Author Archives: jolanta
Timeadark
“Twenty-one 70% dark chocolate Valentine hearts melt into a pan to become icing for a chocolate-layered cake. Tibetan wool socks from Tibet ruined by standing in the kitchen, they were gassed not washed in woolite.” Out at the park the deaf man gets a kick, the deaf man waits his turn to play a pickup […]
Distracted by the Gaze
For artist David Kastner, content is more important than technique. The Florida-based multimedia artist aims to move beyond the merely technical to get at an understanding of how the materials he engages with actually work, exploiting their properties to get at what he is most interested in: meaning, ideas, and concepts. Ultimately, Kastner says, “Throughout […]
Meeting Femme Fatales
Leah Oates: Please describe how you became an artist and specifically a photographer, and what your family background is.Cara Phillips: My journey to photography was a little more complex than many people who come out of MFA programs. I moved to New York in my early twenties, and spent several years working in luxury department […]
Costumed Intentions
Athi-Patra Ruga is a hastily ascending young South African artist whose work comfortably straddles the divides between fashion, performance, and photography. Dressed in a dizzying array of costumes, most notably his “Injibhabha outfit” (one Ruga himself has been known to call his “Afro Womble” attire), Ruga inserts himself, or rather the characters he is playing, […]
Chaos Theory
Spanish painter, Carlos Aquilino, works in a variety of styles to explore themes as wide-ranging as the role of the individual in society to the rhythms and logic of chaos. His background and approach to art marking are distinctive and compelling. He started his career with his first exhibition in 1975 in Las Palmas (Spain), […]
Viva l’Italia
In tempo di crisi le gallerie più intraprendenti si impegnano nella ricerca. È così che nasce Astuni Public Studio, un progetto col quale la Galleria Enrico Astuni a partire da ottobre 2009, nel suo nuovo spazio inaugurato lo scorso gennaio a Bologna, presenta una serie di iniziative nell’ambito dell’arte contemporanea curate da alcuni dei migliori […]
Logical Perspectives
There are always multiple ideas that I could choose from when I am making another piece of work. As boring as it may seem, I choose it very logically and mechanically. I simply choose the idea from my notebook that is the least like the work I just made. It acts like smelling salts, wakes […]
Flowering Femininity
Haizan Shaw’s Red Flower Girl is composed of large, stiff, ellipses of crimson gather round each other, colonizing into bunches, pointing in, at other times proudly growing outwards. Caught in these different stages, these ranging moments of the flowers give the piece a still movement. These crowding clusters of petals orchestrate the photo’s atmosphere, providing […]
The Status of Greatness
Blame Nandos, but South African TV has a new hero. Call him the “yapping, benign, and slightly ridiculous dictator,” or Idi Incarnate. And like his namesake, he’s everywhere. “We’ve been Having It?” Boy have we ever! So much so that if a buffoon break-dancing to “Brrrrrrrrrr,” leaves you cold in the light of the Zimbabwe […]
The Ghosts of Future Past—The Work of Rowan Smith
With one small step from Mr. Neil Armstrong we reached a world that had seemed to reside outside of the reach of human experience. Yet, almost half a century later, the romantic longing for large-scale space travel, residence and communication with some yet unknown extraterrestrial force remains. This desire, a continual and unfocused looking outwards, […]
