Re-Collecting the Past with Benjamin Freedman's Positive Illusions

Image credit: Benjamin Freedman


text by Karly Quadros

Every morning, I swipe open my phone to check the weather, and there, nestled in the top right of the screen is a little box with one word: memories.

Today, it’s a point five picture of me and two friends lounging in the grass at a music festival (Eliana is a blur, Ashley is caught mid laugh.) Yesterday, it was a picture of my ex from a few years ago welding his motorcycle pipes, sparks flying around his bare torso. My “memories” are clustered, sometimes by vacation (my recent reporting trip to Argentina), sometimes by person (my old roommate Sheila dressed as a table for Halloween), sometimes by arbitrary day (a particularly good estate sale haul followed by a post-tears selfie and a thumbs up.)

Are these my memories?

Canadian artist Benjamin Freedman has been wondering that too. How does technology shape our relationship to the past? It’s something he explores in Positive Illusions, his new photo book – but wait, are they photos? Freedman’s artwork is rooted in the language of photography, but the images themselves are 100% digital, CGI renderings of a 1999 road trip his family took to a coastal cabin in Maine when he was eight. The images are warm and hazy, all telephone wires and glowing TV screens. They’re indebted as much to William Eggleston and Paul Graham as they are to any digital artist. They unfold just like a memory, snapshots of details – ants climbing on a watermelon, bubbles floating in the breeze – all from the slightly shorter, slightly canted perspective of a child taking it all in.

A snapshot of a picnic table covered in toast, eggs, lemons, and a spider.

Image credit: Benjamin Freedman

Some of his memories are quintessentially ‘90s. There’s the time they went to Blockbuster and his parents asked the video store clerk if I Know What You Did Last Summer would be too scary (it was.) There were the hours spent playing boardgames like Monopoly and the Game of Life. And then there were the more universal moments: watching telephone poles and McDonalds arches disappear through the car window on the freeway. Or there was the time he got heat stroke on the Fourth of July and watching the fireworks from the cabin window.

Notably, Freedman actually did have evidence of the trip in a form that those who lived through the era are probably most familiar with: grainy handheld video, home movies-style, that his father, a pharmacist by day, photography enthusiast by night, took. One of his early memories from the trip is trying to grab the camera out of his father’s hands and take photos of his own, one of his earliest memories of wanting to be a photographer. He waited until almost completing the project before he looked back over this footage, lovingly archived in the family home by his mother. As with all memories, there were similarities and slippages: a different kind of car, a different room layout.

“Positive Illusions has become more true than the documentation that my father made in some ways because this is how I remember the past, and how we remember the past is core to who we become,” said Freedman.

The whole project creates the sense of safety and wistfulness that only comes from a child being on the brink of adolescence. But it also paints the pictures of a culture on the brink, the last gasp of the pre-digital world.

Image credit: Benjamin Freedman

As one aesthetic influence, Freedman cites the early-CGI graphics of 90s educational tools, a design style affectionately dubbed “utopian scholastic.” Think edutainment programs like Reading Rainbow or the Eyewitness Book series, all computer-generated models of school supplies like pencils, clocks, notebooks, and rulers, erupting and spiraling around nature like animals, clouds, and oceans. 

“It was born out of optimism around the Internet, it being this utopian space where we can connect,” said Freedman.

In the ‘90s, at the end of history, there was optimism about interactivity and technological capabilities in the Information Age. Our ability to photograph and access those photographs at the swipe of a fingertip revolutionized the act of memory-making, but it also shortened our attention spans and distorted our senses of truth. With the advent of social media, an internal schism had formed – many began to watch themselves from the outside, preparing to capture the perfect photo, the perfect memory before it had even happened. This is the uncanny place that memory occupies in our digital world.

“When working on the project, I was thinking about illusions, simulation, and memories being these spaces that we haunt, that we visit, that have these moving walls. Uncanny memories are uncanny places,” said Freedman.

For Millennials in particular, nostalgia became a major cultural touchstone (“only ‘90s kids will remember”). It also became an aesthetic anchorpoint. In the early years of Instagram, filters made to look like Polaroids and faded Kodak prints proliferated. These days, hope of returning to a pre-digital innocence is long gone, but nostalgia is still more salient than ever. I find myself scrolling through the archives of my Camera Roll with regularity, literally re-collecting the images of my past (or, at least, the ones I’ve managed or chosen to capture, anyways.) Freedman, who was in a long distance relationship at the time he was making Positive Illusions, says that yearning for a time passed subconsciously suffused his work.

“I was a little bit obsessed with nostalgia, the desire to go back in time, to make different decisions, the naive desire to play with the past,” he said.

The title for Freedman’s book comes from the PhD thesis his mother was working on at the time of that fateful 1999 road trip to Maine. (“I’m sentimental,” he joked, “A mama’s boy.) Freedman recalled the sound of her acrylic nails clacking on the keyboard, her face bathed in the glow of the cabin’s personal computer while she worked, sometimes until midnight. Her work was centered around the psychological concept of “positive illusions,” a form of self-deception. People who score highly for positive illusions remember the past more fondly than when it actually occurred. It’s a distortion, yes, but also one that she found leads to more contentment.

“I think I overwrote some memories,” confessed Freedman. “In the process of making [Positive Illusions] I started to fantasize about a childhood that maybe didn’t happen to me.”

So what do we lose in our technologically guided recollections? What do we gain? Freedman said that, as large language models proliferate and AI continues to unsettle the art world, working on the project allowed him to find some kind of happy medium between tech and art. Barreling into this future, we’d all be happier believing that the past is through with us once and for all. But maybe that’s just an illusion too.

Image credit: Benjamin Freedman

Submerged Dreams: Read an Interview of Ethereal Harpist Xiaoqiao →

Photo credit: Erika Kamano

As a child, London-based artist, harpist, vocalist, and model Xiaoqiao spent summer days watching water lilies on a pond near home in Hefei, China. These early moments of  “fluid and empty” time beside water have leaked into her earthly music characterized by angelic vocals, fluid harp, and electronic effects. Her debut EP, Weltschmerz, composed of four songs— “Lethe,” “Magnolia Dream,” “Weltschmerz,” and “Fleur de Sel—” flows through lost and re-encountered memories. 

Each song, vibrating with contemporary sound effects, reimagines ancient feelings— tales from Greek mythology and Taoist parables. In “Lethe,” Xiaoqiao reflects on the Greek river of forgetfulness in the Underworld. Her second single and title track of the EP, “Weltschmerz,” comes from one of Xiaoqiao’s poems and her interest in Renaissance polyphonic choir. “Magnolia Dream,” her third song, references one of Xiaoqiao’s favorite childhood stories, Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream— a tale about a man who is not sure whether he dreams about being a butterfly or if the butterfly dreams about being him. “Fleur De Sel,” Xiaoqiao’s final piece, honors her studio cat, Fleur, whose recorded purring sounds appear on the track itself. 

Here, Xiaoqiao dives into her first glimpse of a harp in a music store, the making of her otherworldly music video, “Lethe,” and existing between London’s fashion and live art scenes. Read more.

Read An Interview Of Robert Wilson On The Occasion Of His Installation During Salone del Mobile →

Michaelangelo was working on the Pietà Rondanini the week that he died. Perhaps eclipsed by his naturalist and expressive Pietà housed at Saint Peter’s Basilica, which is considered one of the great masterworks of the Renaissance, the Pietà Rondanini may seem crude in comparison. Many scholars regard the work as unfinished. And, yes, there is an openness to it—in the roughness of the features, in the ambiguity of the figure cradling Christ, and in the specifically rendered but detached arm that stands beside the sculpture’s primary characters like a sentinel.

The statue, which confounded art critics for many years, was championed by the great modernist sculptor Henry Moore. In his collected writings and letters, Moore noted of the statue, “This is the kind of quality you get in the work of old men who are really great. They can simplify; they can leave out.” At 88-years-old when he sculpted the Pietà Rondanini, Michaelangelo’s sculpture was less of a sermon and more of a prayer: some things need no explanation.

At 83-years-old, Robert Wilson is something of an old master himself, although he has approached his entire career with the confidence of an artist who knows not to carve away more than is needed. Beginning with light and formalist performance schematics, Wilson has staged some of the most renowned avant-garde theater works of the 20th century. From collaborating with minimalist composer Philip Glass on 1976’s marathon opera Einstein on the Beach to directing theatrical masterpieces from Vagner, Brecht, and Beckett, his formalist approach provides structures for audiences to encounter extended stretches of space, time, and silence.

Born in Waco, Texas, Wilson moved to Brooklyn in 1963 to study architecture at Pratt. A day job working with comatose patients at the Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island sparked an early interest in signs and signals that transcend language, which suffuse all his performances. Wilson has collaborated on theatrical works with Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Anna Calvi, and William Burroughs.

On April 6, Wilson will kick off the Salone del Mobile.Milano with a new installation at the Castello Sforzeco titled Mother, centered around Michaelangelo’s final and unfinished Pietà. Featuring music based on a medieval prayer arranged by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, Mother will explore the enduring universality of the image and emotion of Michaelangelo’s final work. In the run up to Salone, Autre editor-in-chief Oliver Kupper spoke with Wilson about his early years in New York, his creative process, and the limitations of interpretation. Read more.

Watch Y-3's SS25 Campaign Film from Moni Haworth and Petra Collins →

Moni Haworth and Petra Collins have always focused on the liminal spaces of American suburbs: teenage dreams confined to bedrooms, silhouettes pressed against Venetian blinds, cut-and-paste condos spiraling down culs-de-sacs like soap in a drain. The two longtime collaborators have teamed up once again for the campaign of another collaboration, Yohji Yamamoto and Adidas’ Y-3 Spring/Summer 2025 collection. From the simultaneously sporty and delicate Regu Mary Jane to Petra’s doppelgängers, duality takes centerstage. Autre caught up with Moni Haworth to talk about crafting the dreamy world of Y-3’s new collection. Read more.

Holly Blakey Premieres A Wound With Teeth and Phantom at Queen Elizabeth Hall

A Lyrical Meditation on Memory, Loss, and the Mythology of the Self

Holly Blakey: A Wound with Teeth & Phantom. Photo Credit: Natasha Back

text by Lara Monro

This April, choreographer and director Holly Blakey returns to London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall with the UK premiere of A Wound With Teeth and Phantom—a poetic double bill that moves through the fragile space between remembering and forgetting, intimacy and distance, body and absence. Following their world premiere in Paris, these works arrive charged with raw intensity and emotional precision, further cementing Blakey’s status as one of the most vital voices in contemporary movement.

Blakey’s work resists easy categorization—existing in the liminal space between film and stage, commercial and avant-garde, sensual and sacred. Known for her signature blend of tactile immediacy and cinematic movement, she has choreographed for Florence and the Machine, Rosalía, and Harry Styles while creating radical live performance works at institutions like the Southbank Centre. Her choreography is a language of desire, distortion, and dissolution.

A recipient of a UK MVA Award for Best Choreography (Florence and the Machine’s Delilah) and a nominee for Best New Director, Blakey has collaborated with Gucci, Burberry, and Dior while cultivating a singular performance vocabulary. Her return to Queen Elizabeth Hall follows the five-year evolution of Cowpuncher and its sequels—culminating in a sold-out Royal Festival Hall performance with the London Contemporary Orchestra.

A Wound With Teeth

How do we reconstruct ourselves in the absence of memory? In A Wound With Teeth, Blakey unflinchingly explores forgetting—not as loss, but as a space for reinvention. Dancers navigate a world on the brink of collapse, summoning monsters, myths, and fragmented selves in place of what has been erased. Inspired by Blakey’s own experience with memory loss, the piece unfolds like a fever dream—part elegy, part invocation—hovering between the rational and the uncanny.

Phantom

If A Wound With Teeth is an act of forgetting, Phantom is a ritual of remembrance. Ten dancers move with aching precision through a liminal space of grief and endurance, their bodies caught in a choreography that feels like sacred rite. Set to an atmospheric score by Gwilym Gold and costumed by Chopova Lowena, Phantom transforms the pain of Blakey’s personal experience with miscarriage into a visceral, collective reckoning. It is not about healing, but confrontation—a raw engagement with the weight of what we carry and the echoes we cannot silence.

This double bill marks a deepening of Blakey’s artistic vision—starker, more intimate, and defiantly vulnerable. Both works exist in the space beyond language, where memory is fluid and the body archives feeling.

Part performance, part séance, A Wound With Teeth and Phantom offer no easy catharsis. Instead, they leave us suspended—in awe, in discomfort, in recognition. A necessary, unflinching experience from one of choreography’s most transgressive and transcendent voices.

Holly Blakey: A Wound with Teeth & Phantom. Photo Credit: Natasha Back

Premiering at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre from April 9–11 in London.

Making Old New: Read an Interview of Sustainable Designer Anna Molinari →

 

Photo credit: Monty Hamm

 

interview by Maisie McDermid

New York-based designer Anna Molinari, 27, is the definition of thrifty. For Molinari, plastic forks, when melted and reconfigured, double as voguish rings. Gold and silver beer tabs, when hooked together, become a one-of-a-kind bikini. She sees the potential in everything—her motto: Why not extend its life?

Three years into running her fashion business, Instinct Brand, Molinari has accomplished what many find un-accomplishable: maintaining a sustainable business model with significant growth. Instinct Brand's buying demographic has expanded from friends and family to 130,000 followers (between @annamo.1 and @instinct.brand) who come across Molinari's bubble-wrap corsets or trash bag high heels online. While her talent emerges from her iconic upcycled pieces, she has recently prioritized making custom pieces for public figures like Julia Fox and Pattie Gonia. This paradox — being a successful and sustainable business owner — won Molinari a position on this year's Forbes’ 30 under 30 list. Read more.

Noah Davis and His Painted Lines Between Reality and Fiction

Walk through Noah Davis’s scenes of timeless, raw sentiment at the Barbican

Noah Davis, 1975 (8) 2013 (c) The Estate of Noah Davis Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner

text by Maisie McDermid

Paintings make space for imagination in a way photographs almost can, but cannot. This distinction lives between a photograph Noah Davis’s mother, Faith Childs-Davis, took in 1975 of a boy jumping into a crowded pool and a nearly identical painting Davis created in 2013 of the same scene. As both a photographer and a painter, Davis’s eye wandered between the two manifestations of a story. 

Up close, one sees how the people Davis’s mother captured on camera appear above and below the water; while, in Davis’ painting, cyan blue water covers the underwater legs and fluttering arms. One captures truth, and the other captures what can be. 

Noah Davis at work, Los Angeles, 2009, Patrick O'Brien-Smith

Davis (1983 - 2015) began painting in high school from his hometown of Seattle, Washington. While later studying film and conceptual art at Cooper Union in New York (2001 - 2004), Davis began also exploring the unique position of a camera in front of a scene. In 2004, he moved to LA to pursue his own artistic education and began working at the bookshop Art Catalogues. He referenced artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Mark Rothko, Romare Bearden, and Kerry James Marshall as he developed his own sharp talent for merging history with fiction.

In 2012, he and his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis, co-founded the Underground Museum, a heart-center for the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights in Los Angeles. Although the museum — slash studio, slash residency site, slash exhibition space — is temporarily closed, its legacy continues to illuminate Davis’s commitment to his people and the responsibility he felt to capture their beauty. Davis had curated 18 exhibitions by the time of his untimely death in 2015. 

The Barbican’s Noah Davis retrospective — which includes 1975 (8), the photographed and painted boy jumping into water — encourages a close reading. Through its chronological showcasing of over fifty of Davis’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, the exhibition communicates Davis’s evolving interests in politics and current affairs, everyday life, ancient Egypt, family history, the racism of the American media, art history, and architecture. His characters, some fiction and some not, tell stories of normal days in communities, but in this normalcy, Davis discovers magic. 

“Noah Davis believed in the power of art to uplift others, and if you spend time with the often surreal and fantastical aspects of his paintings, you will see that he also believed that life — against hardship and violent histories of racism — could also be otherwise,” curator Wells Fray-Smith said. While his paintings of Black communities dancing, resting, swimming, and playing, certainly capture what is; they also capture what can be. 

Opportunities to see Davis’s work have remained rare up until now. The first and only exhibition of Davis’s work in London was in 2021, and there has never been an institutional solo show that showcases the breadth of his work. Today, his work feels all the more timely. “We are living in a world of dehumanization, crisis and upheaval in which there is a drought of love and connection. This exhibition, full of love, hope and humanity, felt like it needed to be now,” Fray-Smith said. As the Barbican emerged from a post-war context with a belief similar to Davis’s — that culture can powerfully transform life — the institution hopes to bring people together through Davis’s art and create challenging and delightful spaces for debate and reflection. 

“Davis’s approach to making exhibitions was often both deeply serious and hilariously funny, choosing combinations of artists and themes that contained lightness but asked profound questions,” Fray-Smith said. The exhibition features loans from public and private international collections, while also extending the retrospective visit to a multidisciplinary program of related events like figure and portrait drawing workshops and a speaker series from Claudia Rankine, Jason Moran, and more. Some notable pieces from the showing include: 40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2007, a painting that references the unrealized order that formerly enslaved families freed during the American Civil War would be given ‘40 acres and a mule,’ and Seventy Works, 2014, a selection of painted collages, which combine images of friends, anonymous figures cut out from magazines, newspaper clippings, and modernist sculptures.

“In Painting for My Dad, as we see a man on the precipice between this world and the next, we also notice that the rocks on which he stands are painted thinly. We can see instances of the canvas underneath washes of veiled paint. It’s the black, starry abyss beyond that has substance, texture, opacity, as if to say that this infinite beyond is the real thing,” Fray-Smith said.  

Noah Davis’s retrospective is a large-scale showing of the many convergences of fiction and reality people experience daily — where the truth lies somewhere in between. 

Noah Davis will be on display at the Barbican until May 11, 2025. Tickets are available on the Barbican website.

A New Story Every Day: Read Our Interview of l'Area's Edouard Chueke →

The Center of Le Marais’s Social Scene Is A Mom & Pop Restaurant/Bar Serving Lebanese/Brazilian Fusion & Drinks Until Late.

 
 

L’Area tonight, like every Saturday night, has spilled a crowd of well-dressed twenty-somethings out onto the streets. The rain comes down in a light haze, and smokers rotate in groups out of the doors. Some women’s fur coats are being flattened by the rain that rolls off the edges of their slanted umbrellas. The smokers hug the small, flat green face of l’Area and step away from the windows, from which you can see, behind and around them, a growing crowd inside the bar.

L’Area, during the day, is a quiet restaurant that serves Lebanese and Brazilian food on a side street between Bastille and Le Marais. The food feels home-cooked, comforting; it’s rich curries and shawarma, black rice and pita bread, citrusy ceviche, and a cold glass of white wine. You can’t go to l’Area and order just one thing—a meal at l’Area means a table covered in plates.

But at night, l’Area becomes something else—an overflowing bar where you can start or end your night, a refuge from the rain, good drinks and good music, but also one of the hearts of Paris’ youth scene. L’Area attracts artists, students, musicians, and, during fashion week, half of everyone who’s left their afterparties. It’s designed for conversations, for making connections. At l’Area, you can find a photographer for your brand, a writer for your magazine, or a date for next Saturday.

Inside the bar, the soft light feels as if it could all be from the glow of candles. The walls are mostly covered with thick white paint that thins in some important places and cracks in others. On each wall, there are mirrors, tchotchkes, and photos and paintings in thick and thin frames. The bar’s counter is long and shining and turns at one end to meet the wall.

The wall behind the bar has a splash of blue and green tiles. There are glass shelves covered in glass bottles and aluminum cans and corks and towels and art and busy hands and other things that a bar should or shouldn’t have. And the bar’s counter itself is covered in action and movement, the knocking of glass on the counter, the shifting of elbows under thick coat sleeves.

I move with the crowd as the room thins and then pushes out into the bar’s barely larger backroom, filled with a traffic jam of tables, benches, chairs, and people. You have to step over and squeeze past creaking wooden chairs with skinny iron legs. Boot heels catch on coats, elbows brush against the shoulders of drinkers, and backs press against backs. A small projector sends a faint blue glow—cut through by the shadow of the spinning ceiling fan’s blades—against a screen blocked by pots of flowers, a glittering silver lava lamp, and an enormous glass vase filled with coffee beans. Wine-soaked cushions and a floor sticky with Saint Germain lick the soles of boots and Puma runners.

The restaurant's owner, Edouard, steps into the backroom and lights his cigarette from a candle placed on a countertop. Edouard has silver hair and skin that looks like it has spent most of its life smiling. He wears a sweater knit tight like l’Area’s weave of tables and chairs. It is my first time back in two years; Edouard remembers my name.

There is no l’Area without Edouard. You would be hard-pressed to find a kinder man in Paris, and if you did, he would be nowhere near as cool. Edouard creates the culture of l’Area. When he can find a break between pouring drinks and hugging friends, he will pull you aside to connect you with someone he wants you to know. And all night, until the bar closes, through every backhanded glass, late reservation, and declined card, he keeps smiling.

I caught up with Edouard the next day. I sat at the counter as he paced back and forth behind the bar. I had to follow him with my phone so the recording would stay clear. Read more.

Doc Fortnight 2025: Breaking Reality, One Frame at a Time

At MoMA, Memory and Desire Collide in a Cinematic Exploration of the Real and the Imagined.

 

Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday. 2025. USA. Directed by Isaiah Davis. Courtesy the filmmaker

 

text by Eva Megannety

Doc Fortnight isn’t just an exhibition—it’s a provocation. MoMA’s annual nonfiction showcase has long been a space where documentary defies its own rules, and 2025 is no exception. This year’s lineup fractures, distorts, and reimagines the boundaries of nonfiction, blending memory, identity, desire, and upheaval into something more elusive—more intimate—more true. From legendary filmmakers like Errol Morris and Stanley Nelson to bold newcomers rewriting the language of documentary, these films dissolve fact and fiction, turning the camera into an accomplice, an intruder, an unreliable narrator. Among the exhibition’s most daring offerings is Doc Fortnight Shorts 4: Memory and Desire, a selection of films that probe the slipperiness of recollection and longing, proving once again that at Doc Fortnight, truth is never simple.

Prelude (2025, USA, dir. Jen DeNike)

Memory is a fragile thing, a collage of images and emotions that flicker and fade—except when celluloid steps in to hold it still. Prelude is a quiet, aching elegy where letters, family photographs, and the misty Scottish countryside form a bridge between past and present. DeNike crafts a dreamscape of longing as a daughter tries to reconcile her mother’s slipping mind with the secret history of a love that once burned bright. It’s an act of cinematic grace, a requiem for the things that time refuses to keep.

Blue (2024, Romania/Portugal/Hungary/Belgium, dir. Ana Vîjdea)

Some families suffocate with love. Some let it spill out in bursts of anxiety and control. In Blue, Ana Vîjdea delivers an unflinching portrait of Rodica, a Romanian mother scraping by in Belgium, desperate to keep her children close. Shot in tightly framed interiors that feel like walls closing in, the film pulses with the kind of intimacy that verges on claustrophobia. Love here is not soft; it’s a grip that doesn’t loosen, an embrace that lingers just a little too long. Vîjdea, ever the documentarian of human fragility, finds the tension between devotion and possession, between wanting to hold on and knowing you must let go.

Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday (2025, USA, dir. Isaiah Davis)

Isaiah Davis has never been one to shy away from the body—its textures, its violence, its aesthetic possibilities. His latest work, Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday, is less a film than a living, breathing installation, a visceral meditation on Black masculinity that pulls from sculpture, music, and the language of fetish. Leather, metal, horrorcore, and the yearning croon of Boyz II Men collide in this dissection of identity, power, and nostalgia. It’s raw, provocative, and formally daring—a theatrical reworking of Davis’ own past installations that reminds us how history, both personal and cultural, is always being remade.

Freak (2024, USA, dir. Claire Barnett)

Some films look like they shouldn’t exist—like you’ve stumbled onto something you were never meant to see. Freak feels that illicit. Shot in jittery, voyeuristic camcorder footage that trembles with tension, Barnett’s film pulls us into the obsessive push-and-pull of young love, where devotion looks an awful lot like self-destruction. It’s raw, nervy, and unsettling, stripping intimacy down to something almost holy—if holiness could be found in jealousy, insecurity, and a love so intense it borders on madness.

School of the Dead (2025, USA, dir. Hannah Gross)

“We need a dead(wo)man to begin.” Helene Cixous’ words haunt School of the Dead, Hannah Gross’ spectral, elliptical debut. A film about absence, inheritance, and the ghosts that shape us, it plays like a séance conducted through cinema—casting Sierra Pettengill as both subject and specter, searching for something in the vast, ancient landscapes of Alberta. History, personal and prehistoric, folds in on itself: the voices of lost mothers, forgotten texts, and the echoes of Clarice Lispector all bleed into this hypnotic, shape-shifting hybrid. Gross makes grief tangible, a thing you can almost reach out and touch before it vanishes into the frame.

If Doc Fortnight 2025 proves anything, it’s that nonfiction cinema is no longer bound by objectivity—or even reality. The festival’s most striking moments weren’t just about documenting the world as it is, but about reshaping it through memory, desire, and the slippery nature of truth. Films like Prelude and School of the Dead blurred the line between personal history and poetic reconstruction, while Freak and Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday pushed intimacy and identity to their rawest extremes.

The hybrid and avant-garde works showcased here reject the notion that documentary must simply “capture.” Instead, they challenge—contorting time, bending form, and questioning whose stories get told and how. This isn’t just a shift in style; it’s a radical redefinition of storytelling itself, one where fiction and nonfiction are no longer opposing forces but inseparable collaborators.

Leaving the exhibition, I found myself reconsidering what it means to document something. Is truth what we see, what we remember, or what we choose to believe? Doc Fortnight 2025 suggests it might be all of the above, and that’s precisely what makes this era of nonfiction cinema so thrilling.

A Meier St/ Installation During Frieze Los Angeles 2025

During Frieze Los Angeles 2025, Meier St/, located in one of 52 historic Gregory Ain homes in the Mar Vista Tract built in 1948, showcased a unique group installation by artists Mike Nesbit, Tofer Chin, Mieko Akutsu, Thomas Linder, and Daniel Derro Regen. This house, which is being re-imagined as a dynamic hub for community and creativity, became a platform for unique works that coalesced around the ethos of the home as a work in progress and Los Angeles as a constantly expanding sprawl of expansion. Tofer Chin’s charred black picket fence was a stark reminder of our dark ecological ambitions—it was especially prescient just after two of the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles history. He said, “[The] work challenges notions of security, exclusion, and resilience in the face of climate change.” Photographs by Taiyo Watanabe

The Los Angeles Confidential: Read Our Interview of Devin Troy Strother →

We caught up with Devin Troy Strother on a sunny afternoon right after a bustling LA art week, where his latest exhibition opening had fans overflowing into the street. We chat a few moments before the debut of his first-ever digital commission, which marks the relaunch of Different Leaf, the trailblazing magazine founded by Michael Kuseck, broadening its horizons from cannabis to a new cultural platform encompassing art, music, and fashion.

Strother reaches an even broader, more diverse audience through Coloured Publishing, his independent press that rolls out artist zines, books, and editions that pop up everywhere, from the Printed Matter Art Book Fair to Undefeated. Strother’s publishing work connects him to a lineage of artists who have explored the book as an art form, including Henri Matisse, whose iconic cut-outs began for his own illustrated book, and Ed Ruscha, whose accordion-like photobook Twentysix Gasoline Stations stretched across galleries at MoMA and LACMA during his recent major retrospective. Or Kandis Williams, whose publishing and educational platform, Cassandra Press, took over an entire floor of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. These artists have utilized the medium to extend their visual narratives, blending text and image in innovative ways that challenge and enrich the viewer’s experience—and make their work more accessible. 

In a way, Coloured Publishing doesn’t just broaden his studio’s creative horizons; it lets him and other artists dive deep into more personal, experimental print work. At the center of his latest exhibition, which was on view at Good Mother Gallery, sits a bright green newsstand bursting with zines and prints, surrounded by Strother’s new paintings—a testament to his commitment to making art communal and accessible.

The return of Different Leaf magazine, with its expanded focus on cannabis, art, music, and fashion, embodies a similar spirit. By commissioning Strother for its relaunch, the magazine not only underscores its commitment to artistic exploration but also celebrates the enduring significance and adaptability of boundary-blurring print projects in the digital era, promoting creativity over commerciality amidst a shifting media landscape.

In our discussion, Strother shares insights into his latest artistic and publishing endeavors, the newly reimagined Different Leaf, and how these efforts interweave to foster a community. Read more.

Suburban Atmospherics: Read Our Interview of Olivia Erlanger →

 

Olivia Erlanger
Prime Meridien, 2024
Aquaresin, aluminum, LEDs, drivers, cord
59 1/2 x 71 x 36 inches
(151.1 x 180.3 x 91.4 cm)
Image Courtesy of Soft Opening, London. Photo: Daniel Terna

 

Multimedia artist and filmmaker Olivia Erlanger is a suburbanist in multiple senses of the word: her oeuvre, a combination of sculpture, scale miniatures and shadow boxes, furnishings, short films, performance, as well as vernacular and technical histories of the home, takes its inspiration from American suburban geographies and the domestic interior that form its primary mise en scène. But Erlanger’s work also explores the world of margins, thresholds, and coulisse implicit in the etymology of the sub-urb—a space that, by definition, is beneath or outside of a physical and discursive center. Hers is a work that often eschews the stabilizing components of characterization, materiality, and setting for what, absent a sturdier, more easily translatable, descriptor, might be called a suburban atmospheric.

But what precisely is a suburban atmospheric? Beyond its seeming interest in combining the milieu of the suburb with a study of speculative environments, the term remains labile and fugitive, as atmosphere tends to be. The topic of suburbanism is itself obscured in a certain kind of epistemic veil, enforced by an enduring urban-centric ambivalence toward its historical or cultural import that says indignantly, “I’d prefer not to.” The suburb has long been the subaltern to its urban hegemon. Equally, the notion of an atmosphere is resistant to any center. It is neither material/spatial nor strictly rhetorical or conceptual, but more like an environmental “mood” accompanying these objects or categories. Peter Sloterdijk, the great thinker of atmosphere, describes it as an affective envelope that shelters self, other and world in various existential interiors. Its ur-space is the home, whether hut or tract house, though the feeling of at-homeness is as much an architecture of familiarity as it is materiality. Atmosphere, however, will always retain some essential mystery or exoticism. Appearing in disguise under designations like “the sensorium,” “the spectral,” “interiority,” “microclimate,” and “the nobject,” it haunts the world of people and objects from its dark purlieus, much like the suburb haunts the city and thrives in the nooks and verges.

Erlanger’s works hover in this same elusive topology with its outré images of possessed housewares, adolescent bedrooms in miniature, deteriorating snow globes, manic realty agents, piscine nymphets, and trompe l’œil terraria. Evoking the sort of Gothic unheimlich that emanates from a landscape of empty cul-de-sacs, dead shopping malls, and vacant ranch ramblers, they play in the interstices of the quotidian and the storybook. The result is a spiritist practice that is simultaneously an “anthropology of the near,” in the words of Marc Augé, and a “space of elsewhere,” in those of Gaston Bachelard. And, perhaps, most of all, Erlanger’s works echo Longfellow’s observation in “Haunted Houses” (1858) that “All houses…/Are haunted houses/…The spirit-world around this world of sense/Floats like an atmosphere…”

On the occasion of Erlanger’s new exhibit, Spinoff, at Luhring Augustine Tribeca, the artist spoke on a variety of topics, including the mysteries of the suburb, the pleasures of the miniature, Last Year at Marienbad and the haunted house genre, Nabokov and the “final girl.” Read more.

A Steamy Night of Readings with Camille Sojit Pejcha and Substack

Last Tuesday, New York’s literary world descended on a Wall Street bath house for a midnight reading on desire.

text by Karly Quadros

There’s rarely a good reason for any self-respecting writer to be in the Financial District at 10:30 pm on a Tuesday, but here I am at a Russian bath house, standing behind a girl complaining loudly on the phone about how she’s definitely over her situationship this time. It’s a fitting start to the real reason that I’m here: a late-night reading on the topic of desire from some of New York’s seamiest and funniest writers, hosted by writer Camille Sojit Pejcha and Substack.

At the tail end of my first frigid New York City winter, I’m ready for a schvitz and a soak in my red Coca-Cola vintage one piece. It was an apt fashion choice: the decor had a distinctly 80s flair, all blue tiles and decals of mermaids and tropical fish. Amidst a modern sauna renaissance, the focus is less wellness and more third space. Clusters of attendees bounce on pruny toes between the sauna, bar, and a large central pool where the readings take place. The hot tub is packed to the brim while the rest of us paddle placidly in the pool or perch on its edge sipping orange juice and house-made vodkas infused with horseradish, lemon, black currant, and raspberry.

Bath houses have been around since as long as humans have lived together. The sauna’s simple, woody engineering helped people escape brutal Norse winters. Russian and Eastern European immigrant communities carved out their own little piece of New York City with homosocial bath houses where potbellied men socialized and sweated it out together in between cold plunges and traditional beatings with prickly oak branches. In the 20th century, bath houses became iconic for their status as gay cruising grounds. But, as Sojit Pejcha reminds me, before all of that, in ancient Roman times, public baths were community spaces, closer to libraries than bedrooms. With this reading, organized in collaboration with Substack’s Matt Starr and Sophia Efthimiatou, she was blending the two.

Featuring performances from Sojit Pejcha, Brontez Purnell, Cat Cohen, Mary H.K. Choi, Jaboukie, J Wortham, Liara Roux, Old Jewish Men, and Sherry Ning, the readings are occasionally erotic, often funny, always revealing. They detailed desires that were passing or all encompassing. The desires were sometimes existential (wanting to be beautiful), sometimes specific (wanting to be let into the Delta Sky Club.) Like an extension of a dream where you have to give a speech only to realize that you’re not wearing any pants, many of the writers, performing in swimsuits, took on the things they’re a little embarrassed to want in the first place. 

Sojit Pejcha riffed on the misbegotten workplace dalliances of her early twenties. Cat Cohen tore through several poems on everything from $400 Zoom psychics to wanting to be so tiny and thin she could ice skate on the crust of crème brûlée. Others wrote about wanting things they feel they should probably be a little more ashamed of but aren’t, like Brontez Purnell taking on relapses and near-death experiences. Mary H.K. Choi channeled her irrepressible lust for affordable health care through Luigi Mangione’s delicately shackled ankles. And then there was Jaboukie who fantasized about a kinky threeway with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and his remote control buttplug-wielding wife.

Maybe it’s the humidity or the smell of smoked herring that’s gone to my head, but the night is shaping up to be, if not exactly sexy, then much more revealing. With authors and audience alike in nothing but their skivvies, there’s nowhere to hide. Considering the avalanche of hand-wringing thinkpieces about how Gen Z is too prudish, I think to myself that those authors clearly didn’t show up here.

Sojit Pejcha, whose newsletter Pleasure-Seeking focuses on desire and sexuality with a gonzo, anthropological aplomb, agrees. She points to a collective burnout in the face of the overzealous sex positivity of the 2010s, in which dating apps gave rise to a particular kind of casual sex and corny brands Urban Outfitters were hawking vibrators as a quick path to empowerment. Ultimately, however, that promised sexual empowerment was just another way for brands to leverage human desires to sell products. 

“I think it’s worth interrogating what shapes our desires, what social conditions we’re responding to and why we think things are subversive,” said Sojit Pejcha. “Brands and dating apps marketed sex as a source of liberation for women–but failed to close the orgasm gap. Between this and the conservative cultural turn, there was a sense that sex positivity wasn’t all it cracked up to be, and sex negativity almost seemed subversive.”

With this event and her newsletter, she’s refocusing the conversation on pleasures and vulnerabilities both transgressive and ordinary. “So much of the conversation is about how atomized we are, how isolated and sexless we are. I think part of that is true, but at a certain point, complaining about it online is not helpful,” she said. “My role is to seek out sexual culture where it exists in the real world.”

If the event’s near instant ticket sell out and 300 person waitlist is any indicator, the appetite for spaces that are sultry and silly isn’t just existent – it’s ravenous. Spilling out into the night, still March brisk but no longer wind whipped January, I can feel the thaw coming.

Images courtesy of Anna Maria Lopez

Nam June Paik: Rear Window Offers a Posthumous Glimpse into the Mind of a Master

Micki Meng’s gallery viewing encourages viewers to look above, behind, and below Nam June Paik’s allegorical work

Photo credit: Graham Holoch

text by Maisie McDermid

Friends Indeed, a storefront gallery between San Francisco's Chinatown and Financial District, is housing a Nam June Paik dollhouse. Tangled cords drape from the house's backside, with ten miniature, '90s TV sets placed into its windows. The pixelated footage loops four scenes from Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window, teasing visitors into thinking they're glimpsing into private moments inside the plaster-painted dollhouse. 

The sculpture, like the film, is about a stranger peering into private spaces, says curator John Morace. "It becomes a kind of hall of mirrors." 

Paik, widely known as the founder of video art, grew up in Seoul, Korea. From a young age, he studied piano and composition, later moving to Japan where he studied aesthetics at the University of Tokyo with a focus on composer Arnold Schoenberg. After further music history studies at Munich University and a brief return to Tokyo – where he bought his first Sony Portapak and joined the avant-garde art movement, Fluxus – Paik emigrated to the United States where he lived in New York City and eventually died in Miami, Florida in 2006. Although most of his art manifests in digital formats – video sculptures, performances, installations, and television productions – his paintings and drawings also reveal his interests in how humans connect.

Rear Window (Hitchcock Dollhouse) is one among three other Paik pieces – Untitled (small painting with film strip jewelry), Untitled (Toy Robots), and Untitled (Allen Ginsberg) – being showcased at Friends Indeed. Visitors walk through the space opening closet doors and peeking behind black curtains at either one of Paik’s detailed paintings or a laser-generated, neon photograph. The works vary in their approaches to perception and play. All – including the six others available for viewing upon request – are on consignment from the owners and available for sale to other collectors or institutions.

In its voyeuristic slant, Rear Window (Hitchcock Dollhouse) combines questions both Hitchcock and Paik ask of viewers who stare into the “windows” of either a screen or a house. "Rear Window itself is a very interesting film because it is about viewing and viewership – who's viewing whom, and under what circumstances. This is one of the themes that Paik has always worked with – how we communicate and how information is passed between people," said Morace. 

Photo Credit: Graham Holoch

Between Alan Ginsberg's vibrating, laser-generated photograph and the toy robots splattered onto a doodled canvas, Paik made art silly, professionally. He celebrated tasteful fun. 

"What a subtle little thing for him to show us," Morace said, reacting to some inch-sized black brushstrokes at the bottom of Untitled (small painting with film strip jewelry). "You know, he's communicating in his Fluxus way by mixing media that was around him. Paint, jewelry, life, and art are all together in this one tiny piece. Look at those little black birds on the bottom, they are a motif he's used in many works – like flying TVs – and it links beautifully to his entire body of work." 

In other public displays of Rear Window (Hitchcock Dollhouse), curators have concealed the many wires, dials, and plugs spilling from the house. "It's like an octopus of cables with all sorts of different colors and widths, and you're like, oh my god," Morace joked. Paik envisioned the lives of his sculptures beyond their years. "He had this theory that if the technology improved, and his piece was going to be up again, you could move the technology forward. So if it went from cathode ray tubes to LCD screens, you could update it as long as it didn't affect the work's physical manifestation." But Morace and co-curator Mickie Meng, unlike other curators who may have likened the “guts” to a distraction, believe the “guts” are the piece’s purpose. Viewers, therefore, peek into the principal theme of peeking. 

The combination of both video and traditional fine art in Nam June Paik: Rear Window’s collection is what makes the showing of these four works – which have never been displayed together – particularly interesting. Not all of Paik's work buzzes, flashes, and sparks. Some of his most sincere art exists on paper. After suffering from a stroke in 1996, he spent much of his remaining decade in a wheelchair. 

"His dealer at the time, Holly Solomon, visited him in the hospital and brought him paper, crayons, and these oil stick colors to give him something to amuse himself. She was doing it to say, ‘Hey, you are still you, and you can go on,’" said Morace. His drawings draw-up dimensions through his use of layering and pressure shading techniques. Untitled (a small painting with film strip jewelry) features a bedazzled film strip with empty photo slots. Paik used the spaces to fill in his own storyboard: a blank face in one, a smiling face in two, a mysterious face in three, and two faces in the fourth above the word "kiss." Even on canvas, Paik could tell a moving story.

"I hope the work nudges people to think about art in a broader way than is typical of many people today when they're really focused on painting. I encourage people to say, 'Wow, I can get some pleasure, enjoyment, and some satisfaction from seeing this video, these sculptural objects, and these weird hybrid paintings with toys stuck on them,’" said Morace.

Nam June Paik: Rear Window will be on display at Friends Indeed from March 13, 2025 to May 02, 2025.

Borderlands: Read an Interview of Artist Hugo Crosthwaite on the Occasion of His Solo Presentation @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Hugo Crosthwaite, La Linea (The Line), 2024, Acrylic and color pencil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

Ex-votos are a form of Mexican folk painting, part prayer, part diary, they are a dedication to the saints and a plea for guidance during difficult times. They’re sometimes crude, sometimes polished, sometimes funny, sometimes heartwrenching. Te pido perdon virgencita pues jugue con fuego (I ask you to forgive me, Virgin, because I played with fire) reads one on a painting of a woman with red skin and devil horns beckoning a man in bed while the Virgen de Guadalupe looks on. Another celebrates two luchadors who met in the ring and found love. Another thanks the Santo Niño de Atocha for surviving a late night encounter with two extraterrestrials.


Inspired by his own close encounter with death, Tijuana and San Diego-based artist Hugo Crosthwaite decided to take on the tradition of ex-votos with a new series of large-scale paintings. The show, Ex-voto, is a series of overlapping snapshots of the city of Tijuana, dense narratives of daily life at the border. Just as in the ex-votos, the physical and spiritual world mingle in scenes of border crossings, street vendors, and women at rest. The Tijuana of Crosthwaite’s paintings is not quite the real one and not quite the sin city of the American imagination. Instead, it is multilayered, a place that we tell stories about and are always returning to across the border fence. Read more.

Balenciaga's Beautiful Dark Twisted Maze For Winter 2025

 
 

Balenciaga’s Winter 25 collection redefines the standard, transforming familiar garments through an intricate exploration of dress codes and proportions. Presented in a backstage maze, the show itself mirrors the creative process—lines blurred, structures inverted, and everyone in the front row.

The collection dissects traditional businesswear, reshaping archetypes with precision. Four standard black suits, identical in cut but distinct in attitude, embody duality, while a deconstructed pinstripe suit and a maxi-skirt pairing challenge sartorial conventions. Outerwear follows suit: streamlined coats, maxi trenches, and a back-to-front quarter-zip nod to historical couture while integrating modern sensibilities. A sheepskin parka references Balenciaga’s 1951 Semi-Fitted line, and a voluminous hoodie echoes the grandeur of the house’s 1967 wedding dress.

Structural ingenuity extends to daywear, where push-up corsetry and anatomical tailoring reimagine standard pieces. Sweater dresses cinched with oversized safety pins, “Luxury” hoodies lined with superfine cashmere, and crushed Dyneema® shoppers demonstrate the brand’s commitment to craftsmanship and innovation.

Technical sportswear under the Balenciaga I PUMA collaboration evokes minimal yet refined streetwear. Swimdresses in water-sport spandex contrast with oversized opera coats in faux fur and nylon puffer. Accessories blend function with subversion—convertible Business Bags, hands-free pouches, and distorted formal footwear subvert expectations. Horoscope necklaces, faceless Geneva watches, and modular ski-goggle-inspired eyewear reinforce the house’s penchant for playful irreverence.

Balenciaga’s Winter 25 is a rigorous exercise in deconstruction and refinement, twisting the familiar into something unexpected while remaining true to its essence. A study of standards—redefined.



Color Vision: Read Our Interview of Master Printers Guy Stricherz & Irene Malli →

William Eggleston 
Greenwood, Mississippi (red ceiling), 1973

Phillips is set to present Color Vision: Master Prints from Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, a landmark series of auctions celebrating the unparalleled artistry of the dye transfer process. The first auction, happening on March 18, 2025, will feature the master prints of William Eggleston, including his Los Alamos portfolio and the highly sought-after "Magnificent Seven" large-format dye transfer prints. These works, crafted by Stricherz and Malli at Color Vision Imaging Laboratory, represent the pinnacle of color photography, offering collectors a rare opportunity to acquire the definitive prints from one of the most influential printers of the past four decades. I sat down with Guy and Irene to discuss the rare and fleeting magic of the dye transfer process in anticipation of next Tuesday’s auction at Phillips. Read more.

Georgia Gardner Gray's Chrysalis Reminds Us That Transformation Demands Confrontation

 

Georgia Gardner Gray
Walk-In, 2025
Oil on canvas
75 x 63 inches (190.5 x 160 cm)

 

Georgia Gardner Gray’s exhibition CHRYSALIS, currently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, marks a defining moment in her career as her first large-scale solo presentation in the United States. Expansive in both scope and ambition, the exhibition encompasses new paintings, sculptures, and an original theatrical production, all bound by an intricate exploration of transformation, ritual, and cyclical processes.

At the heart of CHRYSALIS lies the chrysalis itself—a potent emblem of metamorphosis and renewal. Gray draws inspiration from Salvador Dalí’s 1958 pharmaceutical pavilion, a surreal structure that fused art and alchemical symbolism, to probe the nature of ritualistic reenactment, the repetition of history, and the evolving language of artistic expression. Her work reframes transformation not as a singular event but as an ongoing process shaped by cultural, historical, and personal forces.

Gray’s paintings interrogate the paradox of historical reenactment, specifically through the lens of Civil War pageantry. In Belles (2025), figures adorned in antebellum costumes evoke a distorted vision of Scarlett O’Hara, where the romanticization of the past collides with its inescapable weight. Through this juxtaposition, Gray exposes the absurdity of attempting to relive or aestheticize historical trauma, inviting viewers to confront the cyclical nature of cultural mythmaking and the complexities of inherited identity.

The exhibition also engages with contemporary notions of femininity and self-construction. Gray’s depictions of women in transitional spaces—trying on clothes, gazing from windows—resist passive voyeurism. Instead, these figures assert their agency, shaping their own narratives within the liminal spaces of modern life. Here, transformation is not merely biological or historical but psychological and performative, implicating the viewer in the act of perception.

Further deepening the exhibition’s conceptual rigor, Gray presents CHRYSALIS as a theatrical production. Performed by Los Angeles-based actors, the play unfolds as a meditation on modernity’s contradictions, drawing upon archetypal characters and fragmented narratives to interrogate the tension between progress and nostalgia, innovation and repetition.

Through CHRYSALIS, Georgia Gardner Gray’s deft synthesis of painting, sculpture, and performance constructs a multilayered inquiry into the nature of change—whether historical, social, or personal. The exhibition is a powerful reminder that transformation is not an endpoint but an enduring process, one that demands both confrontation and reinvention.


Performance documentation of CHRYSALIS by Georgia Gardner Gray. Regen Projects, Los Angeles. March 1, 2025
Photo: Evan Bedford

Energy From the Underground: Read Our Interview of grounds Designer Mikio Sakabe Following His AW25 Presentation @ PFW →

Mikio Sakabe is a designer, a teacher, and an experimenter. He runs two labels, MIKIOSAKABE and the footwear brand grounds, creating style that comes to life from Tokyo to the world. He is also a mentor for young Japanese designers, founding MeSchool, a fashion school that provides the same education opportunities in Japan that have been historically limited to Europe.

In a cold, concrete garage, buried behind metal fences and dusty staircases dimly lit by glowing exit signs, a crowd gathered on thin benches. Gold and silver emergency blankets distributed upon entry caught and refracted the light from camera flashes and the fluorescent whites that beamed from above. With the shrieks of a piano and the hums of a deep bass, the grounds Fall/Winter 25-26 show began.

grounds is known for its avant-garde and vibrant designs. Shoe’s understated uppers burst into large, cloud-like soles — a rejection of expectations and mass-market footwear. Sakabe has said he wants to “defy gravity.” With grounds, this has two meanings: the inflated, bubbling soles let the wearer float above roads and floors, but in fashion, gravity is not only physical, gravity is the pull of trends, the temptation to do what’s expected. Sakabe resists this, breaking new ground.

Sakabe continues his experimentation with his latest collection by taking the brand in a new direction. Previously, grounds could be best described as playful, fantastical. But in that sub-level garage the collection was industrial, festering, wonderfully unconventional, and pushing the limits of footwear. Styled by Betsy Johnson, the models began to march down the runway. The shoes where violently oversized, rubber layered on rubber, shoe melting with shoe, the bulbous clouds signature to Ground’s designs erupted out from under thin socks. Cables hung off from shoes like bungie cords wrapped around luggage. Leg warmers scrunched onto sneakers, and padded high socks wrapped around legs like medieval armor. There where large rubber soles like the treads on a tank, and some toe boxes curled upwards like a jester's boots.

The clothes were just as unconventional. Flowing wide legs spilled onto shoes, shoulder pads jutted dramatically from coats. Leather gloves, stacked belts, and oversized sunglasses adorned models with matted hair. Everything was unusual, dark — a collision of industrial and organic — yet, true to Sakabe’s touch, remarkably fun.

I caught up with Sakabe after the show for an interview. Read more.

Emma Webster "That Thought Might Think" At Petzel Gallery In New York

Emma Webster, The Material World, 2025. Oil on canvas102 x 190 x 2 in259.1 x 482.6 x 5.1 cm. Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel,New York

Emma Webster's inaugural solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery, "That Thought Might Think," is a mesmerizing journey into expansive, otherworldly landscapes that challenge our perception of reality. On view from March 7 through April 12, 2025, this exhibition showcases Webster's largest works to date, offering viewers an immersive experience. Central to the exhibition are two monumental paintings: "The Material World" and "Era of Eternity." "The Material World" transports viewers to a primordial realm, where lush foliage thrives under an obscured sun, evoking a sense of ancient majesty. In contrast, "Era of Eternity" captures a celestial spectacle—a spiraling sunburst accompanied by a flock of geese soaring over a canyon—eliciting feelings of awe and contemplation. Webster masterfully manipulates light and atmosphere, leaving us pondering whether we are witnessing the dawn of creation or the quietude of an impending dusk.

What sets Webster's work apart is her innovative fusion of traditional painting techniques with modern technology. By integrating virtual reality, hand-drawn sketches, and scans of handcrafted sculptures, she constructs digital dioramas that serve as the foundation for her paintings. This approach not only pays homage to historical artistic tools like the camera obscura but also propels the genre of still life into the contemporary digital age. The resulting landscapes are immersive and uncanny, blurring the lines between the tangible and the virtual, and prompting reflection on our relationship with nature in the Anthropocene era.

The timing of these works is particularly poignant. Created amidst the Los Angeles fires, Webster's paintings resonate with the urgency of ecological crises. She reflects, "It was surreal to make this work while just outside the studio; the orange, smoky sky was raining ash from the fires." Yet, through her art, she celebrates the resilience and complexity of natural systems, inviting viewers to engage with environments that are both familiar and fantastical. "That Thought Might Think" is not just an exhibition; it's an invitation to explore the delicate interplay between reality and artifice, nature and technology. Emma Webster's visionary landscapes beckon us to reconsider our place within the natural world and the digital constructs we inhabit.

Emma Webster, Era of Eternity , 2025 Oil on canvas 108 x 180 x 2 in 274.3 x 457.2 x 5.1 cm. Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York