Porcelain Raft is set to release debut album Strange Weekend out on Secretly Canadian on Jan 24, 2012. Listen to a recently released track "Unless You Speak From Your Heart."
Porcelain Raft - Unless You Speak From Your Heart by DOJAGSC
Los Angeles this weekend: Classic Photographs Los Angeles show. Pieces by master photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Frantisek Drtikol, Elliott Erwitt, André Kertész, Wayne Miller, Joseph Sterling, Edmund Teske and Garry Winogrand. We'll have work contemporary photographers such as Raymond Meeks, Mark Steinmetz and Jason Langer as well as by a number of Japanese photographers including Emi Anrakuji, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Daido Moriyama, Harry Shigeta and Issei Suda. On view January 14 & 15, 2012, Helms Daylight Studio, 3221 Hutchison Ave. #E, Los Angeles.
Y Gallery presents an exhibition of Norma Markley’s recent work—neon, silkscreen prints, and sewn drawings—inspired by the rhythm and language from literary sources and images from a film to explore the notions of sex, on the one hand, and the concept of answering questions with a yes or no, on the other hand. Yes, No is on view until February 5 2012.
Daddy TattooZoe Strauss: Ten Years is a mid-career retrospective of the acclaimed photographer’s work and the first critical assessment of her ten-year project to exhibit her photographs annually in a space beneath a section of Interstate-95 (I-95) in South Philadelphia. Strauss’s subjects are broad but her primary focus is on working-class experience, including the most disenfranchised people and places. Her photographs offer a poignant, troubling portrait of contemporary America. Strauss (American, born 1970) states that her ambition is “to create an epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” Zoe Strauss: Ten Years will offer one version of that narrative, presenting approximately one hundred and fifty of her photographs, along with slideshows displaying more of her imagery, and installations on billboards throughout Philadelphia that will extend the exhibition beyond the Museum. Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from January 14 to April 22, 2012.
Steve McQueen motorcycles are up for auction at the 21st Annual Las Vegas Motorcycle Auction and Races at the South Point Hotel & Casino Jan. 12-14 in Las Vegas. Not only will two of McQueen's classic motorcycles (1938 Triumph Speed Twin and 1940 Indian Four Cylinder) and a personal Bell (1970) helmet be on the block for the MidAmerica Auctions, but his widow, Barbara McQueen, will be serving as the guest of honor.
What song do you want played at your funeral? Daniel Mudie Cunningham has been asking that question of artists and art workers since 2007. Hundreds of people answered it in all manner of ways that ranged from the profound to the playful. The idea for Funeral Songs is based in personal experience. Weeks before the artist’s brother unexpectedly died in 2001, he’d mentioned what song should be played at his funeral. Amid the grief, the song choice was forgotten. Now recalled several years on, the song features in the Cunningham’s jukebox archive of music you can live or die to. Funeral Songs will be on view at the MONA (Museum of Old New Art) in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia,from January 13 to February 13, 2011 – the exhibition will also be a part of the annual MONA FOMA event (curated by Brian Ritchie, bass player for the Violent Femmes) which includes performances, art, and the like.
Last fall Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radio Head composed the soundtrack for Rag & Bone's 2012 runway show in New York. Listen to Stuck Together below.
A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the world wars. Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide. Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance. [Find it here.]
"I have to like the people I photograph. I need to feel an attraction, a fascination." Bertien van Manen. Buried deep in Bertien van Manen's images is an intimacy between photographer and subject. The viewer trespasses on the private moments in the frame, catching a glare over breakfast, unheard words between friends, both party to the action and intruding on it. Between 1991 and 2009 van Manen travelled across Asia and Eastern Europe with a small, analogue camera, learning the local language and engaging with the people who would become the subject of this collection. Let's sit down before we go is a portrait of the places van Manen visited and the people she met, stayed with and became friends with during her travels across Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Siberia, Tatarstan and Uzbekistan. Across nearly two decades, with the exception of big cities, little about the scenery in van Manen's photographs has changed. The relative sameness of Russia's appearance binds the images together, leaving us no indication of the time lapse from one photograph to another. The title, Let's sit down before we go represents an old Russian tradition, the practice of taking a moment, stopping to think before embarking on a journey, to consider where we will be travelling to and why. A special edition of Let's Sit Down Before We Go has recently been released by Mack Books and includes a hand made c-type print and first edition copy housed in a bespoke embossed linen clam-shell portfolio box. Let's Sit Down Before We Go, the series, is also on view at the In Camera gallery in Paris until January 21.
Recorded by Kevin Morby, of the band Woods, and Cassie Ramone, of Vivian Girls, The Babies prep a new 12" inch EP of demos. The twenty minutes of music onCry Along with the Babies invites you into the kitchen, art studio, and bedroom where it was recorded in 2010 and early 2011. Intended to be an immediate document of new ideas, the six songs sound fresh, loose and vulnerable all at once.
Sex, eroticism and Judaism – Israeli artist Jacque Katmor, who is all but forgotten today, is the subject of a retrospective of sorts at the Nachum Gutman Museum of Art in Tel Aviv starting January 13. Katmor, who died in 2001, will undoubtably be an artist posthumously appreciated for his genius. Somewhat of a Kenneth Anger of the Israeli unground cinema movement in the 1960s, Katmor was a leader of the artist collective Third Eye. Erotically charged, drug induced, and psychedelic, Katmor's art and films dealt with not only a rapidly changing zeitgeist, but also Jewish identity and Kabbalistic mysticism. "Jacque Katmor is Wishing You a Good Death" is on view at the Nachum Gutman Museum of Art from January 13 to May 19, Shimon Rokach st 21, Neve Tzedek, Tel Aviv.
A series, called Gif My Heart Away, created by Arvida Bystrom for The Ardorous, a series of individual and collaborative projects between a collective of female creative professionals.
Film still by Adarsha Benjamin
On Saturday, November 12, renowned performance artist Marina Abramović brought her manifesto to Grand Avenue, as the artistic director of MOCA’s 2011 gala, An Artist’s Life Manifesto. Abramović arrived with 85 performers to serve as human centerpieces on dinner tables and enough white lab coats, her prescribed gala-tent attire, to outfit the 750 guests who attended.
Painting by Annabel Graham
Stephen Friedman Gallery presents an exhibition of early and recent work by Catherine Opie. Opie is considered to be one of the most important American photographers of her generation. This is her fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and follows her highly acclaimed solo mid-career surveys at the Guggenheim, New York in 2008-2009 and at the ICA, Boston, earlier this year. Shown here for the very first time is an early group of portraits from the artist's black and white 'Girlfriends' series and a major new body of landscape photographs, taken at sea. On view until January 23, Stephen Friedman Gallery, 25-28 Old Burlington Street, London.
New Photographers presents five artists exhibiting in New York for the first time. The artists are not linked thematically or stylistically, but what they have in common is their distinctive approach to photography and the originality of their images. In this show, each body of work creates its own context. Artists include CHRIS LEVINE, YUJI OBATA, SCHELTENS AND ABBENES, PATRICK SMITH, TEREZA VLCKOVA. New Photographers is on view at the Danziger Gallery, January 12 through February 25, 527 West 23rd Street, New York.
The Woodsist record label announces the upcoming release of the fourth album by mysterious U.K. based, lo-fi act The Doozer. The Woodsist record label, which was started by one of the founding members of the Brooklyn based band the Woods, is a making a name for itself in the dissemination of low fidelity, folksy acts such as Kurt Vile and Sun Araw. The name of the album is Keep It Together and it will be released on January 31st.
“Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart” is an intimate collaboration between two near-strangers—Zackary Drucker, the LA-based photographer, video and performance artist, and Amos Mac—the creator and publisher of Original Plumbing. Executed over a long, snowed-in Christmas weekend at Drucker’s childhood home in Syracuse, New York, the images combine elements of personal history, performance documentation, and exhibitionism. The resulting intervention is also an experiment in cross-identity representation; a dialogue between Mac, a trans man, and Drucker, a trans woman. The exhibition marks the official release of this unique suite of 25 limited-edition photographs, a number of which appear in the first issue of Mac’s new publication, Translady Fanzine. "Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart" is on view at the Luis de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles until January 22.
