Leave Your Thoughts On Boobs After The Tone: Read Our Interview of Carly Randall On Her New Short Film "TITS"

Carly Randall is a visual artist, filmmaker and creative producer. Her work explores issues and themes that specifically impact women in modern society. These include knife crime, online bullying  and filter culture, as seen in her multi-award-winning dance film, FILTERFACE: Double Tap to Like, which examines how social media filter culture affects the mental health of young women. 

In 2022, Carly was awarded a Develop Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England to create a 2-minute-long, educational art film that exposes the language men use to talk about women’s breasts, highlighting the ubiquitously misogynistic and objectifying attitudes. Carly set up a hotline for teenage boys and young men to share their honest opinions on women’s breasts via voicemail. She created posters to promote the hotline, strategically placing them in prime locations around London’s East End Borough of Hackney (sometimes up to 200 a go), and shared with universities, colleges and friends who posted them in city centres nationally to ensure a diverse response that fairly depicts the breadth of the UK. To accompany the voicemails, Carly worked with a casing agent to bring together a selection of women from around the UK to shoot and film their breasts—those which our patriarchal society have deemed “undesirable": too flat, too big, odd nipples…

Carly has created a unique social experiment that creatively dramatizes the disparity between the ‘fantasy’ and the ‘reality’ of women’s breasts as a result of unrealistic representations created by the porn industry, perpetuated across social media and reaffirmed by patriarchal conditioning. I spoke with Carly about her motivations behind the art piece, how Playboy inspired her backdrop for the art film, and her main takeaways from listening to the voicemails. Click here to read more and watch the film.

Watch Barbara Kruger's "In Violence" (2011) On The Occasion Of Her Survey @ LACMA & Solo Exhibition @ Sprüth Magers In Los Angeles

In Violence (2011) was presented in Commercial Break, a group exhibition curated by Neville Wakefield at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art during the opening week of the 54th Venice Biennial. Eleven years later, in the midst of a continuing war in Ukraine and numerous global humanitarian crises, Kruger’s use of novelist, critic and political activist, Mary McCarthy’s quote: “In violence we forget who we are” is an increasingly potent reminder.

Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You is on view through July 17 @ LACMA 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Her solo exhibition, Barbara Kruger, is on view across the street through July 16 @ Sprüth Magers 5900 Wilshire Blvd.

Watch Doug Aitken's Experimental Short Film "Autumn" (1994) Starring Chloe Sevigny

In the case of Autumn, Aitken wanted to create three music videos, each with their own narrative, to be aired separately at different times as part of his commercial production. The resulting video, shown in galleries, fuses together the three separate narratives in a non-linear fashion. Located on the precipice between the oft-thought mutually exclusive realms of art and entertainment, Autumn stands as an emblematic example of Aitken’s video practice, investigating the cultural numbness generated by the flow of media images.

Watch John Baldessari's Short Experimental Film "Title" (1973)

Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor. Through the gradual integration of cinematic techniques—motion, color, sound, acting, editing and arc—the artist inverts the traditional Hollywood model, stressing structure over narrative coherence.

Highlights from Katya Grokhovsky's solo show System Failure @ Martin Art Gallery

Katya Grokhovsky's SYSTEM FAILURE is on view through April 10th at Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College 2400 Chew Street Allentown, PA 18104. The artist will be performing live in the gallery on March 14th at 5pm and at the closing ceremony on April 10th. She will also be conducting a lecture in the space on March 21st. To learn more about the artist, her practice and curatorial work, read our interview of Katya Grokhovsky here.