A Visit To Key Biscayne, Florida with Ariana Papademetropoulos and Jessica Tonder

I didn’t know exactly what to expect when visiting Jessica Tonder's mother Lucy in Key Biscayne, but I had a good feeling about it by the bedazzled chokers she made and sent me in the mail. We arrived to the Towers of Key Biscayne, and when I opened the door, it was heaven. Lucy, all in white, was lounging in her white living room, and I mistook her for a statue as she blended into the godly décor – she was perfection. All of a sudden my friend Jessica made sense to me. Of course, she is the way she is – growing up in a curated heaven draped in gold, white and roses. The first few days it stormed. Lucy art directed photographs of us in the apartment calling her dress up closet Lucy’s Boutique and told us to “hug the columns like Romans." We went to Vizcaya, embraced the rain and took a dip in its fountains. Once we were soaked we took refuge in the man made caves. We visited exotic animals, as I’ve been dreaming of holding a baby monkey for far too long. My dream came true, and Jessica took a panther for a walk in her cream suit and hat ensemble. What a vision she was. All in all, I left Miami feeling a bit freer. Spending time with Jessica, Lucy and no ‘sane’ person around to stop us, I got to see how fabulous life can become even in seemingly mundane moments. Text by Ariana Papademetropoulos. Photographs by Ariana Papademetropoulos and Jessica Tonder

Read Tessa Fontaine's Short Story About Life As A Sideshow Performer And Chasing The Ghost One Electrocution At A Time →

Dr. Frankenstein holds the hammer. He has the metal moon of a nail’s head protruding from his nostril, which he taps in a little deeper. The flat head rests one inch out from the entry to his cavity, the metal flaring the soft nostril tissue wide. With the hammer’s forked prongs, he hooks and slowly pulls out the nail. It glistens. Only the audience members right up front can see the sheen snot coating the nail, but the rest are practiced in the art of imagination. Click here to read more. 

Jordan Wolfson Sculptural Work @ David Zwirner Gallery In New York

The red hair, freckles, and boyish look of Colored sculpture draw associations to such literary and pop cultural characters as Huckleberry Finn, Howdy Doody, and Alfred E. Neuman, the mascot of Mad magazine. Highly polished in appearance, the work is suspended with heavy chains from a large mechanized gantry, which is programmed to choreograph its movements. The sheer physicality of the installation, which fills the entire gallery space and includes the work being hoisted and thrown forcefully to the ground, viscerally blurs the distinction between figuration and abstraction, while furthering the formal and narrative possibilities of sculpture. The sculpture’s eyes employ facial recognition technology to track spectators’ gazes and movements, thereby adding another layer of interactive corporeality to the work. Using fiber optics, its eyes also intermittently display a range of imagery and video footage, including the artist’s own animations and filmed footage, and other found visual material, all of which seem to mine the subconscious preoccupations and desires of our society and consumer culture. The work’s incongruous accompanying soundtrack further underscores the complex tensions and distortions that the artist establishes between reality and artificiality, subject and object, meaning and sense. The exhibition will be on view until June 25, 2016 at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. 

Watch The Latest Music Video For Cate Le Bon's Track 'Love Is Not Love' Off Her Current Album

'Love Is Not Love' is the second single taken from Cate Le Bon's album 'Crab Day'. 'Crab Day' out now! The music video is directed by the wonderfully idiosyncratic Turner Prize nominee Phil Collins. Shot in Berlin, the video sees Cate being joined by an elite troupe of dancers to engage in some seriously avant-garde yet clinically synchronized dance routines! Buckle up kiddos, things are about to get weird.

Support Bruce LaBruce's New Film "The Misandrists" On Kickstarter

"I’m making The Misandrists with limited resources because I feel it’s important to push my work forward as a filmmaker regardless of budgetary constraints or the prior censorship that certain kinds of more conventional financing may entail. Working with modest budgets has always allowed me the freedom to make challenging and provocative films that would otherwise be very difficult or impossible to finance. The film itself is about characters with radical leftists beliefs that question authority and the dominant ideology, so it seems very fitting that we are asking for broad-based, community support for the movie, a project to which everyone can feel they have contributed and had a part in making." Click here to learn more. 

Ivar Wigan "The Gods" Opening @ Little Big Man Gallery In Los Angeles

Scottish Photographer, Ivar Wigan, presents a series of images taken around the street culture associated with the urban music scene of the American South. Captured on the urban fringes of multiple cities—predominately from Miami, Atlanta and New Orleans—the images are a defiant celebration of a marginalized and often demonized culture, here raised to iconographic status and suffused with a sense of admiration and empathy. The Gods will be on view until June 19, 2016 at Little Big Man Gallery, 1427 E. 4th Street

Our 10 Favorite Magical Objects From The Enigmatic Mind of Architect and Designer François Dallegret →

Design is important because it reinvigorates our everyday objects with new life. A good designer does not just make a bed; he makes a bed into a crucifix made out of sot polyurethane. A good architect does not just redesign a basement; he turns the basement into a drugstore/nightclub. We are speaking of the multi-talented architect and artist François Dallegret. The French-born, Montreal-based designer studied architecture at the famous Beaux-Arts in Paris before he tired of their strict, conformist imaginations of what spaces and objects might look like. Since the 60s, Dallegret has been experimenting with futuristic and imaginative concepts and materials, creating multifunctional furniture, strange machines, walking cakes, jumping spheres, electrical and inflated garments, and more. On the occasion of the architect's latest exhibition in Los Angeles, here are ten of his most whimsical and fantastic creations. Click here to read more. 

Exclusive Preview Of "Kienholz: Five Car Stud" @ Fondazione Prada in Milan

Milan’s Fondazione Prada presents “Kienholz: Five Car Stud”. The exhibition brings together a selection of artworks by Edward Kienholz and his wife Nancy Reddin Kienholz, including the well known installation that gives the show its title. A self-taught artist from Washington State, Edward Kienholz’s work was described by Germano Celant as “making no attempt to sublimate the meanness and tragedy of life, its condition of loneliness and triviality, but on the contrary using them as a way of highlighting a low and popular universe in which the wasted and the dirty, the depraved and the filthy, represented a new and surprising beauty”. The exhibition features numerous installations and tableaux created by the couple between the early late fifties and the nineties, often directly representing death, violence, war and various kinds of social injustices. Looking at them makes the viewer feel uncomfortable and powerless but, at the same time, turns him into a participating witness as the urge to meticulously explore the details take over: Voyeurism and the power of crude beauty win over the common sense of morality. The main installation, “Five Car Stud”, catapults the viewer into a nightmarish situation, plunging him into a dimension of extreme violence. It recreates a dark, isolated environment, illuminated merely by the headlights of four cars and a pick-up truck,  at the center of which lies an African–American man, surrounded by five white men wearing Halloween masks. The aggressors grab his arms and legs while one of them prepares to castrate him. A woman is forced to watch, shocked and powerless, and a frightened little boy witnesses the scene from the backseat of his father’s car. This work was defined by Kienholz as the representation of “The Burden of Being American”. The exhibition will be on view until December 31 2016 at Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Mila. Text and photographs by Sara Kaufman

Anish Kapoor Stainless Steel Sculptures @ Lisson Gallery in Milan

For his first exhibition in Milan’s Lisson Gallery, Anish Kapoor presents a new series of fourteen steel sculptures, stainless and polished, twisted through an unspecified number of degrees. These small scale twists - thirty centimeters by height - are shown for the first time as an entire group, placed together in a room, interacting with one another and with the public by creating fluid reflections, which disrupt and dismantle any stable imagery: their original pre-twisted form becomes impossible to detect and the space around them turns into a surreal mixture of reality and reflection, continuously changing according to one’s vision and perspective . The artist has referred to similar sculptures as “non – objects”, losing themselves almost completely because of their unidentifiable geometry and their highly reflective material. One larger twist (100 cm) is placed outside on the terrace. Just like in some of his best –known works such as the Cloud Gate in Chicago’s and the C-Curve at the Chateau De Versailles, Anish Kapoor once again explores the idea of the curve. In this particular case his twisted forms somehow provide an optical vision of the universe by warping the light on its way through space and tilting our intuition to one side, presenting to the viewer a distorted vision of reality which is totally subjective to his point of view. The exhibition will be on view until July 22nd at Lisson Gallery Milan (via Zenale 3, Milan). text and photographs by Sarah Kaufman

Read Our Interview With Iconic Fashion Designer and Artist Christophe Coppens On Leaving The Fashion World Behind For Art →

One might expect someone with the credentials of Christophe Coppens – internationally acclaimed avant garde fashion designer, official milliner for the Belgian Royal Family, former theatre actor and director, burgeoning artist – to be radically unapproachable. Instead, Coppens shakes your hand warmly, orders iced tea at an outdoor café, talks about his love for cheap avocado toast and the 20s style bungalows in Silverlake. Perhaps this is why Coppens jumped the brutal, fast-paced, capitalist boat of the fashion industry circuit five years ago, abandoning his label to pursue art. Click here to read more.