Presented by The Broad Stage and Sotheby's Institute Of Art, Artist Talk: LA Legends is the first of a series of talks with influential California-based artists, established to explore the living legacy of Los Angeles' arts scene. Art legends and postwar trailblazers set the stage for L.A.'s vibrant contemporary art scene and continue to define L.A.'s cultural landscape today. photography Oliver Maxwell Kupper
You can purchase the album on dark pink vinyl here.
Watching one of Galen Pehrson’s films, like his most recent, The Caged Pillows, starring the likes of Jena Malone and James Franco, is like stepping into a psychedelic cartoon where you can’t help feeling a tinge of déjà vu – you’re not sure if it was a dream, a childhood memory, or an omen. It’s as though a mixture of real life memories and old movie scenes were plucked from your brain and rearranged into a brilliant new narrative. They’re the renderings of a world that most of us have inhabited for all our lives, but for Galen, who spent the first 12 years of his life in rural Nevada City, without access to cable TV or any other means of consuming pop culture, this world can be seen from a slightly outside perspective. Click here to read more.
Nina Ljeti is prolific. She is a writer, filmmaker, actress, and musician. Just a few of her many projects include: starring in films directed by and alongside James Franco; co-writing and co-directing the feature length film Memoria with Vladmir de Fontenay (which is out in theaters now); performing in her band, Nani; and shooting a biopic about Jerry Garcia. She has the creative output young artists have wet dreams about. But Nina Ljeti is prolific in another sense of the word. She is the daughter of Bosnian immigrants (who came to Canada at the start of the Bosnian Revolution) and a high school punk stoner; a film buff who loves Titanic and Coppola alike. Her richness isn't just in practice; it's in spirit and history as well. We got to ask Ljeti about memory, filmmaking, ghosts, and getting to play Patti Smith. Read it here.
MAMA Gallery twists itself into a temporary coil, experiencing an equally unexplainable impulse to spiral briefly into the form of the Cerebral Vortex. This multi- sensory group exhibition features work from eight highly cerebral artists, like Jonathan Bepler, James Franco, Henry Hopper, Galen Pehrson, Luckey Remington, Angeline Rivas, Adam Tullie, and Double Diamond Sun Body. Cerebral Vortex will be on view until October 31, 2015 at MAMA Gallery, 1492 Palmetto Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper and Sara Clarken
Part two of artist Daniel Arsham's film Future Relic 02. See Arsham's upcoming exhibit, entitled Welcome to the Future, on view during Art Basel Miami at Locust Projects. For the installation, Arsham transforms the gallery into an excavation site, digging trench in the gallery’s floor that holds thousands of calcified artifacts—a muted cacophony of 20th century media devices. Mounds of boom boxes, electric guitars, SLR cameras, Blackberries, game controllers, VHS tapes, Walkmans, film projectors, and portable televisions, rendered in crystal, volcanic ash, and other minerals fill the pit, collapsing linear narratives of past, present, and future.
Inspired by Chekhov's The Seagull with elements of Ginsberg's Kaddish, BirdShit is a multimedia performance piece that combines theater, dance, video, live and pre-recorded music, and a few surprise elements. BirdShit has been commandeered by artist and musician, Nina Ljeti, choreographer, Chloe Kernaghan, and NYU Graduate Film students Joshua Richards, Zach Kershberg and Tine Thomasen, under the guidance of James Franco. Go here to donate.
Peres Projects presents Gay Town, a solo project with James Franco. Gay Town explores a variety of themes that are central to Franco's artistic practice, mainly issues related to adolescence, public and private persona, stereotypes and other societal concerns such as society's preoccupation with celebrity. Franco created most of the works for Gay Town over the past two years, making many of the works in hotel rooms, makeshift studios and other temporary locations whilst completing other projects, mainly motion pictures. Franco makes reference to several of his motion picture work and related projects in parts of the installations and other works on view in Gay Town. Gay Town will be on view from February 9 through March 9, 2013 at Peres Projects temporary space: Karl-Marx-Allee 87, Berlin
Kenneth Anger, James Franco and Brian Butler at their performance of Aleister Crowley’s Bartzabel Working at the opening of The Martian Chronicles exhibit, honoring the work of sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, on view until January 5, 2013 at L&M Arts, 660 Venice Boulevard, Venice, CA
Autre's Art Basel Edition fresh off the press today, THE INFINITE JOURNAL, will be available this week in Miami and soon in cities worldwide. Cover photograph by Adarsha Benjamin and art by Alia Penner, other contributors include James Franco, Amanda Charchian, Cole Sternberg, James Georgopoulos, Daniel Pinchbeck and more. More photos coming soon. Sign up for newsletter to find out where you can find a copy.
Music video for R.E.M.'s track Blue, featuring Patti Smith, from their final studio album Collapse Into Now, directed by James Franco
OHWOW is presents the fifth and final edition of the annual group exhibition It Ain’t Fair (IAF). Coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach, It Ain’t Fair 2012 celebrates the history and tradition of IAF‘s renowned multimedia production, and closes the chapter on what came to define OHWOW’s identity as a community platform for progressive art in all media. The final IAF moves from the Design District to a 6,000 square foot location on the beach to accommodate a large-scale exhibition and various projects, delivering a climactic conclusion to this definitive enterprise. It Ain‘t Fair 2012 assembles a selection of over 30 contemporary artists, many who contributed in past years, along with several new names, from David Adamo, James Franco, Dan Colen, Terry Richardson, Aurel Schmidt, and others. It Ain't Fair will be on view from December 6 to 9, 2012, 743 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach, FL
James Franco and musician Tim O'Keefe (a former classmate of Franco's at the Rhode Island School of Design) have released an EP under the moniker Daddy. James Franco directed the duo's first video, Love in the Old Days, a meditation on romance in the 1960s. Daddy's debut EP, Motor City, hits Sept. 25 and features vocal contributions from Motown's Smokey Robinson, whom Franco met on a flight. The cover art is a polaroid of Franco's Spring Breakers costars Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine. The music video stars Autre's own Adarsha Benjamin, along with Henry Hopper, Lily Donaldson, Nina Ljeti and a host of Franco's merry band of postmodern pranksters.
A great photograph of James Franco and Paul McCarthy for McCarthy and son Damon's contribution to Rebel in the exhibition monograph co-published by MOCA Los Angeles and OHWOW.
James Franco and merry band of pranksters, including Adarsha Benjamin, covered in red paint and feathers during a performance at the Rebel exhibition now on view through June 23 at the MOCA, 941 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90038.
James Franco and merry band of pranksters spread red paint and feathers all over his Rebel exhibitionin Los Angeles over the weekend. Photograph by Adarsha Benjamin
Artist Galen Pehrson's animated short, entitled El Gato, an erotic reinterpretation of Rebel Without a Cause, voiced by the likes of James Franco, Jena Malone, and Devendra Banhart is on view now as part of James Franco's Rebel.
