Extinction

November 20, 2018

In an urban environment like NYC or Paris, where staring out of the window and seeing a sky of high-rises is the norm, it’s not hard to feel out of touch with nature—but don’t worry, you’re not alone.

That’s the overwhelming sentiment in Extinction, a new exhibition at the Artemis Fontana Gallery in Paris, on view now through December 2. With work from a wide array of artists, including Edgars Gluhovs, Katarzyna Przezwanska and Gaia Vincensini, the various interactions between humans, their surrounding nature and the inevitable impending doom resulting from the long term relationship between the two, are examined and displayed through every imaginable medium, from embossed leather and painting to digital engraving and video, to name just a few.

Text by Caroline Brown

“Everything is artificial, everything is artifice. Nature no longer exists,” reads the gallery’s press release about the show. “We always start from the contemplation of artifice. That’s why everything’s so chaotic. So false. So desperately confused.”

And while we can’t argue with that, we can use it as a rock bottom realization to begin conversations about a much needed sustainable future—or else, we will be extinct.

View some pieces from the exhibit, below.

‘Extinction’ is on view now through December 2 at Artemis Fontana Gallery in Paris.

Photos courtesy of the gallery.

Art

Some People Think I'm A Shoe

With anecdotes from designers and fans like Pharrell, who wrote the foreword, and archival photos by Juergen Teller, Some People Think I’m A Shoe documents the impact Smith’s legacy has had not on only fashion, but art and music, as well. The book also highlits some of the shoes most famous—and ridiculous—collaborations, including ones with Raf Simons, Yohji Yamamoto, Colette and Miss Piggy.

To answer Smith’s son Trevor’s question from the beginning: we’re not really sure. After flipping through Some People Think I’m A Shoe, it’s pretty unclear who made who—the man or the sneaker. What is clear, though, is the legacy that the Stan Smith has created, one that allows athletes, rock stars and just your average writers at office to be participate in; one that’s not going anywhere, any time soon. As Pharrell says at the beginning of the book, “It’s a rare thing to have produced something of this quality and longevity—and adidas knows it.”

Photos courtesy of adidas

Art

Fever Dream of the Female Form

August 30, 2018

Honestly, we're not surprised that Heather Benjamin has almost 32K followers on Instagram. Her work, which is fearless in its obsession with the female form, feels like a fever dream you don't want to wake up from. Benjamin's illustrations are equal parts reckless and careful; in fact, her attention to detail is so exquisite I find something new each time my eyes land on the range of bodies (and vaginas) she draws.

Her background in printmaking and underground zines is evident...something about the familiar freakiness of her subjects and the density of her pen strokes tells me there's a teen punk hiding somewhere beneath the surface. But her newest work is mature in an unserious way (I'm imagining my future sex den with her art as the wallpaper), and though the presence of spiders and scissors might make my skin crawl--in a good way, of course--the thing I'm most excited by is what she has to say.

Benjamin's new book Cavegirl Monologue is out September 21st from Sacred Bones Books, so we asked her about women, words, and being a Sagittarius.

Interview by Evan Nicole Brown
Photos courtesy of Heather Benjamin

How has moving from creating multiples (zines) to single, standalone works impacted your process?

I’ll think I’ll always make zines. But it’s true that in the last couple of years, I started focusing a lot more on making larger scale, standalone works, which I wasn’t really doing before. Typically these days, I’m working simultaneously on a few standalone works AND a zine - I like the way the processes of making both kinds of work at the same time can inform each other. It felt really freeing for me to move out of only making work that was meant to exist in book format as its final form - because in a lot of ways, making work that is supposed to find its resting place in a book can be restrictive, in terms of scale, the ways it can be printed/reproduced, the way it relates to the other pages in the publication, etc - it’s just a really different way of making work than being able to focus on just a single entity and let it be whatever it wants to be, on its own. Moving into making standalone works has changed my process in the last year or so - by enabling me to loosen up, experiment more with color and different materials that wouldn’t have translated so well as photocopies (which is typically how I print my zines), and think more about how to create a narrative within a single piece rather than throughout a set of related images.

What role do words play in your work? In comics and zines they're expected, but what purpose do they serve in your single prints?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself because I’ve been starting to write a bit more and use text in my singular images in a way that I wasn’t before. I think specifically in my work, I tend to only write a line or two to accompany a piece, and it’s meant to be just sort of a nudge or a suggestion of what direction to go in as you imagine the narrative behind the piece. I see those little text moments as poems, and they’re sort of little guiding poems for each image.

Has your start in DIY, underground culture made it harder for you to pivot to the larger art world and gallery shows?

I think it’s made it a bit difficult for me in the sense that I am continually amazed by the presence of money and social climbing and misogyny and all this other gross, bureaucratic stuff in the art world. I guess I’m naive, but I wasn’t expecting it. Not that everything I’ve experienced has been like that - it hasn’t. But there has been more of it than I expected. Coming up through DIY and carrying those ethics with me throughout my life, that’s still the way I like to conduct myself, and I feel really, really strongly about that. I’m actively trying to figure out how to strike a balance between the way I am and will always be - which is incredibly informed by DIY and punk ethics in the way I conduct myself within my work and life - and trying to navigate the art world in a way that feels right to me. I also get kind of excited by the idea of “infiltrating” a little bit - like, I want to weasel my way in there, but once I’m in there, I’m doing it my way - it’s important to me to bring those DIY ethics, and principles of inclusivity and humility, to whatever work within the art world I end up doing.

It's clear that visual culture is important to you. Is there a film that has inspired you?

The first thing that comes to mind that’s had a lasting influence on my work, which I could really just watch over and over again forever, is Terry 100 Channels - not exactly a film, but it’s a collection of animations by King Terry, one of my favorite artists. It blew my mind when I first saw it, basically still does every time. It was reissued by Picturebox a while back and I managed to grab a copy. It’s all these really raw, energetic drawings, really minimal animation, and set to perfect soul music - I really can’t do it justice by describing it, but it’s incredible. You can’t find all the parts online, but I think a few of the sections are on youtube.

I think one of the things that's so beautiful about women is how grotesque and precious we can be, and I really feel this duality in your work. What speaks to you about the female form?

My work has always been so autobiographical, and I think it always will be. My drawings are basically journal entries - they’re cathartic for me to make, I use the process of creating my work to process what’s going on in my life, and their genesis is always rooted in something I’m grappling with in my own life. So the presence of the female form in my work overwhelmingly has to do with my own experience in my body, how overwhelming it can be, and the dichotomous relationship I have with myself. Like you said, the duality between the grotesque and the abject & the ethereal and visceral beauty that is contained within women, in multitudes, and it’s so multi-layered. I felt hesitant to describe it this way for a while, maybe because I wasn’t sure if it was true, but now I think it is - all my figures in my drawings are essentially self-portraits, representing different aspects of myself & of my womanhood. I think that’s how I’d describe why I keep representing the female form, in a conceptual sense. And then aesthetically, the female form just speaks to me in terms of, of course, my own reliability to it, but I also just have so much appreciation for women’s bodies and all their varied landscapes. I never get tired of representing them in a purely aesthetic sense, and I think it’s important to keep visually representing women’s bodies, especially the aspects of them that may not typically be considered attractive or appropriate. Of course, societally we have made a ton of progress surrounding the perpetuation of shame and criticism of women’s bodies, but there is still a lot of work to do, and so much about us is still taboo. That’s one of the reasons I keep drawing bleeding vaginas, pubic hair, etc… I also just love doing it for so many other reasons, but a big one is that I think it’s important to keep blasting out visual representations of that stuff. It still never ceases to amaze me how grossed out people still are by so many natural aspects of women’s anatomy.

Does your work ever get interpreted (or perhaps misinterpreted) as taboo because it centers sexuality and self-pleasure?

Of course. I’ve been censored countless times. This is a constant issue for me - and every time it happens it just makes me feel even stronger about making the work that I do. Since my work is so personal and about my own experiences that often already contain trauma and shame, when that extra layer of shame and self-consciousness gets added to my experience by someone censoring my work or expressing really negative emotions about it because they’re either disturbed or grossed out or think it’s inappropriate, it’s really hard for me. It’s like this whole extra layer of shame and discomfort about making the work that is my ultimate catharsis for already dealing with so much shame and trauma surrounding womanhood and sexuality. But yeah, in the end, it just makes me more determined to keep making the kind of work I do, and showing it.

I love that so many of the pieces feature the night sky...the constellations make me think of "celestial bodies" and zodiac signs. What's yours? Do you feel like your sign explains some of your artistic process, if at all?

I’m a Sagittarius. I’m honestly just getting deeper into astrology recently and am enamored with how much inspiration it’s brought to my life and work already. That’s an interesting question though, whether my sign explains my process. I’ve definitely been exploring how it explains different aspects of my personal life, but I’m sure I could relate it to my artistic process as well. I’m supposed to get a tarot reading tonight from a friend who is incredibly knowledgeable about astrology, I’m going to ask her what she thinks! Haha.

Art

A Decade of Beautiful Losers

And on Thursday night, with the aid of RVCA and Red Hook Labs, Alleged Gallery rose again. Alleged took over The Hole for a limited exhibition (open until September 1st), featuring works from artists skate legend Mark Gonzalez (whose 1995 mixed media piece, “Wein I Take Drugs Things Get Out of Focus and I Like That,” included graffiti and illustrations and his trademark scrawled, intentionally misspelled poems); photographs from Cheryl Dunn, Ivory Serra, and Deanna Templeton (naked girls, pool, sunlight); and pieces from Mills, Shephard Fairey, and Rita Ackermann. There were replicas of the original Alleged Good Luck candle, the kind of Catholic prayer candles you find in bodegas across the city.

The opening was intensely crowded, with people spilling onto the street. The artists were there, models were there, Timothée Chalamet was there. Younger people who worship older skaters were packed into every corner. Bertie Bert the pom, the Hole’s resident adorable pomeranian, panted happily. It was hot in the gallery, and I wanted to jump into one of Templeton’s pools. I heard one of many grizzled dudes in baseball caps sight that he wanted to go back. For a week, you can.