Month 2: Volume 1
Ouanessa glad but achy.
Welcome to (Month 2: Volume 1), the second exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 2: Volume 1) contains twenty contemporary visual artists from all over the world, fourteen pieces of contemporary literature: poetry/fiction/theory/interviews, eight wild and beautiful and haunting albums, thirteen entrancing videos: artworks, fashion shows, music videos, interviews, documentaries, 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…
Contemporary American artist Sabra Embury
I walk into a whole
other
room, thinking it’s a reflection
of this one and lose her,
half the day
behind a curtain— from Silts by Jed Munson, via Annulet
Two films by Levi Hanes
Mirror in a Field (2016) & Tennis : Racquet (2009)
enmeshed and ruthlessly entangled reduced to a thought inside a thought the mind in its own place from the middlings and meddlings the era of explaining gets you what you want if words don’t line up properly you are you just the same as yesterday
— from The End Zone by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, via A) Glimpse) Of): New Narratives For The Now
Maisie Wilen | Fall Winter 2021/2022 |(New York Fashion Week)
Joiri Minaya (1990) is a contemporary Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist whose work investigating the female body within constructions of identity, multi-cultural social spaces and hierarchies.
....syntax, the structure of an idea, leads you to the world view of the speaker and reveals her values. The syntax of a sentence equals the structure of your consciousness.
—from June Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” via Harvard Educational Review
Contemporary Canadian-Nigerian artist Ekene Emeka-Maduka
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person's truth as far as it can be rendered through language.
— from “Literature's Legacy of Honorable Failure” by Zadie Smith, via Daily Good
Trials of the Past (2020)
film by Photographer / Director and Producer- Erica Génécé
Designer / Creative Director- Priscilla Torres
Contemporary multi-media sculptor and conceptual artist, Philip A. Robinson’s artist statement says:
Through thoughtful selection of materials and the science of dendrochronology - as a protocol for historic markers for environmental changes through time - his work accentuates aesthetic and historic patterns between self and the world, with socio-political undertones. These undertones are shaped by influences from a Cherokee and African American mother and a Trinidadian and British father against the backdrop of the 1980s neo-conceptual art and installation practices and a climate of laissez-faire capitalism and technological advances.
The sky was yellow under the clouds and they were passing small islands. Dim shadows of gulls folded out of the rock, a duplicate detaching every time a bird fled from shelter. Anna remembered standing on a chair at the dining room table of Henry’s townhouse, years ago, sipping coffee that tasted like smoke. She’d been wearing wings.
— from “Couture” by Lucie Elven, via The Drift
Contemporary American artist Suzanne Jackson
Contemporary American artist Deborah Roberts
People flow through tributaries of the souk in covered pathways, clay and wooden capillaries bearing greens, radishes, chickens, clotted with bulbous lamps.
— from "To The Baths of Azahara” by Youssef Alaqui, via Chestnut Review
by Tierra Whack
TELFAR has launched a 24hr Live-Linear TV network in collaboration with the Ummah Chroma Collective ('community of colour'). Basically we launched a TV Channel without any content — because we are tired of being content for other channels. When you watch TELFAR.TV you will see the channel take shape LIVE — and you can take part in what it becomes by sending us your videos.
Watch Telfar Clemens’s TELFAR TV here
Contemporary German drag artist Hungry (Johannes J. Jaruraak)
Thinking the artwork as poethical, as “a composition which is always already a recomposition and a decomposition of prior and posterior compositions,” requires being poised for the advent of becoming as matter, and its immanent interrogation of the temporality of forms. In contradistinction to understandings of the artwork as an autonomous totality, or those that would consign the artwork to some iteration of Kant’s forma finalis—that is, the reductive ascription of a formal purposiveness to the object—a poethical reading stresses the provisional ground where questions of form, formlessness, and abstraction collide.
— from “Four Theses on Aesthetics” by Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, via e-flux journal
Contemporary American artist Leah Schrager is a digital artist and online performer. She is the model, photographer, artist, and marketer in/of her images. Her visual works apply a painterly aesthetic to bodily forms and often draw their material from her conceptual online practice.
No one told me my body was an earthquake, my body a hurricane, tornado. That my body was and will always be the eye of the storm.
— from “The Storm” by Christine Sloan Stoddard, via Quail Bell Magazine
In this episode of “Artists On Writers | Writers On Artists,” the filmmaker-novelist [Dennis Cooper] and the artist [Ryan Trecartin] talk about theme parks and haunted houses, the pain of producing first drafts, and what it means to make a life in art right now.
Contemporary American artist Steph Tanney self-identifies as a conceptual sculptural artist
The alphabet changes everything,
But not immediately. On continents
Unknown to Phoenician mariners,
In languages that did not yet exist,
Reading aloud would be an important
Mode of transmission until well into
The 19th century.
— from Context Collapse 1 & 2 by Ryan Ruby, via The OXONIAN REVIEW
Derek Bailey – Chats
(Incus Records, 2001)
Contemporary American photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis
Brian Eno - Imaginary Landscapes (1989)
A film by Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo
Contemporary Japanese artist Kayo Shido
Here is a new function for criticism: not evaluating the object but reproducing the critic’s experience of the object. Since the turn of the millennium especially, the critic has become chiefly someone who responds, who feels the raw impact of culture on their nerves, and who writes primarily to pass on this unmediated crush of sensation to the reader. They have become a surrogate experiencer.
— from “Getting Personal” by Mitch Therieau, via Chicago Review
UNTOLD: TELLURIAN VISIONS | Sophia Loizou & Annie Tådne (2020)
an audiovisual accompaniment to Untold: A Tellurian Memorandum, the new album and poetry collection from Sophia Loizou. A collaboration with visual artist Annie Tådne, the work “re-interprets complex geological formations and their entangled states of existence, highlighting the deep connections between living systems, technological developments and earthly flows.”
Contemporary American photographer Logan White
Contemporary Canadian photographer Rebecca Storm
A virus can kill you dead directly. Poetry is not a vaccine. Poetry is not a flak jacket. Poetry is a machine made of voice or paper. Poetry carries ideas; ideas make their homes in humans, passed from one to another. Language can kill you indirectly. It is not a gun but it is the order from one mouth to the mouth of the man holding the gun.
— from Sun Yung Shin's "Poetics in Pandemics, Poetry Against State Violence" via Mn Artists
It’s Me (2020)
short film directed by Amanda Ba
…shot at the Seven Sisters Cliffs of East Sussex. The film is a take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights set to an incredibly slowed down version of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.
Contemporary Chinese artist Ziping Wang
HOW TO SEE | Sophie Taeuber-Arp (2021)
MoMA Senior curator Anne Umland, organizer of the exhibition "Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction", guides us through Taeuber-Arp’s multifaceted work, revealing a shapeshifting artist whose language of abstraction defied categorization.
Contemporary German artist Jana Euler
Coffee & Conversation with Meredith Monk (2021)
Meredith Monk in conversation with the University of Oregon Composition Department, moderated by UO Faculty Professor Robert Kyr. In the session, students will learn more about Meredith Monk’s artistic trajectory and the role that creative risk has in composition. Professor Robert Kyr will lead the conversation with a Q&A by UO composition students follow.
Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations. Recognized as one of the most unique and influential artists of our time, she is a pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance”. Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words.
Contemporary American artist Stewart Uoo
I say that Davis is one of the strongest writers of cosmic realism because few others so regularly, so relentlessly, place the human subject and the cosmos side by side. Her nine published novels vary widely in subject matter: opera music (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf); Marie Antoinette (Versailles); a trip to Wales (The Walking Tour); the end of the world (The Silk Road). Davis’s novels also vary in style, though over the course of her career they have become sparer in plot and syntax: her more recent novels possess the chiseled shape of parable.
— from “The Wolf Hour: The Cosmic Realism of Kathryn Davis” by Anthony Domestico, via Image Journal
Contemporary Korean artist Minjung Kim
![Leaflet] Minjung Kim 김민정 - Timeless](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff522c0ec-2575-4fee-861f-7de4bc1ed931_1600x1067.jpeg "Leaflet] Minjung Kim 김민정 - Timeless")
Film by Eric Minh Swenson.
Minjung Kim’s aesthetic is expressive minimalism with traces of 17th and 18th century Japanese ink paintings, yet these images are unquestionably contemporary. The handmade Mulberry Hanji that Kim employs comes from the inner bark of the Paper Mulberry tree, which is native to Korea and flourishes well on its rocky mountainsides. Hanji, Korean for paper, is known for its durability. The oldest existing Mulberry Hanji in Korea is 800 years old. Kim’s ability to create soft, delicate imagery stands in marked contrast to the resilience of the paper.
Contemporary American artist Josh Smith
It is an endless sky. I can see the cumulonimbus that spreads fluffy like cotton candy. A swallowtail butterfly that is weakly swept away by the wind. A crow that stops flapping and jumps into a canopy of zelkova leaves. The days are getting shorter. It is the end of summer.
— from Hiromi Suzuki’s “Ghosts Passing along Sunset Boulevard” via Mercurius
Contemporary Moroccan artist Amina Benbouchta
Look darling, I’m already having enough difficulty figuring out life with COVID,
life with no sun I’ll deal with next year.She laughed.
And then she whispered, please listen.
— from Tanya Jayani Fernando’s “And They Dimmed the Sun,” via The Brooklyn Rail
Contemporary American artist Andrea Ferrigno
The Saami indigenous people, in solidarity with the Native Americans fighting against the creation of the Dakota Access Pipeline on their lands, perform a joik for Mother Earth during a traditional gifting ceremony at Standing Rock, in 2016.
You can learn more about their involvement in this newsletter from Patrick Mazza.
