A Winter Weekend In Joshua Tree, California

The air in Joshua Tree is sweet, thin and immaculate. It is high desert air at its finest. It is a forsaken landscape. The Joshua trees that line the horizon and the desert seem like lost souls trapped in a spinning chokehold, moving so fast that everything is brilliantly still and hopeful. Despite its alienness and despite its strangeness, it is a beautiful landscape full of boulders and small shacks and homesteads. In the summer, it is too hot to live here, so many people move North or somewhere more forgiving. When you wake up in Joshua Tree, you want to walk for miles until you are an invisible stranger. At night, have a shot of whiskey at Pappy + Harriet’s and in the morning eat at La Copine in Flamingo Heights - make sure to order the beignets, which are splattered devilishly with cinnamon-coffee sugar. Just two hours away from Los Angeles, Joshua Tree is a strange and beautiful oasis. text and photography by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Masami Teraoka’s Apocalyptic Theater/The Pope, Putin, Peach Boy and Pussy Riot Galore at Catherine Clark Gallery In San Francisco

Catharine Clark Gallery presents Masami Teraoka’s Apocalyptic Theater/Pussy Riot, The Pope, Putin, and Peach Boy, a solo exhibition of new and selected work by Masami Teraoka. The exhibit features four large triptych paintings more than a decade in the making, in which Teraoka continues his brazen portrayals of abusive power. While shocking and lurid, the exhibit (titled after the villains and heroes in the artist’s theatrical renderings) is also sardonic and impishly humorous: power changes hands, traditional roles reverse, and fates are reimagined. Mirroring the triptych construction of his paintings, Teraoka’s tableaus literally and figuratively open the secretive and dark underworlds of institutional power to Teraoka’s singular brand of unabashed truthtelling, searing criticism, and playful ridicule. The exhibition will be on view until February 20, 2016 at Catharine Clark Gallery, 248 Utah Street, San Francisco. Photographs by Bradley Golden

R.I.P. Legendary Musician and Artist David Bowie Is Dead At 69

Sad day indeed, the words come in fits and starts, David Bowie's music was and is and has been the soundtrack to many of our lives. He was 69. He died peacefully. He will be eternal. His most recent album Blackstar was released on his birthday on January 8th. From the official statement: "David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief." photograph by Gijsbert Hanekroot

Punk In Translation Private View @ The Horse Hospital in London

Japanese leather initiative Leather Japan has collaborated with avant-garde brand Blackmeans to create the exhibition Punk in Translation. Produced by Harris Elliott – co-creator of the widely acclaimed Return of the Rudeboy, Punk in Translation features work from Japanese documentary photographers Yusuke Yamatani, Tatsuo Suzuki and Naoya Matsumoto. Their images document the raw community of Japanese punks, following the underground music scene;; diversified sounds, ‘live houses’, discreet characterless buildings, and Tokyo’s loyal punk youth. Punk in Translation showcases the scene’s style and attitude in its rebellious form unique to Tokyo’s surroundings, highlighting the radical Japanese interpretation of punk. The unmistakable style has been integrated with traditional Japanese festival culture, incorporating sensitivity towards detail, a natural characteristic of the Japanese. Held at The Horse Hospital, the exhibition highlights the lifestyle and culture of how the UK punk fashion and music scene has influenced, and informed a new breed of subculture. Punk In Translation will be on view until January 11, 2016 at The Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London. photographs by Flo Kohl

For The Love Of Gore: Read Our Conversation With Teenage Filmmaker Kansas Bowling On Her New Prehistoric Slasher Film That Is Being Released Today →

We met up with Kansas Bowling, the young, bright-eyed filmmaker who is about to release her first film – a “prehistoric slasher film” called B.C. Butcher – at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles. It was the perfect setting for a late night nosh and chat about filmmaking; a not so unusual conversation among the famed booths of the Jewish deli where Bowling’s boyfriend, the iconic DJ and “Mayor of the Sunset Strip” Rodney Bingenheimer, has his own table. And it was at that table where we talked with Kansas about her upbringing in Los Angeles, her early fascination with low-grade horror films and B.C. Butcher, her first feature, which stars the likes of Kato Kaelin and Bingenheimer himself. Click here to read more. 

Molly Soda "From my Bedroom to Yours" @ Annka Kultys Gallery In London

Annka Kultys Gallery presents From My Bedroom to Yours, Molly Soda’s first solo exhibition outside her native United States. The show features twenty recent works by the Detroit-based digital artist realised across a variety of digital platforms, including videos, gifs and NewHive. Born in 1989 and currently 26, Soda explains her work is about girls and for girls in their bedrooms, and takes the private behaviors inherent to those spaces and makes them public, reflecting how that process changes the way in which those behaviors are seen and contextualized. As a result, her images are raw, rejecting conventional beauty norms, whilst still maintaining a tween-Tumblr aesthetic and employing kitsch elements and lowbrow internet culture. From My Bedroom to Yours will be on view until January 16, 2016 at Annka Kultys Gallery, 472 Hackney Road, Unit 3, 1st Floor, London

Nobuyoshi Araki "Love On The Left Eye" @ Little Big Man Gallery In Los Angeles

Little Big Man Gallery presents “Love on the Left Eye,” a solo exhibition of works by Nobuyoshi Araki. The prints included in this exhibit have been selected from the photographer’s most recent work. The title of this exhibition refers to Ed van der Elsken’s 1956 photobook “Love on the Left Bank.” When Araki was around twenty years old, he saw “Love on the Left Bank,” and took some photographs of women in poses inspired by this book; “Love on the Left Eye” could also be seen as an homage to van der Elsken. After a recent stroke that left him mostly blind in his right eye, he has decided to black out the right side of his photographs so that the viewer can see what he sees. Love On The Left Eye will be on view until February 16, 2015 at Little Big Man Gallery, 1427 East 4th Street in Los Angeles

Sam Anderson "Endless Love" @ Tanya Leighton in Berlin

Tanya Leighton presents Endless Love, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by American artist Sam Anderson. Anderson's multidisciplinary practice focuses on the peripheral, the bit-part actors of life that arrive to bring about plot development and then slink off to the fringe. These figures are studied and organized, but never defined by Anderson, who asks her viewers to regard their personalities as carefully as they would themselves. Arranged into grid-like patterns that call to mind urban planning, public smoking areas, playgrounds, and other spaces that have been imagined and built for human interaction, Anderson's sculptures are subject to the impulse of an architect they have never met. Sam Anderson "Endless Love" will be on view until January 14, 2016 at Tanya Leighton, Kurfürstenstraße 156, 10785 Berlin, Germany

Alex Israel At the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino

Alex Israel lives and works in Los Angeles, where he was born in 1982. Deeply entwined with his home town, Israel’s art explores the iconography of L.A. and Hollywood, and the cult of celebrity. It posits L.A. as central to an understanding of American culture and the American dream. The exhibition ”Alex Israel at The Huntington” places 16 of Israel’s paintings and sculptures, as well as two site-specific murals, among the works in the historic Huntington Art Gallery, which once served as the residence of Gilded Age collectors Henry and Arabella Huntington and, since 1928, as the gallery for a celebrated European art collection. Intended to spark a dialogue between the new and the old, this intervention of Israel’s work within the Gallery creates a discourse on place and identity, two things fundamental to understanding Henry Huntington’s own love of Southern California, a region whose identity he helped to forge. Alex Israel at The Huntington will be on view until July 11, 2016 at the The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA

Yoko Ono "Golden Ladders" @ Faurschou Foundation in Beijing

Faurschou Foundation presents the first solo exhibition with the world-renowned artist Yoko Ono in Beijing. The exhibition will offer the public an opportunity to participate in her interactive art and take part in her honest and utopian, yet forceful, universe and life philosophy. The exhibition shows a variety of works from Yoko Ono's extensive artistic career, and includes important pieces from her early Fluxus and Conceptual work. Ideas, rather than materials, make up the core of Yoko Ono’s art. Based on verbal or written instructions for actions that are utopian, ephemeral and performable, Yoko Ono presents viewers with art which becomes a shared mental or physical experience. Yoko Ono: Golden Ladders will be on view until July 3, 2016 at the Faurschou Foundation in Beijing

When Good Sex Goes Bad: Audra Wist Writes About Sex With No Strings Attached and The Perils Therein →

My sexual freedom had turned into burgeoning co-dependency and like a shark sniffing out blood in the water, my eyes went white and I could no longer see the world as I once had. I fiended for that good stuff and locked myself away gnawing at the fence of sexual satisfaction. I started getting attached, paranoid, neurotic. This was a real problem for me. I am interested in sex, I write about sex, I think about sex, I like sex very much. I don’t even have to question it—I’m just there, fucking. And therein lied the problem: reckless, automatic over-investment. By diving head first into something that was supposed to be on particular terms, did I lose the ability to create the framework in the first place? Click here to read more.