Devonté Hynes and Ryan McNamara “Dimensions” Performance at the Pérez Art Museum Miami

Last week, during Art Basel Miami, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) commissioned a collaborative performance between musician Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange) and artist Ryan McNamara. The performance on PAMM’s terrace included an original multi-part composition by Hynes, an internationally-acclaimed musician and producer, and sculptural elements and choreography by McNamara, a celebrated performance artist. Presented within the global context of Miami Art Week, the performance was an allegory of Miami’s history as a place of fantasy and fragmentation. photographs by Scout MacEachron

8 EZ Steps by Gusmano Cesaretti at These Days in Downtown Los Angeles

"Eight pinups in a portfolio laced with perfume. Wallet-sized: a barber's New Year's gift slipped into the hands of loyal customers. The secret currencies of men in suits. The kid searches his father's jacket pocket for the prize. Any thumbnail memento promises to make real his world of fantasy. He smells the perfume. In his studio, an artist photographs a friend. The photographs are transferred to screen prints. Her body is abstracted in close-up, her figure fractured by halftone dots. Glossiness is displaced by the rough grain of uncoated paper. A fuzzy sensation becomes direct. The coy touch gets confrontational. Gratification becomes something less certain. As the kid finds pleasure in obscenity, the artist finds it in disorientation and dissonance. They agree on the urge. Peeking and seeing are two different acts, but no one should refuse the right to look. Satisfaction only takes a few steps." A poem by Sam Sweet. 

These never-before-displayed photographs by Italian-born Los Angeles photographer Gusmano Cesaretti represent a departure from the gritty, black-and-white documentary pictures and portraits of Los Angeles subcultures for which he is mainly known. By contrast, this 1979 series delves into the artist’s experiments in abstraction and eroticism. Cesaretti took a progressive series of eight tightly cropped black & white photographs of a woman shaving her pubic hair. He made traditional silver gelatin prints which were then turned into high contrast half tones eliminating any grey scale from the images and rendering them purely in black and white. He furthered the mutation by running the halftones through a mid-70s photocopy machine and adding only the color red or green to the images. The result was a combination of pop art and abstraction, producing a voyeuristic view of an intimate, yet anonymous, grooming ritual. Gusmano Cesaretti "8 EZ Steps" will be on view until January 17, 2016 at These Days in Los Angeles. You can also purchase a monograph of the works here. 

 

Opening Tonight In New York: Patricia Field Brings Her Sartorial Genius to A Dover Street Market Holiday Gift Shop →

Patricia Field is best known to a certain generation of women as the coveted costume designer behind the looks of Carrie Bradshaw, but she means infinitely more to the convergence of fashion with downtown New York’s art world. Since the 1980s when she held exhibitions for the budding artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat at her East Village boutique, Field has been a champion of both New York grown artists and fashion designers. She has truly one of the most unique eyes in the world. “I look for the same thing in art that I look for in fashion,” says Field. “It’s chemical. I see it, I like it, and I go for it.” Click here to read more. 

Two Boxers And Two Roller Skater Girls Face Off In Jacob Bellens' New Music Video For the Track "Polyester Skin"

Polyester Skin is the title track and first single from Danish musician Jacob Bellens' upcoming hfn album, and introduces his abundant talent in fine style. Born in 1979 in Nakskov, a small town in Southern Denmark, Bellens has written songs since the age of 13 resulting in a huge output of material. Danish photographer and video artist Jonas Bang created a wonderful, weird and charming video for ‘Polyester Skin’ featuring two boxers and two roller skater girls who face off in a strange balletic dance set to the tempo of the track. You can purchase the single here. 

All Or Nothing: Read Our Candid In-Depth Conversation With Writer, Artist, Former Lover and Muse of Robert Mapplethorpe, and Cultural Survivalist Jack Walls →

When Ryan McGinley, Dash Snow, and Dan Colen formulated a new downtown NYC rebel art scene in the late ‘90s, they all uniformly cited one artist as a massive influence: Jack Walls. The trio was hell bent on having Walls become a mentor of sorts to them, perhaps even a father figure, and eventually Walls relented. Through the process, an entirely new generation of art weirdoes found themselves interested in the work of Jack Walls. He was the subject of a solo exhibit at RARE this past summer, while another exhibition Paintings, Et Cetera opened up at Basilica in Hudson. Though Walls claims to have no interest in the “antiquated system” that is the art world, the art world is surely interested in him. Click here to read our in-depth conversation with Jack Walls here.