Activating The Vehicle of Ascension: An Interview of Filmmaker Floria Sigismondi On Working With Rihanna and David Bowie →

Floria Sigismondi’s work, like her music videos for Marilyn Manson, David Bowie or Leonard Cohen, is a perfect amalgamation of her unique upbringing. Spending her early years in the coastal town of Pescara, Italy and her formative years in the rough steel manufacturing town of Hamilton, Ontario – with opera singers for parents – Sigismondi has developed a unique aesthetic that blends classicalism with a certain darkness that harkens 1970s Giallo films and the nightmarish tableau vivants of Joel Peter Witkin. As a music video director, Sigismondi brings a distinctive world to life with an unsettling and jarring pastiche of imagery that flickers as if each scene was shot with a camera perched on the wing of a hummingbird. Lately, though, her work has taken a turn for the meditative and ethereal, like her most recent music video for Rihanna’s track Sledgehammer – made for the newest Star Trek film. Click here to read more. 

Praying Mantis Disco Queen: Read Our Interview of Artist Joyce Pensato →

Walking into Joyce Pensato's vast studio in Bushwick I’m first greeted by Elizabeth Ferry, an artist and Pensato's studio assistant, as well as Charlie, an eerie looking, sweet dog whose right eye is blind by cataracts. Pensato herself is short, but tall in personality. Her shoes, feel more stylish, remnants perhaps of days in Paris, but still they’re perfectly covered in her signature paint drippings. As we sit, Ferry is busily packing up the space because they leave the next day for the closing of Pensato’s recent show, “The Fizz,” which as has been on display at Grice Bench Gallery in Los Angeles. After this, they come back briefly to prepare and work for upcoming exhibitions in Chicago, and then Austria. Click here to read more. 

Please Have Enough Acid In the Dish! Group Show Organized by Vinny Dotolo @ M+B Gallery in Los Angeles

M+B gallery presents Please Have Enough Acid In The Dish!, a group exhibition organized by James Beard Award winning chef Vinny Dotolo (of Animal and Jon & Vinny's fame). The exhibition explores the intersections between food, daily life and art in Los Angeles and features food-influenced paintings, drawings, sculptures and videos by thirty-seven Los Angeles-based artists, including many new works made for the exhibition. Please Have Enough Acid In the Dish! will be on view until September 2, 2016 at M+B Gallery in Los Angeles.  photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Marco Barrera, Agathe Snow and George Herms "Eternal" @ Moran Bondaroff Gallery in Los Angeles

Moran Bondaroff presents Eternal, a three-person exhibition with new work by Marco Barrera and Agathe Snow, and historical pieces by George Herms, selected by Barrera and Snow. Eternal will be on view until August 27, 2016 at Moran Bondaroff gallery in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Katharina Grosse "Rockaway!" Presented by MoMA PS1 at the Gateway National Recreation Area at Fort Tilden, New York

MoMA PS1 presents Rockaway!, a special outdoor exhibit by artist Katharina Grosse, acclaimed for exploring the medium of painting in regards to its locations, conditions and possibilities. Through this temporary public art installation, Grosse turns Ft. Tilden's decaying aquatics building into a sublimely exhilarating exterior painting with her unique spray painting technique. In her practice, Grosse seeks to extend the scope of her paintings beyond the traditional borders of a canvas. She uses a technique in which brightly colored paint is sprayed directly onto site-specific structures. In doing so, she incorporates both the architectural features of the space, and materials located in its immediate vicinity, such as sand, trees, sea grass and pavement. These sprawling and sculptural landscapes evoke the physicality of action painting and earthworks through their gestures and monumentality. Grosse’s work seamlessly combines the subtle nuances of light and shadow, characteristic of traditional landscape painting, with the weight and spectacle of large scale sculpture. In this exhibition, Grosse’s singular approach highlights the possibilities of painting as a medium, and encapsulates the stark beauty of the natural and manmade structures in which this installation is contextualized. Rockaway! will be on view at the Gateway National Recreation Area at Fort Tilden, New York until November 30, 2016. photographs by Pablo Enriquez