niles reflects on what the Seekers are meant to convey: “I wanted to have these impulsive creatures within the painting. I didn’t want them to be necessarily evil but I wanted them to do whatever makes them happy immediately. And so they came about by me thinking about how... where I grew up, there was a lot of different things going on that influenced our decisions.

I wanted to give a physical form to that,

but I didn’t want to it be in the form of a person because we weren’t aware of that.”

Niles saw a condom for the first time as a child on the playground. Children are exposed to social constructs that they are not yet equipped to understand on a daily basis, a part of emotional development that lingers between naivety and apathy.

There is a multidimensional aspect to every portion of our being. Through his subjects and Seekers, Niles exposes those dimensions—from Seekers performing an exhibitionist sex act behind the window, watching over a presumably father-daughter double portrait in “The Prize” to the watchful stealth Seeker

lingering behind the artist in the selfportrait “Distant Stranger (Welcomer)”.

His work doesn’t only concern itself with the physical interactions of people and their environments but the emotional, psychological nuances of existence.

As expressive as the Seekers are throughout Niles’ body of work, the most pressing aspect is the blurred boundary between viewer and subject.

Even when one of Nile’s subjects is isolated, there is still an engagement with the spectator. “It’s important to me to have that interaction,” Niles states, “so you don’t feel like you’re some omniscient viewer, but they’re aware of you and you’re aware of them. It’s about

people and their interactions with each other, and how they interact with their environment.”

Niles’ renderings of city neighborhoods and interior home scenes flood off the canvas and pour through space into our dimension with molten intensity and glitter, much as Seekers float throughout planes of reality as areas blend together.

They emanate a glow of saturated oranges and reds, investigating wide spectrums of intense and emotional shades, drawing viewers in as landscapes converge somewhere in the middle of this world and Niles’.

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BECCS | RESTLESS Written by Matt Willhelm Photography by Rebecca Hidalgo

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When asked what she wants to achieve with her music, Beccs doesn’t respond in typical fashion. “I don’t want people to sleep easy at night.” They are strong words but they match her music, dark and powerful soul that doesn’t pull any punches. She has zero fear of exploring the dark realms of the human condition in her music.

In fact, for her, that is often the point.

Her body of work is largely personal and confessional. Having grown up in a musical family and playing instruments from a young age, it was a natural transition into songwriting as a young teenager. Music was an organic form of expression and therapy for Beccs. Music continued to play a greater and greater role in her life until halfway through her degree in theater arts, she decided that her future was in songwriting rather than acting.

Though she finished her education, she quietly stopped taking roles and began work on releasing an EP.

Now focused on music as her path in life, Beccs continues to make music that explores the raw depths of humanity.

Whether focused on the highs or lows of life, every song is an intimate affair. Beccs dives into difficult topics fearlessly, covering the sort of material that certainly keeps one up at night.

The first EP, “Unfound Beauty” is a visceral documentation of her own struggle with an eating disorder and the host of underlying demons that create such a condition. The opening tracks were written on some of her darkest nights after Beccs committed herself to a hospital. She would “sit down at the patient piano and the song would come out.” The songs were a “way to survive.” These dark moods that lead off the EP culminate into the final song, a powerful and moving testament to the need for self love and learning to, “recognize a beauty that we’ve been taught to be blind too.”

These wide ranges in mood are natural and seamless narrative to Beccs. She

finds many things about our world to be disconcerting but also looks to find a better way.

In her own words, “things are fucked up.” Yet she finds herself in a place of hope. There is an underlying idea that obstacles can be overcome and Beccs believes that music is an integral part of that process. Moving forward it seems that she hopes to reach others with song in the same way she reached herself. She calls it, “a promise that I will set out to do the work that scares me.”

A long developing fixation for Beccs is womanhood. Much of her newer material addresses the roles that women have in this society and the inherent obstacles that they have to face. Society can hardly be described as fair to both genders and the current political climate is anything but sympathetic to women’s rights. Her recent music also is an ode to the feminine power women have when they come together.

She describes it as a call to action for

women to make sure there’s a better future for today’s daughters. These ideas seem to color much of her past and future work, working as a central hub to her artistic projects. Whether she is speaking of her collaborators, her artistic goals, or her personal life, Beccs consistently returns to the power of the feminine and her hope for the world.

Beccs is truly an artist whose motivation is her message. Whether it is directed inwardly to herself, or outwardly towards those she hopes to inspire, her music is made to drive home a point.

There’s no room for fluff or empty words. She says, ““I want people to be touched and healed and disturbed by my music.” To Beccs, the world is meant to be examined. Her personal demons and the ones we all share are to be put out in the open and reflected upon, often well into the night.

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BEYOND COLLECTION written by Lori Zimmer

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Artists and art collectors have had a complicated relationship for centuries.

A messy intermingling of patronage, support, and fandom, sometimes tinged with an uglier side of flipping, profiteering and at the extreme end— exploitation. The relationship has only become more complicated in the age of Instagram, giving easier access to both parties without the liaising interference, or helpful guidance, of art dealers and gallerists. In this climate, collectors of today are accumulating work from contemporary artists for a myriad of reasons including investment, prestige, hype and genuine passion.

Craig O’Neil is not just a buyer of art— he is a benefactor, an advocate, and a an ally of artists. The Florida native first got his fix in 2008, when a trip to New York inspired his first art purchase- a stenciled woodcut by Joe Iurato. The piece reminded O’Neil of a fall day spent wandering the city with his wifeit was one of the first cold days of the

season, and the combination of the crisp air filling his lungs while walking the streets held a nostalgic memory for him.

Relating Iurato’s piece to this day was the bait that got O’Neil hooked into buying Urban Art. His collection quickly flourished, and he and his wife Charo began exploring artists whose narratives they could relate to—or impress their own personal narratives upon. Their home quickly filled with a Who’s Who of Urban art- works by Shepard Fairey, Os Gemeos, Faile, Logan Hicks, Revok, and RETNA, later joined by younger artists like Michael Reeder and Juan Travieso, and a continuing search for new work that may or may not have a place in the art market rhetoric.

Soon O’Neil’s obsession with buying art was not enough of a fix, he needed more.

He was amassing a sizable collection, but also began connecting with the artists on a personal level. Buying from auctions and online became boring, instead he was interested in artists’

stories, learning about their processes, inspirations and struggles. Like the great art patrons of the past, he decided to shift his focus from collection to benefaction. That’s when the idea for the National Institute of Urban Art came into play. Now friends with many of the artists be bought work from, O’Neil began asking them more in depth about their struggles—and how they rain their businesses.

“Through these conversations we identified that the business of art— the accounting, the legal and career development- are common challenges that artists face and often struggle with.

We can help support by buying their art, but we also decided that someone needs to be there to help with these career logistics—and that’s us.”

As the art market shifts, galleries are struggling as much as artists are, and many are unable to provide guidance

to their stable as gallerists of the past did. In addition, the Urban Art genre is underserved in this respect, with many artists breaking out thanks to social media, rather than due to the efforts of a gallery. Seeing this need, O’Neil’s NIUA will fill this void, acting as a hub of practical information for urban artists navigating the fleeting art market, and its insertion into the commercial world.

It will also be the resting place of his personal collection, a private museum that will be open to the public.

The NIUA opened its offices in July in Gainesville, Florida, a seemingly unlikely hub for Urban Art. O’Neil, who now lives in the Miami area, grew up amongst the countercultures of Gainesville in the 1990s, where hardcore music and raves flourished. Aside from his personal attachment to the area, he also wanted a place where artists could detach from the chaos of their everyday lives, where artists could come to work temporarily and affordably, outside of

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Untitled, Joe Iurato

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UNCONTAINABLE entrance, with work by Michael Reeder

( from left to right) Swoon, Mortimer & Jenkins, Michael Reeder, The Observed Observer and Juan Traviseo, Continuous-Time Markov

big art scenes like New York and LA. He approached the city with his vision of a hybrid museum, educational center and information hub for urban artists, and the city welcomed him with open arms.

“At some point I have to imagine every collector starts with a thought of ‘what the hell am I going to do with all this?’

As well as, ‘would love for other people to enjoy this.’”

O’Neil’s collection, which debuted as a pop-up exhibition called UNCONTAINABLE at the Thomas Center Galleries in Gainesville, will soon find a permanent home, and be shown alongside two to four yearly temporary exhibitions. His collection, which continues to grow, will be backed by an Urban Art library, available for institutions and individuals to study, and will be accompanied by workshops

and talks throughout the year. His penchant for collecting Urban Art has developed into a driving need to preserve and support it. He hopes the NIUA will be a rock for Urban Artists, and will help solidify the genre into art history books.

“Urban art is a living movement, it has needs right now, the people creating it are dealing with the real challenges

of navigating tax liability, legal issues for VARA and copyright problems, as well as understanding how to develop their careers so they can make art a lifelong endeavor, as opposed to a flash from their youth. We want to be sure the artists in this movement have long and successful careers, and we are dedicated to making that happen.”

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Olivia Wolf

At The Function

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WXYZ Jewelry Photographer | Björn Jonas Art Direction | Lori McMichael Hair | Erol Karadâg Makeup | Stephanie Peterson Stylist | Laura Wass Model | Krystall Schott

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Photographer | NaShish Scott Styling| Abim "Bim Star" Afolabi + Anthony Cruz Model | Anthony Cruz

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The Evolution of a Serial savant. | Neil Grayson.

Written by Akeem K.Duncan Photographer: Yelena Yemchuk Photo Assistant: Dean Dodos Post: Jenna Mewes Happiness is overrated but purpose is everything. After all, is it not safe to say that a life without it can lead to unhappiness? Purpose is not law but a life without purpose can be existentially excruciating; it can lack direction and incentive. Even the most basic needs give your life purpose. Food, shelter, love and belonging—these bare necessities all give most human beings a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Awakening to the smell of coal and a cast iron skillet, the thought of being safe and warm in your home during a storm, the feel of a lover’s cheek gently brushing against your own… Abraham Maslow did not create a hierarchy of needs out of thin air. These casual occurrences are in fact far from casual; they create the very fiber of what we live for.

to do anything else. He has knowingly dedicated his life to dissecting and reinterpreting humanity through related, and unrelated, happenings.

“I wouldn’t be able to wake up and do anything if I didn’t think I could find a new way of thinking. I feel my meaning as a human is to create a unique vision of world where all has purpose, where light gives meaning to the darkness, where darkness cradles the light. A universe that expands endlessly with our imaginations.”

Grayson loses himself in his work, giving his mind, body and soul to the journey of discovering what makes us tick. When in his presence, one gets the feel that Grayson does not have an ear for small talk. The act of producing art allows him to articulate the indescribable phenomenon of existing and the result is nothing short of perpetual intent and sheer, unadulterated joy. He knows no other language. Not to say that he is not up for a casual chat about the weather or your run of the mill political discourse, but he always manages to methodically make his way to the meat of the conversation every time. Grayson has a knowledgeable air about him that is grounded by an almost childlike inquisitiveness and a beaming sense of humility. He seems cognizant of his journey, from past, present to even well into the future. Grayson is an oracle, capable of seeing everyone’s future but his own. Afterall, who wants to read a book or watch a movie if they know each detail, from beginning to end, beforehand?

Having found a purpose that lies further beyond food, shelter, physical affection, Neil Grayson lives to create.

In a strange way, he almost has no need

When asked exactly what he would do without art, Grayson halfheartedly— but candidly—jokes, “My gut response is “I would be a law abiding criminal”. And

as i think through it, I probably mean ‘I would be a politician’. [Laughs] Grayson has an inadvertently dark, mysterious way about him. You can almost presume that he has an alter-ego; but nothing close to that of a criminal or a politician.

Instead, he is an expressive anti-hero, a brilliant forensicist with the uncanny facility for creative analysis. He wears a slight smile when confronting death, madness and vulnerability, and in his fight, Grayson has made these existential antagonists allies—employing them as key players in his efforts to crack the universal code.

“Rembrandt found light and gave meaning to the darkness and purpose to the sadness.”

The internal inferno that rages within Grayson has gone through its stages.

When Grayson was a teen, he studied every medium almost extensively, eventually developing within his young mind a proverbial toolbox. He first became obsessed with painting through Rembrandt’s self portraits. Grayson was hypnotized by the famous painter’s signature lighting technique—which is specifically named after Rembrandt himself. Grayson believed Rembrandt’s portraits were picture perfect examples of self-awareness and creative existentialism and was immediately inspired. “My first [core] theme, my older work which I began as a teenager,

was about self examination and trying to know the subconscious in order to take control of a self destruction impulse. I think we can imagine to the extent we know ourselves, and our universe mirrors our imagination.

Nothing is finite,” shares Grayson before going into Industrial Melanism, a body of work inspired by a natural phenomenon in which a creature— predominantly arthropods—changes its pigmentation according to changes in their environment. Grayson is exploring industrial melanism not just out of scientific curiosity but out of expressive serendipity.

Grayson’s eyes burn with an unwavering desire when he speaks about the current concept behind his work; a concept that he has been shaping and molding itself for the past two decades and manifested almost by happenstance.

But before we get into Grayson’s obsession with the phenomenon that is industrial melanism, let us flashback to early nineteenth century England where the first major study of industrial melanism began. The white pepper moth flourished in the countrysides of London and Manchester, enjoying near invisibility amongst the lightly colored foliage. Then, as those cities became populated with coal burning factories, the forest became coated in soot. The white pepper moth was greatly affected by the change in decor. Its cover was

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blown and it was now susceptible to predators as it was not blending in quite as well as it used to. Now sticking out like a sore thumb, the white pepper moth had a choice to make—adapt or die.

Flash forward to the mid-nineteenth century and the black pepper moth population, once a rarity, is booming.

Naturalists took notice, specimens were collected and studied and by the end of the century the term “industrial melanism” was born.

Unable to cope with a lack of camouflage and the increased pollution, the white moth population dwindled. The black peppered moth went from being an anomaly to now making up more than 98% of the pepper moth population.

When we think of evolution, natural selection and Darwinism in general, we think of survival of the fittest. But if we were to reconsider, there is more to evolution that the strong begetting the strong. “That notion of evolution is too simplistic. It leaves no room for Nature to conduct experiments,” Grayson points out. Grayson continues, “looking at it like that, in real life, the biggest, the strongest, the most efficient kills off the weak and becomes bigger, stronger and more efficient and so forth… using that logic, in the back of our minds, you then believe it’s logical that a corporation swallows up all the smaller companies, become stronger and more efficient… and you would think that human beings, the stronger group, would kill off the weaker become stronger and so on and so. If you follow Darwinism in its simplistic view, you would end up with one corporation and one race.”

According to Grayson, there is more to Nature’s happy accidents than just casting them off as outliers. At heart Grayson believe that when it comes to Nature, there are essential experiments that are vital to the bigger picture. This is neutral evolution and the artist in the black peppered moth.

“We knew Neil’s technical skills were in a league of their own, but it has been exciting to watch how he used those skills, honed obsessively since childhood, to create a body of work that is wholly new and deeply personal. Neil’s Industrial Melanism series takes the viewer on a journey through the artist’s sometimes dark but always fascinating psyche, and we anticipate that the public’s response will be just as animated and excited as ours.”

-Christopher Eykyn Partner, Eykyn Maclean

The Falconer, 2017

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Hindsite, 2017

Herbert L. Grayson, 1987

Fixated on the inner workings of life and how we adapt to our environments not just physically but mentally, Grayson has taken the prominent study of the white pepper moth and broadened its horizons. Because Grayson uses precious metals in his paintings—primarily silver—his works have a reflective range and spontaneity; which thusly reflects the notion of perspective and, more importantly, the unraveling of the mortal coil. When you walk by one of Grayson’s pieces every angle is a new painting. Every point of view is its own unique experiment.

Grayson’s battle with the light and the darkness, happiness and depression, lepidopterans and revolvers is an evident element in his work. He intends to relinquish the darkness, depression and revolvers but deep down he knows that they are all a part of the structure and refrains from throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Similar to how Rembrandt used light, Grayson has simultaneously picked up and extinguished the torch, using the dark to further the existential narrative in his own right. One may not realize it at first but Grayson’s current body of work is indeed a series of self portraits.

The pieces are organized chaos huddled and thrashing underneath one conceptual umbrella. There is an allegorical tug-of-war taking place between illumination and the abyss—one that takes place in most of us. As a human being, Grayson knows this struggle all too well; but as an artist, he has taken it upon himself to illustrate, demonstrate and eventually alleviate this immutable quandary. This is a feat that no creative can pursue on their own.

“Fortunately there was always someone, or something, that randomly appeared and in the smallest isolated moments that lifted me. There is a family, the Sussmans, that has believed in me for 30 years and have continuously supported my art as if it were a calling.”

With a willingness to acknowledge the existing elements that surrounds him, Grayson has become an inspiration to all of us who are merely trying to make sense of it all. He is genuinely vested in the work and is disposed to getting his hands dirty when piecing together multiple truths. Grayson is a creative of the people, content with confronting, and simultaneously taking comfort in, the unknown. For all the anomalies, the atypicals, the misfits and the oddballs—for all those unable to fight the good fight, Grayson has taken upon himself to give it purpose.

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“My paintings change drastically depending on the light, like night and day.”

Turn of the Gyre, 2017

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Horizontal Blonde, 2015

Outside the Bubble. | Bradley Hart.

Writer | Roman Kalinovski Photographer | Leon Williams

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Recently I spent about six hours in the presence of Bradley Hart, an artist known for his unconventional paintings executed with sheets of bubble-wrap.

His paintings are made by injecting each cell with acrylic paint to build a recognizable image, bubble by bubble.

After this painstaking process, the filled bubble-wrap—which Hart calls the “substrate”—has the excess paint removed, what is removed is called an “impression,” and each is presented as a painting in its own right.

Bradley Hart is one of those people who doesn’t have an “off ” switch. His brain is constantly working on several projects at any given time, and although he can talk at a fast clip, his mind constantly

outpaces his speech. This made a traditional interview impractical, if not impossible, so I turned on my recorder and listened as he talked about how his artistic practice evolved into what it is today.

“It all started with a roll of bubble-wrap left over from a show of my earlier work, and several experiences at museums around the city,” he said. “I remember security telling people, including myself, not to touch the art. After these encounters, I was sitting, looking at this roll of bubble-wrap, and I had the ‘aha’ moment.” This was the “big bang” that began the universe of ideas that Hart is still investigating today; everything he’s done since then was in his mind at that

moment. “It was like a floodgate. All the information about what I was doing, and all the possible iterations of what I could do, came rushing in!”

The first piece Hart conceived was a resin cast of a roll of bubble-wrap that had the words “Please do not touch” silkscreened on it. The piece is titled, “Touch Me,” playing with the question of whether or not viewers are supposed to touch art. “Everybody wants to touch it: It’s bubble-wrap! But if you actually have the balls to touch the thing, your experience is castrated because it’s hard as a rock.”

Meanwhile, Hart was researching the history of bubble-wrap, and discovered

that it wasn’t always used as a packing material. “It actually was invented as wallpaper: It’s three-dimensional, very apropos for late 50’s modernism. It failed as an experiment and never made it to market, but IBM came around two years later and thought it would be perfect for wrapping their 1401 computer, and that’s that. But bubble-wrap’s original purpose was wallpaper, and what is a painting conceptually, short of the cultural significance and historical value that it can attain over time? It’s a wall covering!”

The first painting Hart made with his current technique of injecting paint into individual bubbles was called Insomnia, and depicted the color bars that TV

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stations used to broadcast when they went off the air at night. Then, he made a piece called Canvas that showed, as the title suggests, a close-up of the weave of an artist’s canvas. For Hart, the painting was a way to claim this particular material and process as his own variety of “canvas.”

We spent three hours in his studio that day, and as I was about to leave, he said: “We’ve just scratched the surface. Next time, let’s go deeper.” The following week we met on his rooftop patio over chicken biscuits and beer, and deeper we went. He talked about the iconic and personally meaningful images he works from: “Well, what is bubble-wrap used for? We use it to protect things that are

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important to us. So, for me, I extend that to memory. From a material point of view, it protects memories. Today with digital photography, our memories— our personal photos—exist in the aether. So when the power goes out…

Where are your memories? The ‘pixels’ in my ‘Injection’ paintings will never disappear. The iconic images I paint are immortalizations. I’m protecting their memory in bubble-wrap.”

While each painting is executed by hand, digital technology plays a part in Hart’s process. Because digital pixels don’t have a one-to-one correspondence with bubbles, Hart uses custom software to accomplish this. “I’m bringing hightech down to low-tech. I’m dealing

with something that’s processed algorithmically but is executed manually. I like the tension between the mass-produced product and the artisan manually injecting each bubble with a little datum of information to create an image.”

Hart’s overall philosophy is one of endless cycles. During our conversation he referenced worldwide astrological cosmologies and how it mirrors the cyclical narrative of his work and the medium. While the western Zodiac cycles through twelve signs each year, the Chinese calendar has a sixty-year cycle, taking most of a human lifetime to come back to a particular point— he highlights this disparity as a way of

addressing patience and how it relates to the grand scheme of change. Hart’s work places a metaphorical emphasis on memory and the place it has in a “plastic” society. His material of choice started out as a failed attempt at a wallcovering, but through his artistic vision, he has brought it full circle to, as he says, “fulfill its creator’s intended purpose.”

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Decisive Moment, 2017

REMOTE | IN CONVERSATION WITH EMILY MARIE MILLER. Writer | Diane Knarr Photographer | Leon Williams

Bluebeard, 2017

Emily Marie Miller’s most recent series, Remote Triggers, is bold, large, and uncomfortable. Viewers are forced face-to-face with depictions of stripped female figures, contorted in various, undeniably odd positions, but you can’t look away. The longer one looks at Miller’s work, the story of feminism, strength, and evolution slowly comes into focus. The hot afternoon that we met at her studio in Bushwick, NY, Emily answered the door with a huge smile, gentle voice, and was as welcoming as if we were old friends—the same magnetism of her works shines through in life. When we got to talking about her past, her work, and her future, I quickly discovered Emily’s passion and fierce drive to push herself, and boundaries, has been a constant throughout her life and career.

Diane Knarr: Tell me a little bit about you: you are a painter but you started off in sculpture? Why did you switch?

Emily Marie Miller: I went into college expecting to major in painting, but was recruited for the sculpture program by a professor who saw potential in my work.

At the time, I was 18 and making video installations. Throughout school, most of my work centered around creating

performative objects and installations.

In my last semester, I switched from making installations to making more traditional object-based sculpture.

My experience working in sculpture was empowering. Sculpture unleashed my capacity to make large, ambitious work. It made the impossible possible.

However, I had this chip on my shoulder because I initially thought that I was going to do painting and had been sort of dissuaded from it. The program’s idea was that “Painting’s dead, painting’s dead, painting’s dead.” After graduation and without a metal shop, I dove headfirst into painting.

DK: What major themes do you tend to pursue in your art? Is there a common thread or are you always exploring new avenues all the time?

EMM: Everything just keeps coming back. It’s all cyclical. I was actually just looking through this recently [picks up book], my sketch book from college, and realized I’m basically talking about the exact same things.

My work has always been about—it’s always been about...well, being a woman and trying to find strength and feeling

really broken up and not really feeling okay with the way the world is right now.

And how women have been marketed to and shaped into this certain role. I’ve been trying to dismantle that.

I’ve also been really interested in the mystical, the mysterious. I’m a spiritual person and now I feel like that’s coming back super hard with me and where I’m at right now. It kind of all circles back to my personal experiences.

DK: Can you describe your most recent series of paintings, Remote Triggers?

EMM: My work shows the internal transformation from a naive state to a more aware state after a traumatic catalyst, as inspired by the Bluebeard story archetype. The figures are contorted in uncomfortable positions on vibrant fields of red or in confined spaces that signify an internal space. I want to show the uncomfortable side of personal evolution as yielding new power and wisdom. I am interested in showing this metamorphosis of self as incentive for the viewer to outsmart their own predators and gain new selfawareness and worth. The figures clutch remote triggers that fire a camera shutter.

The inclusion of these triggers signifies

self-awareness of painting’s often-silent relationship to photography as well as a self-awareness that the figures are gaining through their paradigm shift.

DK: Because your work has been about women and women in society, what are your thoughts on the commodification of women and sexuality? Do you think that we, as a society, are getting better at including women in the narrative or is marketing getting better at obscuring their messages and intent?

EMM: I feel like everything is just being marketed in a different way. I get really annoyed and upset by the fact that brands take these movements that people are pouring their souls into, that are really important, and they make it about their product. I’m having this whole moment right now with Instagram. It was such a great tool for me in the beginning, but now I’m pulling away from it because I’m not interested in buying my spot on someone’s timeline to be seen. It feel like it was such a cool platform for artists and now it’s been commodified.

When I was in school, I had this awesome, old school feminist professor, and she was like, “I don’t believe in this third wave feminism stuff but try and

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sell it to me.”; I thought that women were equal and everything was going to be smooth sailing from our generation onwards. I was just wrong. I recently did a scathing post on instagram about how I can’t network with men because they don’t take me seriously.

DK: The women that you portray, are they people that you know, are they models, or are they based off any one?

EMM: I use myself. A lot of the time – like for the [Remote Trigger] series – I put myself in contorted positions and it’s just easier for me to work through it. For some of these paintings, the photographs came before the work and it took me awhile to get there. I’m still trying to figure out my whole routine and process. I still feel like a new painter.

I definitely feel like an installation artist or a sculptor still, and I’m finally feeling more comfortable calling myself a painter.

DK: Why do you use red? Can you explain your color choices?

EMM: The red paintings started off with this work, “Wrought,” where I was using a greyed-out blue background.

It was the first painting I made in this series. “Wrought” was about feeling broken up and not knowing how to move forward. I finished it right after Trump was elected President. I started using red backgrounds when the feeling of sadness gave way to an intensity and sense of purpose. The red paintings were inspired by this fairy tale from Women Who Run with Wolves. This fairy tale called “Bluebeard” is about losing your innocence, or more so losing the façade of comfort and safety, venturing out, and becoming – having a moment where you have to evolve to be stronger. So, that’s what the red was for me: it was this energetic movement towards something a little bit more mature and stronger.

Plus, I think that red is a really great symbolic color of sacrifice and passion, and that’s what I was feeling when I was making these [paintings].

DK: It doesn’t seem like there was a single, individual catalyst to this series but more like there were multiple experiences. Do you also draw upon experiences from your social circle, or is it all from personal interactions in the world?

EMM: I think it comes from my personal experience, but it is relatable to many. One of my main goals forever, like since I’ve been a student, is to make work that’s accessible. That’s why I try to steer away from total abstraction because [the average person] can grasp it

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Reversed Hierophant, 2017

better. I want people to be able to look at my work and be able to get it if they want to get it, even if they don’t have an art education.

DK: How have you navigated the arts scene, and just the scene in general, now that you’ve become more empowered?

What are you doing differently? How are you engaging differently?

EMM: It’s a new shift for me. When I first got to New York, I had to figure it out. I was trying to be a socialite. I was going out all the time, and at the time I loved it, I loved going out, but everybody was an asshole. Everybody was superficial and fake and all of the rumors were true and I was just like, “ew this sucks.” It was after maybe 6 or 8 months of me being [in NYC] that the people in this group that I was hanging

out with were finally able to somewhat accept me.

However, it felt so empty and fake that I really did a 180 and was like “oh, no.

That’s not right–I’m here to do this differently.” Since then, I’ve been trying to take care of myself more, including not being out all the time. It’s hard here, because you feel like you need to be all places at all times, but if you present this burnt out fragile person all the time, your value sort of goes down and you’re just the person who goes out. I want to be the person who’s making work, and shows up, and supports those who’ve supported me. That’s what I care about.

DK: What are your views on artists in society: do you think that artists owe society anything or are they just supposed to be a mirror?

EMM: I think that artists have a lot of responsibility. I think it’s hard to define an artist now because with Instagram everybody is an artist, and that’s cool. I’m into people making their own work. I think when people commit and dedicate their whole life to it, that carries a lot of responsibility. People look at you and what you produce. I do get frustrated with situations like the Dana Schutz piece at the Whitney Biennial. That was very intense for everyone that I know.

It affected my friends negatively. It is still a huge debate. There is definitely a lot of responsibility there and I don’t think she handled it well.

Torque, 2017

DK: What artists, if any, have had influence on your work, or who inspires you?

EMM: A lot of people! Maria Lassnig, Francis Bacon, Bosch, Jan van Eyck, Hilma Af Klint. I feel like I missed the education on painting, and I had a lot of sculptors I was looking at – I really love Valie Export. I’ve been trying to go back and research feminist artists or female artists, because I feel like all I reference are these men when I get asked about who my influences are. My influences change from series to series. However, I really, really, really, love old Christian paintings, religious catholic paintings, and byzantine art work. That kind of art is [gestures, looks to sky, and smiles] DK: And this has advised you on the direction of your next series?

EMM: When I was making paintings in Florida, they were essentially really bad [religious] icons. I was just learning so it was fine. Since being in school, I’ve been really interested in ziggurats, religious structures, and architecture. Spirituality has been informing my current body of work.

In the City, there are front yard Catholic shrines enveloped in Plexiglas throughout Queens, religious candles in supermarkets and bodegas in Brooklyn, preachers at Broadway Junction, esoteric pamphlets sold from folding tables on Harlem sidewalks, ascending and descending stairways in nearly every building. Some semblance of spirituality is present on every block of the New York City I know. My recent work draws from transcendental experiences, the mystical, and the sublime. In part, this work is still a response to the uncertain times of the Trump era.

I’ve observed a notable insurgence of discussion about witchcraft, divination, and the unknown in day-to- day life.

I’ve observed folks turning away from the scathing political landscape and into themselves to explore their own subconscious terrain. I want to paint that subconscious and spiritual terrain in and of itself, and where it intersects with experiences of spirituality in New York City. I actively choose figuration over total abstraction for such an abstruse subject matter in hopes of

making the work more accessible, and to mirror visual expressions of spirituality i both my Catholic upbringing and in the imagery of my Puerto Rican and Dominican neighbors in Bushwick. – I’m using New York. FINALLY. I feel like I can do it.

DK: [Laughter] Finally! Because you’ve been here for almost two years.

EMM: Yeah! The Catholic shrines set up in Bushwick and Ridgewood – that’s really exciting to me. I was raised Catholic and it’s still a huge part of how my whole world is shaped.

DK: I totally agree with you about the resurgence in witchcraft and the mysterious since Trump got elected.

I feel like in the past 6-7 months or however long it’s been, people have been trying to figure out how to be more in control of their lives, since everything seems so out of control. There are critiques out about how we’re being marketed “wellness programs” now. It’s interesting to see how capitalism has been trying to respond to that desire

for control and sell it back to us as a people and society.

EMM: It really bothers me. I went off into this very moody, esoteric, witchy, mythical, spiritual place, and what I’m interested in now is taking that and pulling it back down into reality— to bring spirituality into day-to-day scenes. And I just feel like it’s something that’s really important that’s lost in Capitalism.

DK: So, what’s next for you? What new thoughts are bouncing around?

EMM: My immediate focus is on finishing my current body of work so I can show it. I’ve been in the studio building up layers of glaze. These paintings are going to be installed in a non-traditional way: the canvas will not be stretched, but suspended from the top and bottom in space. The idea is that the entire show of paintings will look like one complete installation piece.

Right now my thoughts are on making that vision a reality.

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Diovadiova Chrome Karyn IV

A PROPER REFLECTIVE. | KIP OMOLADE. WRITTEN BY GRISELLE RODRIGUEZ

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Made up of 43 muscles, our faces are the most prominent calling cards in nonverbal communication. From a lustful lip pout to the bend of a brow, our faces can also dictate the kind of interaction we will have with those we come into contact with. From RBF (Resting Bitch Face) to a creepy smirk, our facial muscles can reveal things about us that we are not quite ready to reveal, but Kip Omolade challenges us to face ourselves.

Both equal parts social commentary and pure talent, Omolade’s Diovadiova Chrome series marries the two through exploration, and preservation, of the many dimples and furrows of the human “mask.” Translated from sculpture onto canvas with such fluidity, it begs for a double/triple take—which is no accident as Omolade fine-tuned his technique to do just that.

Diovadiova Chrome Diana III

Omolade’s paintings force us to truly access our roles within all facets of human interaction: from family unit, to community, and, ultimately, the universe. Omolade’s beautiful and succinct manipulation of our psyches in his paintings force the question of if what we are seeing (i.e. oil on canvas) is really just that and not merely our eyes playing tricks. ________________________ Why faces?

I wanted to create work that would have a global impact. It made sense to use portraiture as a motif to connect people because the human face is universal. For our survival, we are genetically designed to recognize each other’s faces. We read faces to determine fight or flight and sometimes love or hate. Even in our digital age, the facial expressions of emoticons help us to determine the emotional context in a text or email.

How did you develop your technique?

My use of sculpture and painting for the Diovadiova Chrome technique involved a lot of trial and error. The process itself

is autobiographical as it connects to different stages of my life. The bright, saturated colors and intricate, abstract shapes recall my graffiti days in NYC during the 80’s. My teenage internship at Marvel Comics influences a futuristic, sci-fi aesthetic. The use of is the result of painting from life at The School of Visual Arts and The Art Students League of New York.

Did you experiment with any other materials or paints before deciding on oil?

I’ve experimented with airbrushing, markers, watercolors, and a bunch of other stuff before using oils as my main medium. I continue to experiment with other techniques including performance art, Photoshop and collage.

Has our current social climate influenced your work?

As an artist, I always planned on focusing on self-portraits, but my image in the current social climate may now have strong political and social implications.

However, any image of African American people during recent history is potentially loaded. For my latest selfportrait, I positioned my face between a distorted reflection of the American flag and a Times Square billboard. This was a way to explore my place in both contemporary culture and world history as an African American man.

If you could collaborate with any artist (living or eternal), who would it be?

I would collaborate with Takashi Murakami. I like how he combines commentary on the past, present and future all at the same time.

Where else can we see you?

I have an upcoming solo show in November at Jonathan LeVine Projects [and] I’m also working on some largescale projects for a solo museum show.

Diovadiova Chrome Joyce II

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Diovadiova Chrome Karyn VII

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Diovadiova Chrome Kitty Cash III

Diovadiova Chrome Kitty V

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Diovadiova Chrome Diana II

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Diovadiova Chrome Karyn I

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An Open Letter from Malinche

by MarĂ­a Fernanda LeaĂąo

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Photoshoot during Art Basel Switzerland 2017.

Location: Youth Basel Hostel Performance production and body paint: @malincheart Photographer: Joaquin Castillo. @thejoaquincastillo Makeup: Ana Faktor Hair by: Stephanie Welsen Jewelry: Bulgari

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Prisons are inside our minds, freedom cannot be taken away from someone if that person is not blindfolded or controlled without even knowing it. Freedom is a mindset, it cannot be touched, it is abstract. (The Other Malinche).

Some have dared to go against repression, dictatorship and institutions in a variety of ways: revolutions, protests, wars, etc. That is not the answer. Art is a peaceful reaction to hate. Love builds bridges, not walls.

The Nahuatl word “Tlacaxouhkayotl” means freedom. It is found tattooed on Malinche’s back in this editorial. We also find the name “Malinalli” tattooed on her chest. Malinalli was the name of La Malinche, a Nahua princess sold as a slave to General Hernan Cortes, the conquistador who came after Columbus defeated the Aztec empire in 1521.

She was his translator and mistress. They had a son and he was the first Mestizo (mixed blood descendant) in “The Americas”—as they used to call this continent.

Some people have been imprisoned by defending their beliefs in the past, now we

live in a world where people express their ideas freely but some are still divided and prisoners of division or misinformation.

My statement through my art and performances is a peaceful reaction to the current situation happening in the world.

I created a way to press social awareness campaigns for arts and social networks and print media using images, collages, phrases and hashtags. #endracialtension is one of them, aiming to neutralize the division in humanity based on religion, cultural background and geographical origin.

Division is not the answer, we all are humans and therefore, the same race.

I also launched an art campaign called #mexicanrightsmovement to support my paisanos in USA, Mexico and all over the world and their human rights. I also started a hashtag called #dizlexia to raise awareness for kids and adults who by recent studies do not have a learning disability like it was believed in the past. Instead these are people who digest sounds and letters in the way they sound and not by alphabetical rules.

Their brains are proven to be more creative

and tend to become artists or some are even geniuses like Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci and Jane Austen—all of whom were dyslexic.

Dyslexic kids have been bullied in schools or considered stupid, some have failed grades or dropped out of school, which has lower their self esteem.

The Other Malinche, or just Malinche, is the reincarnation of Malinalli in a contemporary world. She is an artist, a shaman and the main character of a story written by Maria Fernanda Leaño. The author giving life to this magical realism genre character through performance and art.

Finally, I am working on an online breast cancer awareness platform inside my networks which includes aiming to get women to be proud of their breast—explore them, not hide them. This can prevent cancer from spreading and lives can be saved as a result. Breasts, they are beautiful but they have been seen as sinful by many. Although some minds are dirty that shouldn’t make a lady feel ashamed of her natural body, embracing it might prevent morality by awareness.

María Fernanda Leaño is the founder of the art movement @malincheart and describes it as a way to react to division and terror in the world is through art. She is a multidisciplinary artist mainly focused on performance art.

Her most common characteristic is wearing Mexican indigenous headpieces or dressing as a “live wall” as a statement defending Mexico against xenophobic allegations about the country and its people.

We are all one, one is all, the source, the observer. I am you and you are me. Divide and conquer is an illusion, again, I am you, and you are me.

Born in United and raised between Mexico, Switzerland and California, the New York based artist has had several solo art shows in Mexico, USA and Europe and has performed as Malinche is Frieze, TEFAF and Art Basel Switzerland.

Maria F. Leaño.

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VA G A B O N D

SCOGÉ oscilates between creation and destruction.

This is their story, along with countless others.

ON NORA VAL : Jacket - SCOGÉ Fallout OPPOSITE: Tee - SCOGÉ Standard

STYLIST PHOTOGRAPHER CREATIVE DIRECTION EDITING

-

STARR STARR STARR STARR

OGE OGE OGE OGE

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ON YAH YAH: Jacket - SCOGÉ Fallout Bottom - SCOGÉ Vagabond Shorts

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Black Milk Ai Campbell written by Joe Tolbert Jr. photography by Leon Williams

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Guided by the emerging elements of life, Ai Campbell creates elegant abstractions that opens viewers to the possibilities of life.

Growing up in Osaka, Japan, Ai was surrounded by artists and creatives.

Her father, a businessman and jazz musician who played in bands while she was growing up, played jazz around the house. Her mother studied sculpture, jewelry making, and ceramics and taught those skills to students. Even though Campbell was around creativity, she knew she wanted to go to art school, but was not sure whether or not she was going to pursue art professionally.

During art school, she studied oil painting and her practice included painting human figures—because she was trying to figure out who she was.

Trying to understand herself better, she was interested in relationships and emotions, the positive and negative things people hold inside, so painting faces and the human figure became a release for her.

After graduating, Ai married and moved to the States, and her practice of realism would shift when she received a package from her mother. The package contained 5x7 landscape drawings from when her grandfather, Hiroshi Hisatomi, was a soldier during WWII. To keep himself

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occupied while stationed in South East Asia, he used black ink on white paper to draw the detailed landscapes he experienced. Ai explains, “The drawings were super detailed and very graphic.

They were really beautiful, so I was interested in making black and white work.”

Feeling like she had discovered who she was, she no longer needed the process of discovery that figurative painting provided. She began to feel that when you look at portraits, “you think about the story behind this person, and you won’t go beyond that.” This is when she started to turn to monochromatic abstract work, because when you look at

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abstraction, “it could be anything, and it engages more interpretations…more possibilities, and that’s more exciting.”

Ai’s love of nature and organic things influences her work. She likes to work with simple shapes that are often found in nature. She draws inspiration from things as varied as water, the sky, and water stained peeling walls. This spontaneous emergence is carried into her process. She starts with a wet surface and drops the ink onto the surface with a dropper and watches the natural shape appear. She shares, “I can’t really control how the ink settles on the surface, but that’s kind of my intention. I let it create its own shape.” In the second layer, she

adds the detail. She describes, “The first layer is all about spontaneity. The second layer is more about intentionality.” It is these forces combined that adds depth to her paintings.

She said that she is fascinated by transient moments. These are moments in life that don’t last, like lightning’s intense flash, or the way milk moves in coffee cups. She knows it disappears, but that is why it draws her attention.

With a sense of wonder in her voice she explains, “When I pour milk…the way the liquid moves is really beautiful.

Then I forget about the crazy busy morning and stare for a minute. I know

it will be gone in a second, that’s why I feel it is really precious and beautiful. I guess I am trying to capture that type of movement in my work, attempting to preserve those beautiful scenes…trying to make it last. In paying attention to one particular moment, that kind of makes me appreciate each moment within life.”

Ultimately, Ai Campbell’s work invites us to enjoy the mystery of life’s fleeting moments that are and never will be again. Her work broadens our possibilities of ways to view our life that is ever changing.

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Creation in Controversy. |Harmonia Rosales.

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Written by Moeima Dukuly

Poet Nizar Qabbani said succinctly, “One of the greatest lies of patriarchy is framing the father as the lifegiver.”

Creation is the involvement of action, reception and incubation. Women depicted as creators and thus masters of the universe is rare, especially in regards to classical artwork. When Harmonia Rosales, recreated Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, this time depicting the creation story with black women, the image quickly went viral and was quickly met with shock, awe, rage and pure vitriol.

Black women are touted as the root of us all. The beginners of life. The original creators. Having brought humanity into form. Yet, their faces have been methodically hidden, erased and phased out of history. If classical art provides us with a glimpse as to what ancient peoples developed the world—what value is there to erase the makers of it?

Who does that serve? Besides being scientifically and anthropologically

inaccurate, white men as the central authority—as the ones to birth, the ones to paint, the ones to tell the stories of others—satisfies very little in terms of historical or cultural representation.

It could be these truths that sparked Rosales, a peaceful, centered creator from the Chicago area born to an artist mother and musician father, to change the narrative. Her quiet, contented nature is certain. Determined. And highly discerning of the subject matter and motive behind her work.

As an artist, Rosales presents her work and steps aside once doing so, leaving the viewer to make up their own minds and be lead to their own conclusions. When asked about the creative impression of her work she remarked with sage like certainty, “We are only beginning to see the consequences of our national failure to be critical thinkers. I want us to think critically.” Translation: create your own opinions on the work, and what brought you to these assumptions or opinions.

When dealing with a layered concept like creation or authority, what are we asking ourselves as both onlookers of a creative work and as humans? What truths makes us uncomfortable and what age old fabrications make us feel safe, or powerful?

Do we not, or can we not fathom inclusion?

Chatting with Rosales, left me with more questions than answers. But essentially isn’t that what art should leave you with?

At the end of the day, the pursuit of art and creation should challenge where you are and where you have been and allow you the ability to experience life in another’s shoes. It is this experience that allows us the innocence of children—a chance to see the world through new eyes. One should hope we continue questioning, expanding and creating, with each creative experience.

As an artist who happens to be female— how would you define creation?

I prefer not to define my work because I like to provoke thought. That means to never accept what people say without asking—as our children always do—why? I think this work and the conversations surrounding it can jump start conversations about so much more.

How would you define God? No comment. If religion is all you see in my painting, you’re not looking deep enough.

Are you religious? Or spiritual? If so can you elaborate, how so? If not, why?

I prefer not to elaborate, not because it’s a secret but because whatever my beliefs are, it should not dictate the message I want to get across in my work.

How did you feel when met with resistance to your work, “The Creation of God”?

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I was saddened, not personally but to see that we, as a society, are still stunted in our growth, the blow back I received helped to illustrate that point.

What was the most disturbing comment made to you during this time?

I read a comment that seriously broke me but made me stronger at the same time. I will never forget it and it will always be my driving force to create the work I create. To paraphrase the comment, “Muslims, women, niggers or anyone other than white should not be seen or portrayed as Gods”. Racism, hatred, and gender inequality still exist, and this piece challenges all that, all the preconceptions that people have. That provocation is only the beginning of questioning why we think the way we do.

Oil based paint is a fairly classic medium—is it your only method of painting? What made you choose this medium? What are its difficulties?

I actually use to strictly paint in acrylic.

Oh, how I loved acrylic and it’s fast drying time! I make too many mistakes for watercolor and was too impatient for oil. It wasn’t until a close artist friend

(who paints in oils) and I had a big blow out on acrylic vs oils and its quality…

Being that my friend loves to prove their point, that Christmas they bought me an entire set of oils, brushes, linen and mediums with a little note that read: “I would like to see what you can do, humor me”. Let’s just say, from there I never turned back. I’ve become an advocate for stepping out the “Comfortzone”.

I find that all mediums has its challenges, consistent practice and experimenting always overcomes any obstacles.

When creating an oil painting, how challenging is getting the tone of black and brown skin ‘right’?

Not challenging at all, when I paint I see past the surface, I just don’t see “brown” skin “dark skin” etc. but an array of colors in the undertones… blues, reds, yellows… not just in “brown” skin but lighter skin tones as well. When you begin to see people from that perspective you realize we are all equal, we are all people of many colors.

Do you imagine yourself utilizing another medium in the future?

Of course, the sky’s the limit… the more mediums you become skilled in, the less boundaries you have and the freer you are to express yourself as an artist.

When it comes to how black women have been portrayed (in art and otherwise), how do you feel about non-black people or black men portraying the story of black women?

All artists convey their life experiences and emotions through their art. Through those emotions, life experience—it gives character and the work produced a soul and a meaning.

You can study and observe until your heart’s content and produce skilled or beautiful pieces of work (written or visual), but from what I have learned, a man to portray a woman (or vise versa)... That portrayal will always be in third person, there will always be that distance… unless that distance is intentional.

works. I’m an introvert because I’m like a sponge… what’s on the news, trends, gossip all can influence artist consciously and subconsciously and that’s when some of us begin to produce work that is not directly related to what they have experienced individually. That is when you begin to see a wave of similar work being produced by various artist.

What are you currently working on? Any shows in the near future?

I’m currently working on a few projects.

I have an upcoming show including the ‘The Creation of God’ on women empowerment in LA at Simard Bilodeau Contemporary (SimardBilodeau.com) on September 14th. I’m also currently partnering with fellow artist Aldis Hodge on a series that will be showing next year. To keep up with all the updates you can subscribe to HarmoniaRosales. com

What narratives in contemporary art have you enjoyed seeing, that depict marginalized People?

I love all kinds of art, however I try to not absorb myself too much with others

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by Sam Duratovic

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Sock Arms | Ali Cavanaugh WRITTEN BY AKEEM K. DUNCAN

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Trauma can be a good thing. At the time it may seem like a devastating inconvenience but with enough understanding it can be a life changing blessing in retrospect. That is very much case with Ali Cavanaugh.

My dependence on the visual world began when I lost much of my hearing through spinal meningitis at 2 years of age. This loss was a blessing in disguise as I learned to depend on body language and lip reading to communicate. So, from my youngest days, I became sensitive to the people around me and the unspoken language revealed through compositions of the human body.

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This epiphany is not immediately apparent in Cavanaugh’s sock arm series. There is an inherent playfulness that purposefully addresses everything but the elephant in the room. Then again, her work overall is not about the medical trials and tribulations she has faced almost from birth. It revolves around something far more beautiful and simplistic, yet blissfully complex.

It is an amorous aftermath of her afflictions, a worthy work in progress that pays homage to the versatility of the human body.

Elegant and effortlessly abstract, the sock arms series has an inviting aesthetic that is genuinely alluring. The interlocking limbs, stripes and soft hues carry with it a latent nostalgia, a welcomed familiarity.

In its own way, the series rouses art enthusiasts out of a pretentious sleep and reminds us that art wrought from disadvantage or pain does not have to be mired in such. Cavanaugh has taken her bout with illness and transformed it into something animated and whimsical.

This series is an act of pure alchemy.

In 1994 I began painting dangling legs and feet with striped leggings.

It was sometime in 2007 when the sock arms emerged. I felt that I had exhausted painting stripes on the legs and wanted to create a strong graphic visual on the arms. So I asked my muse to put the socks on her arms. It was instant magic.

It reminded me of the sock puppets

from my childhood. The covered hands created a mystery and the stripes invigorated my otherwise quiet and graceful paintings. There is not a specific message that I’m trying to communicate with the gestures. My work has some similarities to modern dance in its essence and purpose. I’m creating an element of surprise within the composition, branching out from traditional figurative realism.

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THE LITERARY PORTION. WRITERS Malik Crumpler | Rob Cook | Kristina Marie Darling Rosalind Kaliden | Alcy Leyva | Maya Marshall | HALL SULLIVAN ARTISTS Jean-Paul Mallozzi | Karen Jerzyk

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Girl in Plastic by Karen Jerzyk

North Sidin’ Out The Window

BY MALIK CRUMPLER

first time i met Lil’ Michelle was in the fall of ‘93, first class, first day of 7th grade Biology, eight in the morning, sharp, she had on a zipped up black & silver Raiders Starter jacket, acid washed blue jean overalls, long thick dookey braids & the smallest pair of black on black suede nike cortez i’d ever seen, she sat by the window reeked of weed and day dreams, sucked her thumb and played with her braids, Mr. Prodovic walked in shoutin’ roll while some big ethnically ambiguous dude in the front row (everybody called, Big Blood) mumbled jokes after every students name got called, whole class laughed at his mumblins, Mr. Prodovic ignored Big Blood (I don’t blame him, Big Blood was rumored to be 16 in 7th grade and stood 6’2 and about 220 pounds, plus it was at least forty other students sardined in that little humid yellow & till room that all admired Big Blood) anyway, when Mr. Prodovic calmly called on Lil’ Michelle she ain’t answer, she was out the window, so Mr. Prodovic shouted her name, she ain’t flinch, then Big blood took it upon his self to try & get her attention like, “You deaf, munchkin?” Lil’ Michelle giggled, all the other 38 kids accept me laughed, Mr. Prodovic tried to settle them down, in the commotion Lil’ Michelle hopped up out her seat & strolled right on up to Mr. Prodovic’s desk, swiped his big blue Biology textbook right off the table, eased up to Big Blood’s desk, mean-muggin’ him until he mugged back & flinched like he was gonna do somethin’, that’s when i stood up, she seen me, he shouted, “Fuck out my face midget, dike bitch.” Lil’ Michelle yanked her thumb out her mouth & bashed Big Blood upside the head so hard, so quick & so many times with that big blue book that we all thought a drumroll had popped off, (he took the blows like a strong tree takes a new ax) she paused, stepped back, book all dented, he slumped forward, sandbaggin’, eyes closed, bleedin’ out all over the desk, she shoved her braids away from her face, took a deep breath, aimed & kept drumrollin’ until he crumpled to the floor lookin’ like a tore up pinyata, none of us noticed Mr. Prodovic hollerin’ on the walkie for security, when security came, Lil’ Michelle (out of breath) tried to wipe Big Blood’s blood off her face, unfortunately blood was on her hands too so it just smeared on her forehead, she mean-mugged the security guard when he got there & warned, “Don’t touch me.

Don’t talk to me.” & he didn’t, they walked outta class side by side with him radioing for an ambulance, just before she crossed the door she threw up the North Side with her bloody hand & shouted “North Side, bitch” then whipped her other hand off on her Starter jacket & popped her thumb back in her mouth, we all gathered around Big Blood, trippin’, tryin’ to figure out if he was breathin’ but too afraid to take his pulse, he didn’t even twitch, him of all people, layin’ there like some shitty cubist sculpture.

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Black Dress by Karen Jerzyk

DRIVING AT NIGHT

BY ROB COOK

It could be 1957, billboards from Syracuse to Middletown lit with shadow-lamps, headlights

What are you looking at Gilligan, the girl sneers.

You toss a burning match into her hair and the strands split

from battleship-blue DeSotos, hula-hoop waitresses dancing in stop-motion silence

into a flock of orange mosquitoes. The girl laughs.

Through openings in the wall you see the strippers washing

near the exit to Bear Mountain. You imagine a man condemned to drive on a thruway winding along

each other’s feet. Everything is ready to burn.

The girl behind the bar plants the room with explosions

eternity-mountains dividing the nine continents of Hell, every restroom, filling station and vending machine

from her thinning hair. Eric Wehrle starts to move, he shoves the collapsed ceiling off his lap and marches

a laundry operation for the Mafia. You arrive in a hamlet built right on the highway, a collapsed

across the falling mosquitoes. You turn to run.

A priest staggers from the men’s room

honky-tonk, everyone who taunted and thrashed you in high school sitting in a row of barstools like pompadour

with an open razor, hurries you out to the parking lot telling you how he hitchhiked with Marilyn Monroe

lizards waiting to spitball the teacher and her den of bookworms. You listen for the familiar role call:

from Montreal to Key West back when Chuck Berry could still belt it out, then crawls into the passenger’s seat.

Gilligan, Mick Jagger, Mole Man. You throw darts, billiard balls, shot glasses into Eric Wehrle’s groin.

His mouth crackles with storm warnings: The clouds out there are looking for us.

Your most mutilating enemy, his eyes never leave the bottle in front of him.

He rolls down the window to show you.

You get on I-287 to Mahwah, listen to the roadmaps,

A girl you’ve never seen before mops behind the bar.

Yellow cider gurgles like bile from the beer taps.

the Lebanese postcards shivering in the back seat’s hyena-skin terrain.

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Calm Down by Jean-Paul Mallozzi

YOUR MOUTH, THE CENTER OF THE STAR.

BY KRISTINA MARIE DARLING

Wrapped in swansdown and silk, I was becoming smaller and smaller in is hand. He was the impossibility of a shoreline. Who can remember how any times we�d tried before? I wanted to be that cut----glass city greeting him on the other coast. Frost----bitten, shivering, he moored the ship one last time. Above us, snow sealed the window in place. What waited beneath a patch of ice was its light.

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Turning

--from Therèse, 1928 by Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) Bare calf and shoeless heel. Balthus continues a stroke, crossing one thin ankle over the opposite leg, ending precisely in the middle of the white thigh.

The model’s pale oval face, with vacant eyes and child-like pout, looks as if she doesn’t embody the brain it took to pose. The artist sees the chair sweat.

Therèse, the world of what’s-to-be.

Thirteen years radiate an undeniable allure, a fact not lost on the artist who catches the unkempt crop of chopped hair tamed to the side with a bobby pin.

The red school blazer with crumpled sleeves.

The artist notes the dark skirt hiked thigh-high.

The model slouches in the wooden arm chair, pelvis in the vanishing point on the padded seat.

The chair, plain arms and dull olive fabric, a prop.

The witness of the loose wrist as it hangs over the armrest, the other eye on her knee.

The fingers wait for something.

The body, uncoiled as a skein of yarn.

In the background, the plain white cloth thrown over the buffet or the daybed, the crisp fold marks cringing in the weave, readied for the seasonal feast or the wearied body.

Through the window, the light, the virginal.

by Rosalind Kaliden

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Sanctuary

BY ALCY LEYVA

MOOD SWING GLAD by Jean-Paul Mallozzi

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She says she loves it there.

So one night, as they lie front-to-back in bed she pushes her shoulders squarely against his chest and listens to the arithmetic of his inner workings.

To the clockwork of his heart gears, To the hiss of his lungs listlessly whispering his secrets, To the sun cooling its fire on the horizon of his spinal chord and resurfacing as the moon.

She pushes herself deeper, feeling the need to believe why the birds perching along his ribcage sing so dutifully, or how beautifully sits the sad architecture of his tongue; a table of wet craft where his words are birthed and sculpted.

She pushes herself deeper.

And deeper still.

Until she is thin enough to move through his skin, Until she can write her name on the short edge of a pin.

Invisible and yet home. Whole and yet surrounded by the flesh and sinews of a man she didn’t know at birth. But it’s worth not knowing, it’s worth growing within because living without was coming as second nature. Nurturing, pleasuring furthering, entering.

She has left her clothes behind, She is naked inside of his skin.

Praising the creator for home is a temple.

Home is the only place where her prayers could be answered.

This is home, she whispers.

And he stirs.

American Girl Manages a Café

BY MAYA MARSHALL

Cat and Maus by Jean-Paul Mallozzi

WKRB Brooklyn, Sunday Morning

BY MAYA MARSHALL

Hunger and the radio call us to the kitchenette.

Mama and that nasty-ass Bill at the table with paring knife and lime sipping gin already.

Mama say, “Go ‘head. Show Bill what all you can do.

Mama and that nasty-ass Bill at the table watch me drop my hip like little Sally Walker.

Mama say, “Go ‘head, show Bill what all you can do.”

Twist and twirl in time. Blossoming at ten, I can tear.

Watch me drop my hip like little Sally Walker with a paring knife and lime. Watch me twist and twirl in time, blossom, tear.

Hunger and the radio call us to the kitchenette.

I am tempted to look away From intimate gestures: A woman lifts her hands to her ears; a child wobbles, balance lost, the sky comes close; A woman crosses the street to turn and walk back the way she came; a man drops a tray, won’t bend to retrieve it until no one is watching; a man crumples his nose up toward slouching eyebrows, a map: its letters all silent to him. Across the street two men’s hands hardly touch —nail to finger pad— accidentally on the train. She imagines they drape the same pole, sway toward the same doors.

They are strange to each other, the hands.

Never met, the fingers. A woman walks, one hip inches higher than the other.

An obeyed slowness, necessary patience, resignation.

A man, a customer, asks my permission To tell me what is true where he’s from.

I am tempted. I begin to look while a man is castrated for stealing a phone. I am watching, from America, on a phone with a man who wants my soft things and any job I can get him.

I have no papers, he says. I live with a friend, he says. I will do any work.

I work/out all day. You may not be able to look. You may look away.

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Bar by Karen Jerzyk

A Seahorse Wind

BY HALL SULLIVAN

Bri, you be safe over there. Stay in communications. Promise me you won’t get out of the truck. The connection burped and her now-pudgy face froze on the screen for a moment, eyelids mid-growl.

It doesn’t work like that.

She shrieked, Promise me!

And he did. He promised again and again, so much so that he likely came to believe he was back at base when they entered the house, guns hot, two men left, two right, sweeping, gun shots upstairs, someone was down, Fitz, you and Santiago, green light, and he’d gone, he was explosives, Santiago first, then he, gun drawn, thinking about back at base and his computer kiss, wasn’t in Falluja in 120 degrees, in an insurgent’s home hunting terrorists who could be anyone, everyone, he was doing communications, on the other end of the radio, talking to the leader, advising on location with the electronics and equipment all around his head and, on one monitor, Tara and their bellied beast, and when Santiago fell, and then his own leg was bit, the gunshots he fired weren’t his, he was hearing them over the speaker, Tara was kissing back, and two men fell on the video feed, his leg was cold, and someone was shouting for backup and there was a third man firing from a window across the way into the room with a downed soldier, and he was watching and telling them to get out of there, but the wounded soldier lost a chunk of his hand— no big deal, he can live, he can make it—and backup arrived but across the way was an RPG, communications was telling them to get out, retreat, and he was yelling retreat, and the solider wouldn’t move and he’d tried to move for the solider but couldn’t, and there was a flash and he looked at his Tara on screen, and there was a moment of calm, something loud, they lost all sound in comm, then they lost visuals but he had Tara’s screen up, his private laptop, but that too went out, everything went out, there, in Falluja, the building leveled, brick and mortar returning to earth, the whole block a kiln, IED’s in the street, too loud, everything was loud until there was no sound, a baking sun, just dust heralded by a small, curving sea-horse wind.

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SURE BET | Dice SOho Writer | Zachary Schwartz photo credit | Mark St. Andre Jr. / @saintvisual

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Rock n’ roll and hip-hop have always had a symbiotic relationship. Forty years after Chuck Berry played his first riff, bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Sublime drew inspiration from the swaggering new genre on the block.

Forty years after the birth of hip-hop, rising artists such as Lil Uzi Vert and Young Thug often sound, act, and dress more like last century’s rockstars than the gangstas and backpackers that built rap.

It is in this context that 22-year-old Houston rapper Dice Soho has gained prominence. Although active in the Houston scene since a preteen, Dice first received national attention with music video “Just Watch,” a collaboration with longtime friend Trill Sammy. Dice Soho can rap and craft a catchy hook, but the single most important thing about the young artist is his energy. Over beats built upon addictive, cinematic loops, he covers the usual topics—cars, cash, money, and hoes—but in an undeniably fresh way, either by wrapping them around some lesser-heard word (“But I’m gone get money regardless/fuck all the bitches regardless”), or by making his voice so unfettered and unbound that you can’t help but feel like you’re right there with him, doing donuts in a sports car, with a bad foreign girl on the side and a blunt in hand.

Rockstar energy is what carries Dice Soho’s music, along with an irreverence exemplified in the name of his debut project “0 Degrees”—a hilarious take on

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Cash Money’s lineage of albums “400 Degreez” and “500 Degreez.”

Who’s your favorite Houston rapper and why?

But Dice Soho is part of a lineage himself. Houston rappers, from Paul Wall to Pimp C, have always reveled in outrageousness: rocking mink coats in summertime, candy-painting their cars, flashing gold teeth and talking slick.

And, like many of the Houston rappers before him, Dice has partnered with superproducer Mike Dean (Kanye West, Scarface, Beyonce, Frank Ocean, Jay Z, many more), who’s made Dice the first signee to his incipient “M.W.A.” record label.

Pimp C. ‘Cause he was one of the realest artists. He really ain’t give a fuck about anything, he didn’t hold nothing back.

He kept it the way it was supposed to be, you know what I’m saying? And then he was also trying to bring all the artists together and stop everyone trying to hate on one another. So I liked that a lot about Pimp C. And his swag was on one-thousand. The mink coats, the fur coats with the diamond chains, the diamond rings, the iced-out watch.

We caught up with Dice Soho, who spoke freely on his relationship with Mike Dean, the origin of his name, and how much weed he smokes a week. ________________________

Where does the name Dice Soho come from?

When I was younger, my uncle was rapping, and he inspired me to want to be a rapper. So I had to come up with a name. I came up with Dice first, it really had no meaning, I just wanted to be called that. I was Little Dice at first, then I was just Dice, then when I got to high school I added SoHo. SoHo’s for Houston, I’m from the South side of Houston. I just ran with that, put them two together.

What’s the best thing about being the first artist on Mike Dean’s record label?

I get to be his main focus. That’s the main goal, just being somebody’s main focus so they can put their all into you.

We can vibe out, get real creative and high. He’s teaching me how to record myself, use certain Autotune keys the right way. At his studio he got these big speakers, so whenever he plays music he cranks it all the way up. You could hear certain sounds that you wouldn’t hear with headphones or in your car. And we smoke a lot of weed… we run through so much weed.

How much does Dice Soho smoke and how often?

I was a Swisher Sweets guy until last year. I started smoking Backwoods, but I stopped that because I don’t like the way

they feel. I smoke Au’s now, the fronto leafs. It’s no strong taste, they don’t burn your throat like Backwoods do. I smoke maybe like two zips a week. My favorite strain is OG. All I smoke is OG. What should we expect from your debut album?

Man, a lot of real life shit, a lot of stuff that people go through every day. Also, it’ll be fun, inspiring, motivational, got a whole lot of swag to it. A whole lot of big dog shit going on. For producers, we got Mike Dean of course, Dez Wright, James Royal. With features, we got Wiz, Slim Jxmmi of Rae Sremmurd, Blac Youngsta, PnB Rock. It’s called “You Could Have.” It’s for everybody who slept on me, people who ain’t see the vision like me and my day ones did. The ones who turned their back on me and switched on me. The people who ain’t stayed down for the crown, now they in the lost and found. They could have been a part of this icey life, but they ain’t believe in me, so now they can’t achieve and succeed with me, you dig?

That’s a Pimpin’ Ken quote, right?

[Laughing] You know what’s up right, we ain’t got to talk too much, you know what’s happening!