Fashion Fetish - Poppy De Villeneuve

Alongside the 2012 SHOWstudio Shop exhibition Selling Sex, SHOWstudio launches Fashion Fetish, a series of fashion films, performances, multi-media pieces and accompanying essays by women in fashion. The latest addition takes us on a trip to the coastline, courtesy of acclaimed photographer and film director Poppy de Villeneuve.

Theater of the Street

walker_evans_subway_portrait_Photography_and_the_Theater_of_the_Street

Since the invention of small hand-held cameras and faster films in the late 19th century, photographers have been fascinated with capturing everyday life in the urban environment. An exhibition of nearly 90 works will celebrate how photographers such as Harry Callahan, Bruce Davidson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Beat Streuli creatively pursued a new genre of street photography, capturing the diversity and rapid pace of modern life.I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938–2010 is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. from April 22 to August 5, 2012.  

Made in America

This Friday at the Roll Up Gallery in San Francisco will present Matthew Henri's solo exhibition of new works entitled Made in America.  Using his unique silkscreen method "Henri will present portraits of bank robbers and wanted posters, prostitutes of the Barbary Coast in San Francisco’s now defunct red light district, old whiskey bottles, railroad ties, public hangings, along with other haunting ephemeral nostalgia. By digging further than most, culling and obtaining imagery from obscure books and libraries, with exhaustive research, and artifacts such as nudie playing cards found at seedy liquor stores on the outskirts of the Las Vegas desert, Henri has created an extremely visceral and heartbreaking portrait of an American landscape...." Made in America will be on view from April 13 to April 29 at Roll Up Gallery, 161 Erie Street, San Francisco. 

Un-Self Portrait

London based designer Gabriella Marina Gonzalez presents her amazing Autumn/Winter 2012 collection entitled Un-Self Portrait which was designed, hand made and shot by the designer while traveling abroad in the United States. Using material she pick up along the way, the collection includes vintage monkey fur reassembled from a 1920’s coat to form part of the showpiece dress. In the designer’s signature style, shredded silk appliqué was made from discontinued chiffon. Vinyl from a 1950’s table cover manufacturer’s dead stock was used to create metal like tubes and a new take on the GMG harness. Silk rope from home decor was used to create luxury straps on high gloss wooden platform shoes.

Hit Me Love Me: The Weird World of Actually Huizenga

Performance artist, pseudo-porn star, singer, Actually Huizenga looks like a throw back to something out of the pages of Hustler circa-1979, but the vision she is creating through her art and music is distinctly new - even verging on futuristic. Huizenga, born and raised in the Hollywood Hills, specializes in "raw Bacchanalian Los Angeles music video kitsch" and performs live as Actually with her band Wet Look - a solo record is on its way. And along with her collaborator Socrates Mitsios are creating a series of 5 to 8 minute videos, entitled SoftRock, that they call an "exercise in the photogenics of sex, exploring the power within the act (both social and aesthetic)." They also refer to the films as "Pop Rape" which in its simple, brilliant distillation is a perfect term to describe an entirely new, futuristic brand of cinema and music. The first two installments of SoftRock premiered at the Pompidou Centre as part of Diane Pernet's A Shaded View on Fashion Film, and a third installment is currently being edited and is due out soon. Actually will perform at King, King in Los Angeles on April 19.

[BOOKS] Seasons in the Sun

"In the mid-1970s, Britain’s fortunes seemed to have reached their lowest point since the Blitz. As inflation rocketed, the pound collapsed and car bombs exploded across London, as Harold Wilson consoled himself with the brandy bottle, the Treasury went cap in hand to the IMF and the Sex Pistols stormed their way to notoriety, it seemed that the game was up for an exhausted nation. But what was life really like behind the headlines?"Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain – 1974 -1979 by Dominic Sandbrook covers a privotal moment in Britain's history with societal unrest and the rise of the punk movement. 

Disco Angola

David Zwirner gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Stan Douglas, titled Disco Angola, Douglas has again assumed the fictional character of a photo-journalist, this time a regular in the burgeoning disco underground of the early 1970s New York. For Douglas’s alter-ego, the new scene offered a cathartic respite from urban grittiness in a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Evolving out of funk and soul, the disco lifestyle mobilized the gay community in particular, and its self-conscious embrace of glamour and fashion represented a departure from the previous decade’s counterculture. Disco Angola is on view at the David Zwirner gallery until April 28, 525 West 19th Street.

The Shaping of New Visions

Valie Export, Einkreisung (Encirclement) from the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations). 1976.

The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, on view this month at the MOMA in New York, covers the period from 1910 to today, offers a critical reassessment of photography's role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements—with a special emphasis on the medium's relation to Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art—and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as "New Vision" photography bore the obvious influence of "lens-based" and "time-based" works. El Lissitzky best summarized its ethos: "The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary art from April 18 to April 29, 2013.

Giverny

The Hole gallery in New York presents the exhibition Giverny, a collaboration between E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler. The artists created photographic works in the famous French gardens built and immortalized in paint by Claude Monet, and will be exhibiting them for the first time here on the Bowery. Playboy.com has generously funded this massive exhibition, for the duration of which the Hole will be transformed into a living, breathing garden—with a lily-padded pond traversed by Monet’s signature green Japanese arched bridge, and scattered with the indigenous plants he is famous for painting. The walls of the exhibition will be printed with the almost claustrophobically green willow trees that surround this historic French site, and your first step into the gallery will be onto grass. Giverny will be on view until April 24 at the Hole Gallery.

Earthling

Janet Werner’s work focuses on the invention of fictional characters based on found images from popular culture including models, celebrities, dolls and figurines. The paintings operate within and against the genre of portraiture, taking anonymous female figures and imbuing them with fictional personalities. For Werner, the process of painting is a way of investigating the iconic power of the image, invoking imagination, memory, and projection to invest the anonymous figures with human subjectivity and emotion. The final paintings are composite portraits that retain aspects of the original while also representing notions of transformation, innocence and loss. Janet Werner's Earthling will show at Parisian Laundry from March 29 until April 28.

Naked Before the Camera

naked_before_the_camera_metropolitan_museum_of_art_hermaphrodite

Hermaphrodite, Nadar, 1860

"Tapping veins of mythology, carnal desire, hero worship, and aesthetic pleasure, depictions of the nude have...triggered impassioned discussions of sin and sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty. Controversies are often aroused even more intensely when the artist's chosen medium is photography, with its accuracy and specificity—when a real person stood naked before the camera—rather than traditional media where more generalized and idealized forms prevail." Naked before the Camera, on view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveys the history of this subject and examines some of the motivations and meanings that underlie its expression.

Homocult

gio_black_peter_gay_cinema_bruce_la_bruce_homocult
Bruce LaBruce music video for Gio Black Peter

Homocult and Other Esoterica is a group show of short experimental queer films focused on magick and the occult and art works curated by Daniel McKernan. Featuring films by Genesis P-Orridge and Bruce LaBruce and artworks by Christos Andres and George Keller. McKernan says, "[Homocult is a] collection of artists & filmmakers who have an affiliation to the Generation Hex era, a blend of old school and new school. Each individual has his/her own unique interpretation of the theme of the occult and esoteric. Jason Louv, in his introduction to Generation Hex (2006), states that the book is a snapshot of those 'who are not only delving into this art of magick and science of the future, but who are coming to magical consciousness at a time when it has never been easier to find and link up with people of like minds and experience.' This is a video survey of such people. As Scott Treleaven, in the final issue of This is the Salivation Army (1999), said: 'We are the new circus. And we are the envy of the fucking World.'" On view April 6 and 7 S&S Projects 3145 S. Morgan Street, Chicago, IL.