Bursting with contemporary art, fashion, music, literature, videos, and other uncategorizable materials…
Welcome to (Year 2: Month 2: Volume 1), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
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Now then, without further ado…
Selam Fessahaye Fall/Winter 2023 collection
photographs by James Cochrane
I LOVE A GOOD RETROSPECTIVE and its implicit narrative of salvation. I enter the gallery prepared to witness the career of some super-deserving artist plucked from the wreckage of disregard or misunderstanding. I expect to feel thrill and awe; I want to depart teary-eyed. “Joan Brown” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art did not disappoint me.
— from “TRANSCENDENTAL FIGURATION: Dodie Bellamy on the art of Joan Brown,” via Artforum
Japanese artist Masataka Shishido, also known as DJ Doooo, creates flesh-like accessories.
What would it mean to think unmoored, unencumbered by words, to write without the constraints of an alphabet? Abstraction, that old chestnut, quickly finds its way into the conversation, too, turning one’s attention to what is produced when an artist-writer picks up a pen and wields it against legibility.
— from “Renee Gladman” by Jennifer Krasinski, via 4Columns
Patch Notes: Hélène Vogelsinger
As part of the practice behind Hélène Vogelsinger‘s modular synth compositions, the French singer and sound designer explores abandoned places and connects with their energies to create immersive and suspended moments.
The secret to watercolor is negativity and accident -- along with this, luminosity and limitation. I feel like I have never been so bad at anything in my life, pushing tinted water across a piece of paper until it turned to mud. If I controlled it, I deformed it. If I gave up control, it never found form in the first place. The pigments were like astrological signs, each behaving according to an occult predestination, like how yellow ochre stands in the way of ultramarine, or how there will always be a miserable stainage of a misplaced pthalo blue.
— from “the governing grass of a dream language” by Anne Boyer, via Mirabilary
The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia (2019)
Directed by Jonni Phillips
After receiving a VHS tape claiming she’s a disciple of an alien species known as the “True Mothers,” Amy joins a local UFO cult, donning the name Celisse and befriending a number of other members while under the watch of the cult’s peculiar founder, Ascenia.
Joyce Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea
Horse Lords - May Brigade [Official Video]
Video by Mary Helena Clark
Kiko Kostadinov FALL 2023 MENSWEAR
Rachel Zucker opens her new book, The Poetics of Wrongness (Wave Books, 2023), which collects four talks that grew out of lectures she delivered in 2016 as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, with a consideration of this most wrong of poems—or at least its final lines. “John Keats,” she asserts, “is wrong.” For Zucker, the problem with Keats’s couplet lies primarily in its elevation of capital-B Beauty and its simplistic equivalence with capital-T Truth because “the relationship between beauty and truth is wildly complicated, complex, and impossible to define.”
— from “Wrong Poets Society: Rachel Zucker considers literary wrongness—from John Keats to confessional poetry—in a book that has the energy of a manifesto.” by JOYELLE MCSWEENEY, via Poetry
Tyna Adebowale works in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, installation and video
Other World, an artist from Los Angeles
CHIRP FACTORY SESSION 011 - HORSE LORDS
Baltimore's Horse Lords joined us in our factory studio building to record this exclusive live session. The band is made up of Owen Gardner on guitar, Max Eilbacher on bass & electronics, Andrew Bernstein on saxophone & percussion, and Sam Haberman on drums.
Aigana Gali “a multidisciplinary artist who works across a wide range of media, from canvas and paper to textiles and film, with a process that is delineated by the character of each series. Born on the ancient crossing of the Great Silk Road in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to a Georgian mother and Kazakhstani father, Aigana’s formative years were spent in the wild, open cradle of the Eurasian Steppe.”
Bees need three things: sun, water, and shelter. Not so different from people. I keep my hives on wooden pallets, facing south like the manuals tell you. They sip water from a saucer on the stump. I name the queens Elizabeth I and II.
— from “Shelter” by Minette Cummings, via Pithead Chapel
Wycliffe Mundopa “(b. 1987 in Rusape, Zimbabwe) lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe and holds a National Certificate in Fine Arts from The National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Arts Studios (2007).”
Your heart, a simulation within a simulation within a simulation. Your hands unpacking shopping bags as they’re meant to. The tablecloth always plastic, always stained, always waiting. The sigh you breathe before you begin. And here they go: the cheese, the baby greens, the onions. The tasteless puffy bread he likes.
— from "VACUOLES" by Łukasz Drobnik, via Split Lip Magazine
“The work of digital artist and motion designer Jordan Coelho, AKA Oelhan, are equal parts macabre as they are fun.”
Luella Bartley “is moving on, shifting from fashion to fine art, although she’s still thinking about curves and the complexities of the female form.”
Two months later, when I arrive at Starbase 174, another letter is waiting. Ray is five. It takes me a little while to realize that this may be the first letter she wrote to me herself. I’ve seen so many in her handwriting by now: Ray age seven, Ray age nine, Ray age 18, 22, 26. Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure. There could be other, earlier letters, waiting at other starbases.
— from “Among the Stars” by Aubrey Hirsch, via The Bureau Dispatch
Tariku Shiferaw “is known for his practice of mark-making that explores the metaphysical ideas of painting and societal structures.”
When the moon appeared, a violent red sphere riding low on the prow of the sky, everyone in the village watched it with an admixture of wonder and terror. Children pointed at it with stubby fingers, asking their parents about the gigantic moon, trying to capture it by closing their hands. Parents whispered to their children, encouraged them to hold the moon.
— from “Omens” by Andrew Bertaina, via Heavy Feather Review
Xiyao Wang, "The Berlin-based Chinese artist creates large-scale, immersive paintings in which gestural lines evoke echoes of landscapes, bodies, movements, thoughts."
Lightbulbs.
Penguins.
Velcro.
Claymation. The moon made out of cheese.
Tap dancing.
Yoga.
Twizzlers. Mountain Dew. Jello. Colors she can eat with her eyes.
Methamphetamine.
Bud Lite.
T-shirts. Thin and soft, they pass from person to person, men to women, each owner slipping into a team—Yankees, Warriors—and out again with no bloodshed, no thought to allegiance or tribe. And the words! Profusions of nonsense.
— from “Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans Because at that Point Fuck Them Anyway” by Gwen E. Kirby, via Smokelong Quarterly
Tuli Mekondjo “(b.1982, Angola) is a self-taught Namibian artist who works with mixed media including embroidery, photo transfer, paint, resin and mahangu (millet) grain – a Namibian food staple. Drawing on colonial and war-time photographic archives, Mekondjo’s practice explores Namibian history and identity politics.”
“Born in Zimbabwe and having studied in Cape Town and Florence, Helen Teede has been dividing her time between Venice and Harare having moved to Venice in 2017 for her Masters in Visual Art at IUAV University of Venice, Italy in 2020. Her research and thesis explored paint and painting as a medium and action to develop non-linear kind of storytelling.”
How do we attend to the delicate task of teaching and conceptualizing decolonial and transnational feminisms within institutions with colonial histories? How do we “decolonise” women, gender, and sexuality studies? How can we teach/learn gender and sexuality in or of the “Middle East”/ “West Asia”? What/whose knowledges are shared? What is or should be front staged in our classrooms and what should be kept silent or back staged?
— from “Stories from Home for the Classroom: Teaching Decolonial Feminist Theori(es)” by Aytak Dibavar, via A JOURNAL FOR BODY AND GENDER RESEARCH
Amanda Shingirai Mushate “(b. 1995), is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.”
Lightwave - Tycho Brahé (1994) Full Album
Film history has developed unevenly, so that in Europe today there are two distinct avant-gardes. The first can be identified loosely with the Co-op movement. The second would include film-makers such as Godard, Straub and Huillet, Hanoun, Jancso. Naturally there are points of contact between these two groups and common characteristics, but they also differ quite sharply in many respects: aesthetic assumptions, institutional framework, type of financial support, type of critical backing, historical and cultural origin. There are other film-makers too who do not fit neatly into either camp, and films which fall somewhere in between or simply somewhere else — Jackie Raynal's Deux Fois, for instance — but in general the distinction holds good.
— from “The Two Avant-Gardes,” Peter Wollen's landmark essay on the relation between two distinct traditions of avant-garde film, via Verso
Tapfuma Gutsa is a Zimbabwean sculptor.
“Founded by Peter Lundvald Nielsen in 2020, Danish label P.L.N has continuously explored the deepest layers of self-expression. While Nielsen pulls design cues from European punk culture and international workwear, Fall/Winter 2023 saw the designer examine the polarity of extremes.”