"Jacklighting"

January 27, 2020

French artist Anne-Charlotte Finel presents Jacklighting at The Chimney for her first solo show in the US. Referring to the nocturnal hunting practice of shining bright lights throughout dark fields in order to momentarily stun animals, Jacklighting proves itself both weird and wonderful. Finel's work, focused on spaces affected by unnatural lighting systems, is composed of four reels. And with each video being manipulated both digitally and physically, the story from viewer to viewer may be rather ambiguous.

In Triste Champignonniste (Sad Mushroom Farmer), 2017, Finel films a mushroom farm in a former underground gypsum quarry—although it may look more like the ground for a nuclear bomb shelter as bursting shapes and foggy landscapes are cast upon a pink velvet backdrop. Only upon closer inspection may one gradually discern the actual rotting of elements played upon the deteriorating pixels of the film for a versatile look on decomposition.

As is the case with all of the show’s remaining components, nothing is quite as it seems in Jacklighting. The rhythm of the subjects and the landscapes of the environment speak to the title’s permanent state through the relationship between man and nature, attesting to Finel’s expertise in observing the unordinary and inclination to search for truth in the otherwise vastly unseen.

Text by Caroline Brown
Photos courtesy of The Chimney and the artist; Photography by Reggie Shiobara

Jacklighting is on view at The Chimney until February 23, 2020.

Art

Chez Opening Ceremony

May 18, 2018

We can always depend on Opening Ceremony to push the envelope with their creative and unlikely collaborations, and their newest one with Crosby Studios is no exception.

OC's Howard Street flagship location is now doubling as the site of Harry Nuriev's latest furniture installation, featuring wall hooks, shelves, and ceramics.

Nuriev founded Crosby Studios, his interior architecture and furniture design firm, in 2014. And his reputation as one consistently on top of design trends is confirmed by his heavy use of Pantone's Color of the Year, Ultraviolet, in OC's space.

We chatted with the designer about why he prefers his palette purple, how fashion has found its way into his work with interior design, and what he's planning on doing next...

Interview by Anna Zanes
Photos by Jesper D. Lund

I'm curious to hear about your color choice for this, the ultra violet. How'd it come about?

It was very natural for me, very organic. I can say that I haven’t thought about it. I just feel this color for Opening Ceremony. And the idea was to blur the distance between the fashion world and the public design world, and I think this color joins these two things pretty well.

Yes, definitely.

And it's royal. For me, this color is very personal. It’s very fair, and could be very tough. I guess it’s hard to imagine it in day-to-day life. But eventually you see here that it’s actually a lot of different colors and it's fine, you enjoy it.

Yeah, I’m usually not a purple person but I like this for some reason. I'm okay with it. What’s your relationship with fashion? How do you feel about it?

This as my first experience to be honest, but I think I'm going to continue for sure. And I do love collaborations. So maybe instead of doing something on my own I would like to collaborate with someone like Union, or other brands.

It’s cool because I feel like fashion can become very competitive so it’s nice to come collaborate from a different world because you get the best of it.

I have a few pieces here, just like a T-shirt and bags. But I really enjoy it, just creating a T-shirt. I hope my next step is going to be in fashion.

Where do you draw inspiration for the shapes? Because I know the hand is a familiar shape for a chair, but this is such an innovative way of twisting it that gets repeated so much.

It’s such an organic shape and I'm a huge fan of hands so I think I just continued the idea of hands and fingers.

I love that it’s a familiar chair but it’s kind of like fashion – a lot of people drawing inspiration is not always copying. So that’s cool.

I’m glad you noted that.

I really appreciated it expecially since copying is a huge thing that's discussed in fashion. And I love that you’re doing that because it’s clearly different but is such a recognizable thing at the same time. What are you doing next, what else are you working on?

I have around 20 projects as an interior designer lined up. We do residential, hospitality... a lot of restaurants.

Do you prefer doing hospitality?

I like doing both. I like working with people. I don’t care about walls and chairs without the people. So it’s all about finding the right way to make people happy.

Art

FERNANDO by Sebastian Faena

After all the hours put into this project – how does it feel to finally be presenting it to the world?

If you put so much of your heart into anything, you do it so that yourself and your work gets to be on exhibition. So it's relieving and gives me a joyous sense of closure and gratitude for those who helped me make it happen.

Who is Fernado and what drove you to write his story?

Fernando is my brother whom I never met. A picture of a child who looks like me but is blonde, holding a tennis ball smiling. It’s the most iconic, an almost religious image for me since I first knew about him.

FERNANDO is about a boy who goes into the country to escape the "distractions of social life" as you put it. How personal of a project was this?

The film is an illustration of a year of my life when I moved alone into the country to do just that. I had a red truck and my dog, a few books, no phone and the spectacle of nature was more glamorous and magnificent than anything I had ever experienced before (Fernando is my godson Tadzio's character, not Miles’).

One thing I noticed in FERNANDO, as well as in "Those Wrecked by Success" staring Gigi Hadid, was how saturated it was with the sounds of the world, almost as if it was its own soundtrack. How important is sound to your style?

Very, you can manage the audience’s emotions like a puppeteer with the help of sound and personally I avoid loud noises in general.

How did you know Miles McMillan was right for the lead? Can you tell us what it was like working with him?

He’s my best friend, his co-star is my godson, Tadzio. Fernando was made by the people I love the most and make me feel the safest. Miles had never acted before and I believe he did it in a very unique way. His instinct is so right, he’s honest, elegant, a natural actor and an original in every sense.

By presenting your film at Cannes, you're joining a 86 year tradition of celebrating cinema. What does that mean to you?

Last year Miles and I were here for work, him for a show, me for a campaign and we said to each other "we are never coming back here if it’s not for a film". And this is just a year later. So that’s a very nice feeling.

DOP Juan Maglione, SOUND Cameron Tompkins, COSTUME Sofia Achaval De Montaigu, AD Carla Di Pietro, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Gastone Solnicki, PRODUCER Helena Martel Steward, AC Florencia Labat, EDITOR Daniel Kaijzer, COLOR Elias Nousiopoulos
CAST: Miles McMillan, Tadzio De Montaigu, Patricia Susana Masseueo

Art

Faces + Traces

May 16, 2018

What’s in a face — what is it, really? Some holes, some circles, a bit of hair, a sprinkling of lines, some skin, some bone, some muscle.

What’s in a painting — what is it, really? Some globs, some slashes, a sprinkling of lines, some canvas, some color, some texture.

Trude Viken’s mesmerizing new works at Fortnight Institute effortlessly beg these questions with a combination of humor and horror. Her anonymous portraits are both clownish and skeletal, depicted as they are in textural whimsies of thickly applied pigment.

It’s as if she is pulling the abstract into the figurative, or vice versa, ever aware of the physical reality of the paint and its capabilities of rendering illusion — and, as a result, has created a ghostly limbo from which her characters grin out at us. They seem to laugh, or plea — their skin is made of pockmarked paint, but their emotions still resonate across the distance of Viken’s veil.