Welcome to (Month 11: Volume 1), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 11: Volume 1) contains tons of contemporary art, music, fashion, videos, and more stuff that resists categorization!
Don’t forget this newsletter will exceed most email limits, so you’ll need to click through to “view entire message” at the bottom of this email or click over to the website to enjoy the whole thing.
And remember, every entry comes with a link so you can explore more and more.
Now then, without further ado…
Torkwase Dyson is “an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.”
And now the road spiralled into the mist, and for a moment they stopped to watch the crowd pass by them, and catch their breath before plunging on. The King shut his eyes, and when he opened them, a white cat was sitting staring at him. Around the cat white butterflies danced, and the cat curled his tail into a question mark, and then an exclamation mark, and finally a comma; and by this sign indicated he would be their guide through the mists. And hand in hand they walked into the darkness, with a white cat and the butterflies showing the way.
— from “Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping” by Derek Jarman, via Granta
Sabrina Small is “a mixed media artist with an emphasis on drawing, painting and stitching. Her artwork, inhabited by Lovecraftian beings, speaks to the raw and grotesque nature of life on this planet.”
A character with a body is a social creature while a character without a body, I believe, is a thought experiment. To some ways of thinking, it is perhaps more honest to write characters without bodies. After all, should fiction be striving for mimetic reality through exact physical recreation? This question has been central to art ever since the introduction of the printing press. The photographic camera. The record player. Etc. With our ability to generate better and better replicas of our exact physical worlds, what good is there in trying to capture the physical dimension of the world in fiction?
— “against character vapor: put characters back in bodies, lol” by Brandon Taylor, via Sweater Weather
Fortunes, an experimental comedy
directed by Greg Barth
Jordan Wolfson is an American artist who lives in Los Angeles
Mernet Larsen is “an American artist known for idiosyncratic, disorienting narrative paintings that depict a highly abstracted, parallel world of enigmatic and mundane scenarios.”
I want to be swallowed by the building. Submerged in the opening well and sealed in place, until I am underneath the surface. Covertly interior. I do not want to be seen or felt. It is easier to desire concealment.
— The Hole // by Mike Corrao, via PSYCHO HOLOSUITE
Alison Elizabeth Taylor is an American artist based out of New York City. “She is known for her marquetry hybrid work combining Renaissance-style marquetry with painting and collage to depict contemporary subject matter.”
Lispector once described writing as “a curse, but a curse that saves.” However, in a rare filmed interview from 1977, she spoke of the intolerability of life without writing. In response to the same question Rilke posed to his young poet—if you couldn’t write, do you think you would die?—she said: “When I am not writing I’m dead.” If language is a curse, it is because it never relieves us of its necessity. The crônicas show the everyday struggle of language—in confronting the everyday itself and the obligation we have to continue its use, even long after we’ve glimpsed its limits.
— “A Ritual for Mystery: Clarice Lispector’s crônicas” by Jared Marcel Pollen, via The Yale Review
Amalia Pica is “a London-based Argentinian artist who explores metaphor, communication, and civic participation through sculptures, installations, photographs, projections, live performances, and drawings.”
Despite her life and work having both been cut short by foreseeable and measured violence, Cha still possesses tremendous agency. Cha did not narrate her art, nor her writing, nor her life in a straightforward or rectilinear fashion. Her short life and work are an anachronistic convergence of interwoven genres, disciplines, and mediums. There are film, performances, videos, documentation, sculpture, book art, multimedia, and different types of linguistic textures (Korean, French, English) in her books and films that reflect her fluency and her polyglottic hybridities with motherland, material, memory, time, and her lineage of violence and diaspora.
— “To Name It Now: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee occupies a savage abyss” by Vi Khi Nao, via The Baffler
Meschac Gaba is “a Beninese conceptual artist based in Rotterdam and Cotonou. His installations of everyday objects whimsically juxtapose African and Western cultural identities and commerce.”
Simone Rocha | Fall Winter 2022/2023 | Full Show
Kelly Akashi is “a Los Angeles-based artist working in sculpture and photography, often using materials like wax, glass, bronze, light, and air to emphasize time and ephemerality.”
Agatha Ruiz de La Prada | Fall Winter 2022/2023 | Full Show
Math Bass is “an artist known for fusing performance with paintings and sculptures using formal elements like solid colors, geometric imagery, raw materials, and visual symbols.”
Contemporary American artist Henry Crane
Of course, an enormous violence is required to produce a working class and drive people without any resources but the self to the market. However, this transition was radically truncated for the formerly enslaved. Late 19th- and 20th-century Black intellectuals, as well as ordinary Black folks, who were primarily agricultural laborers and domestics, stated repeatedly that Black people were living in a condition that was all but slavery in name. That was the reality. So, why the faith in the liberal narrative about emancipation and the end of slavery; why erect the barrier between variants of involuntary servitude when many of the essential features of unfreedom were still in place, when racist terror and state violence was the norm?
— “How Saidiya Hartman Changed the Study of Black Life: A conversation with writer about her pathbreaking book Scenes of Subjection and how our understanding of race has changed in the last two decades” by Elias Rodriques, via The Nation
Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA), lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. “She creates works that explore a mysterious alternate universe full of characters that often interact with each other in tender ways.”
I was in public but you don’t know what it’s like feeling a suck through time-space datamines, feel your life pumping into binary at the speed of Google fiber, seeding that torrential database we call the dark web with great white. I started out thrusting into the great wide web once a month, then once a week, now I have to feel my jaw torn off by mother Marie as she pries me down and out between valleys of code.
— “slip slop” by Zachary Issenberg, via The Shoutflower
Contemporary Australian artist Keith Cunningham
David Behrman - Wave Train, for piano resonances and feedback (1966).
David Behrman, pianoforte
Gordon Mumma, electronics.
Contemporary German artist Michael van Ofen
FKA twigs - Practice
Director - AnAkA
City of Torment is magic realism on steroids. People turn into ghosts, then they become pupae. Characters begin to merge. Souls rustle in vases. Wings beat inside pillowcases. Fingernails on statues turn into claws. The dead swap bodies with one another, are spun and transformed into statues, are heard speaking softly in the pantry. Alice’s grandmother turns into a swan, her grandfather into a moth.
— “Prague Always, Always Wins: On Daniela Hodrová’s “City of Torment” By Agnieszka Dale, via LARB
Cameron Rowland is “an American conceptual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and acclaimed for its structural analytic approach to addressing issues of American slavery, mass incarceration, and reparations.”
Katie Paterson is “a Fife-based visual artist from Glasgow, Scotland, having previously lived and worked in Berlin whose artworks concern translation, distance, and scale.”
Portia Munson “is an American visual artist who works in sculpture, installation, painting and digital photography, focusing on themes related to the environment and feminism.”
COMME DES GARÇONS SPRING/SUMMER 2023 SHOW
“A lamentation for the sorrow in the world today And a feeling of wanting to stand together” - Rei Kawakubo
Contemporary Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen
In Geomantic Slumber
Poet Lisa Robertson’s lecture will range across the neo-baroque, the cosmology of melancholy, grief, queer medicine, dogs, naturecultures, ontological choreography and related topics (perhaps also perfume and weeds) considering texts by Djuna Barnes (Nightwood), Severo Sarduy (Cobra), Walter Benjamin (Trauerspiel) with a cameo by Dürer.
Natalie Ball “was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Indigenous, Race & Ethnic Studies & Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in Aotearoa (NZ) at Massey University where she attained her Master’s degree with a focus on Indigenous contemporary art. Ball then relocated to her ancestral Homelands in Southern Oregon/Northern California to raise her three children.”
Tala Madani “is an Iranian-born American artist, well-known for her contemporary paintings, drawings, and animations. She lives in Los Angeles, California.”