Read Our Interview of Folk Artist Justin Williams On The Occasion of His Solo Exhibition @ Roberts Projects LA →

Oil painting by Justin Williams of his wife, Jade, reclining on a sofa behind a fortune teller.

Justin Williams
Major Arcana, death watching over Jade (2024)
Acrylic, oil, raw pigment and gold pigment on canvas
77.25 x 84.75 in (196.2 x 215.3 cm)

In Justin Williams’s newest exhibition, Synonym, at Roberts Projects, waves of stories collide and crash across timelines, pouring onto the canvas in lush and decadent palettes. Williams creates wormholes between his ancestral memories and the present day. His work carves spaces, ranging from cozy to claustrophobic, in which dead and living strangers coexist in moments of imagined connection. Williams’ world is seen through a kaleidoscope of childhood trinkets, native flora, and mythologized fauna, from goats to dogs to horses. The artist collects moments and mementos alike to collage in these quiet yet fantastical dreamscapes, mining through Westernized memories of suburban Australia and hitting rich veins of ancestral Egyptian aesthetics. Williams embraces the awkwardness of outsider life, and his work embodies the comforting realization that even outsiders create their own exiled community. To mark the occasion of Synonym, he discusses stories and people, which echo throughout his life and strangers whose moments of grief have shaped his work. Read the full interview here.

Read Our Interview of Katharina Kaminski and Hanne Gaby Odiele on Queerness and Fertility →

The iconography of fertility holds a timeless power over us. Our paleolithic Venuses defined this obsession, encapsulating fertility as a powerful force of creation, rooted in the divine feminine while remaining paradoxically universal. Intersex artist Katharina Kaminski expands upon this understanding in her new show, Womb, which embraces our individual potentials for transformation and innovation while interrogating our gendered ideas about fertility. As we find ourselves in the throes of a gender revolution, Kaminski reckons with the intersection of gender and creation in her abstractions of the womb: soft vessels fill the Sainte Anne Gallery, distilling the Venus to its core sense of creation and transformation. In recognition of National Intersex Awareness Day, Katharina comes together with intersex model and activist Hanne Gaby Odiele to discuss creating while Queer, finding community, and claiming ownership of the self in the wake of bodily alienation. Read more.

Read Our Interview Of Photographer and Filmmaker Lewis Khan → →

 
Blurry image of a dark street with a blue haze over the image. In the foreground is a bright lamp with a passer-by a few steps ahead.
 

British Photographer and filmmaker, Lewis Khan, uses London as one of his many creative resources. The city has great sentimental importance to the native South Londoner, who has lived on Bonnington Square for most of his life. Tucked away behind the traffic of Vauxhall, the square is one of 300+ housing cooperatives in London, owned and run by its tenants. It has a unique and fascinating history that owes much to the squatters who moved in during the 80s as a preventative measure to avoid demolition of the residential buildings. The community set up a wholefoods shop and vegetarian café, which is still there to this day. Read more.

Growing Up In Wallace Berman's World: Read Our Interview With Tosh Berman →

Wallace Berman carves a mysterious, counter-cultural figure in the cave wall of Los Angeles folklore. His legend is enhanced by a tragically early death on his fiftieth birthday as a result of an automobile crash with a drunk driver in Topanga Canyon, further cementing his myth as the beatnik of the Southern California chaparrals.

In a new memoir, entitled Tosh, Berman’s son opens the opaque curtain on the enigmatic artist through a bildungsroman of the Beat Generation and hippie counterculture, a childhood on the frontlines of 1960s Los Angeles and San Francisco freakdom. Tosh Berman and Jason Schwartzman got together for a public conversation at Skylight Books to discuss his memoir and growing up in Wallace Berman’s world. Click here to read more.

Read Our Interview Of Rosha Yaghmai On The Occasion Of Her Exhibition At The Wattis Institute → →

Walking into Rosha Yaghmai’s studio is a little bit like walking into the laboratory of a junkyard hoarder/mad scientist. There’s a distinctly pleasant organization to the vast collection of Los Angeles detritus that extends from the studio to the backlot outside. The walls are plastered with images from torn magazine pages, postcards, posters, watercolors and collage works. It’s as though you could hold a microscope to any detail in the room and discover a tiny world within. Click here to read more.

Read Our Interview Of Lauren Halsey On The Occasion Of Her Funkadelic Installation At MOCA Los Angeles →

Lauren Halsey’s dream-world is cosmic, funky, carpeted, and technicolored; an atemporal, fantastical, and hyperreal vision of black liberation which she conjures via site-specific installations that celebrate her childhood home. Click here to read more.

Read Our Interview With Tabita Rezaire The Johannesburg-Based Artist And Healer →

Rezaire is in the business of identifying sicknesses we carry within us everywhere we go—our histories, our implicit and explicit prejudices, our language. She is able to see through the veils of the “free, open Internet” to its capitalist underbellies, using the very tools of the Internet to undermine it. Rezaire is calling us out on the spread of colonial viruses—on our computers, in our history books, in our words. click here to read the rest of the interview.

Trouble-Makers, Truth-Seekers & Cultural Warriors: Read 5 Quotes from our Favorite Interviews of 2015 →

photograph by Chris Rubino

Wow, what a year. In 2015, we were fortunate to sit down with some of the world's most important artists, musicians, photographers, trouble-makers, truth-seekers, and cultural warriors. Here are choice quotes from some of our best interviews of the year, featuring Alan Vega, Genesis Breyer P'Orridge, Roger Ballen, Albert Hammond Jr., and Jack Walls. Click here to read the quotes...

Its Gonna Be A Cool Summer: An Interview with Brad Elterman

Kari_Klark_brad_elterman_factory_77
Boogie Nights at Brad's House

Brad Elterman's first photograph at the age of 16, of Bob Dylan performing on stage, started a life long love affair with photography. His images captured the last gasp of a bygone era of rock n' roll – the 1970s – the days when glamour was rare and pure and stars were stars because they were elusive and unattainable.  His classic images of Joan Jett hanging out in motels and flipping off the camera, David Bowie coming out of his studio, Playboy Playmates hanging out in his Hollywood apartment pool, and more, capture moments in a snapshot style instantly recognizable as Elterman's own. And his photographs were published in every major magazine. Then he gave it all up. For three decades Elterman laid low. Over the last few years Elterman started to reemerge: he started a blog that archived his oeuvre, but also documents new moments, in 2011 he published a coffee table book called Like It Was Yesterday, and he has been having gallery shows across the world including his latest show Factory 77 in Los Angeles which opened a couple of days ago and will be open all summer.  I got a chance to ask the very busy Brad Elterman a few questions about photography, Los Angeles, and some current projects he has been working on including including a new website that showcases his photographs from the 1970s and pop culture today, but is also a platform for new photographers.
JOAN_finger_brad_elterman
Joan Jett Flipping Off The Camera

PAS UN AUTRE: Can you remember the moment you knew you wanted to become a photographer - can you remember the first image you ever printed?

BRAD ELTERMAN: My first image ever printed was a performance photograph of Bob Dylan on stage in 1976. It was also probably the instant that I told myself that I would like to make a career out of this.

AUTRE: Who were some of your biggest inspirations - not just photographers?

ELTERMAN: Helmut Newton, Ron Galella, Richard Creamer all photographers of course. My mom was my greatest inspiration. She was a painter and she thought me to create my own style. She was so supportive as long as I was happy.
marie,cherieCurry-vicki_brad_elterman
Valley Chicks

AUTRE: Who was your favorite subject to photograph?

ELTERMAN: Probably Joan Jett. She always has style and so cool to hang with and of course to photograph. Talent and style, you just can't beat that.

AUTRE: What was your impression of Los Angeles then (1970s) and now?

ELTERMAN: I loved L.A. during the 70's, but I did not know the rest of the world. Since traveling the world now, I still always come back to Los Angeles. The weather, the light, and all the characters. It really is one of the most creative and comfortable cities in the world. Not the culture of Pairs and New York, but you can n't have everything.

AUTRE: What are some of your thoughts as you look through the view finder?

ELTERMAN: It's hard to believe that I am taking photos again after a more than two decade break. During my silence, there was nothing to photograph and the internet did not exist. So when I look though the view finder I am sort of in disbelieve. It's a fun feeling and I like it.
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Duran Duran At The Riot House

AUTRE: What is Factory 77 and what can we expect from your current show?

ELTERMAN: Factory 77 just launched. It's my 70's photos, my new photographs of pop culture today and most importantly it is a showcase for all of the amazing young photo talent out there today. I have met so many talented photographers via the internet and I enjoy sharing stories with them. Erica Lauren, a Los Angeles based photographer is the editor and I will photo edit. We would love to showcase young rock bands who embrace the internet for exposure. No performance photos. I want the pictures to be raw and captivating. It will be great fun.

AUTRE: Most exciting plans for the future?

ELTERMAN: I am part of Vogue Italia's Photo Vogue this summer at 10 Corso Como in Milan. It is an exhibition from 101 photographers. The collection is amazing and there is some incredible talent. My photo is entitled "Valley Chicks" and I took it back in 1977 on a roll of black and white film. My Factory 77 exhibition photographs at Kana Manglapus Projects, Venice is up all summer and I plan on spending time at the gallery. It's going to be a cool summer.

Brad Elterman's exhibition Factory 77 will be on view until Spetember 10, 2012 at Kana Manglapus Projects. Follow Brad Elterman on his tumblr page. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre
Brad Elterman's Factory 77 Opening Kana Manglapus Projects Venic
Exhibition view of Factory 77 with a photograph of Steve Jones of Sex Pistols in Brad's Pool