Film still, Santa Claus vs. the Devil, 1959
Hell is other people's playlists. Some ambient rarities. Shoegaze gems. Sound effects. A prick followed by numbness followed by blackness followed by infiniteness.
Brooke Wise's Aloha From Hell Is An Apt Short Film Festival To Conclude A Nightmarishly Long Year
text by Avery Wheless
As we wrap a year of the unpredictable and frightening, it’s clear that comedy serves as a good access point to observe the macabre in life. This is no new approach for curator Brooke Wise, who is notorious for utilizing humor while approaching complicated topics. Wise reasons, “You can get so much across with humor, especially with so much darkness happening at the moment, it’s the best tool we have.”
Luckily, Wise has blessed us once again with her fourth round of Aloha From Hell, a film festival calling together creatives of all kinds with proceeds benefiting Planned Parenthood LA in partnership with Depop.
Aloha from Hell is typically a Halloween festival, but in a year where schedule is neither here nor there, Wise delivers her satirical and spooky cinematic experience right in time for the holidays.
Unlike most film festivals, submissions are open to all creatives, musicians, artists, comedians, and more. The resulting selection features traditional filmmaking, experimental video, narrative and performance art— proving you don’t need to be an actual filmmaker to make a video.
This year features creatives such as Chloe Wise, Benny Drama, Mia Kerin, Kate Jean Hollowell, Mark Indelicato, Miles McMillan, Dinah Rankin, Ew Yuk! And musical guests, Okay Kaya and Kacy Hill. The festival’s common thread of uncanny and outlandish opens conversations through a visually experimental context, while addressing raw and diverse topics in regards to gender and sexuality.
Known for combining her curatorial work with raising funds for charitable organizations, Wise chose Planned Parenthood specifically for Aloha from Hell, as an open expression of gender and sexuality is rooted at the core of many of the showcased films.
Reasoning that the best way to face all things scary is through a lens of playfulness, Aloha from Hell delivers just the right amount of the obscene, kooky and irreverent, brightening the quarantine and making us all feel a little less fucked up.
Aloha From Hell will be screened virtually on December 22 from 5-8pm PST.
Friday Playlist: Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Nan Goldin, Rise and Monty Kissing, New York City, 1980
Tender, heartbreaking, beautiful, joyous, Nan Goldin's iconic Ballad Of Sexual Depency changed photography forever. Here is the soundtrack.
Read A Conversation Between Emily Labowe and Devendra Banhart On The Occasion Of The Launch Of Poppy Undies →
Click here to read more.
Watch The Music Video "Shiny High" By PAULLUS2089 From His Album The Dream Body
SHINY HIGH written by PAULLUS2089 from his album THE DREAM BODY. Music video made by Diffan Norman, a Kuala Lumpur-born, LA-based artist. Listen on Spotify. Listen on BandCamp.
Michelle Blade's Into The Forest @ Wilding Cran In Los Angeles
Set against the backdrop of a global pandemic and fraught political times, Into the Forest is an amalgamation of experience and emotion made while sheltering in place. Taking note from her most intimate and immediate surroundings, Blade’s paintings depict a collection of quotidian scenes: the last blush of day, her children in the garden, the remnants of a meal, flowers in stages of decay, mountainous landscapes and towering trees under radiant moons. These meditative moments of solitude within a California landscape take note from the natural world and closely examine its stillness, strength, persistence and metaphysical qualities.
Driven by the inescapable qualities of the natural world this exhibition is about curiosity and one's search for meaning and place within the cosmos. The perceived energy Blade depicts lays behind physical appearances. It’s a world of benevolent energy flowing through and protecting life. The title of the exhibition “Into the Forest”, is not simply an escapist fantasy but also a rallying call to dive more deeply into ones reality and reassess our connection to the health of our afflicted world. In the words of Mary Oliver, using “Attention as devotion”.
Into The Forest is on view for two more days @ Wilding Cran 1700 S. Santa Fe Ave #460 Los Angeles CA 90021
Frutti Di Mare: Read Our Interview Of Danish Designer Sia Arnika →
With her SS21 Frutti Di Mare collection, designer Sia Arnika has found a chimeric pearl in the depths of a timeless Limfjord oyster. These highly-coveted mollusks were so in demand by the 16th-century King Frederic II of Denmark and his court that he declared them “crown regalia” and forbade the people of Arnika’s native Mors island from eating any themselves. While the capital city Nykøbing was a bustling port city in the mid-19th century, its population has since dwindled, and with it, much of the island’s former sense of self. Click here to read more.
Watch Alexander McQueen's SS21 Film "First Light" Directed By Jonathan Glazer
Back to London, coming home.
“Shape, silhouette and volume, the beauty of the bare
bones of clothing stripped back to its essence —
a world charged with emotion and human connection.”
-Sarah Burton
Read The Final Chapter of Brad Phillips' and Gideon Jacobs' Serial Novella →
Gideon did a great job above finishing his last chapter of this project. You can see that right? Don’t take it for granted that Gideon has talent.
He wrote about the beginning and the ending of things. When you exit a room, you end the experience of being within it, but of course when you exit a room you just enter another one. You are never not in a room. Click here to read more.
Existential Time: Read Our Interview of Gisela Colón On The Occasion Of Her Solo Exhibition In Palm Beach →
I conducted this interview with Gisela Colón on November 19, 2020, just after a mysterious obelisk-like structure was discovered in Utah’s Red Rock Country, and just days before the discovery was announced. Exactly when this crudely bolted, John McCracken-like monolith was initially installed is a mystery. That it was found by state employees counting sheep has been described as the most 2020 thing of 2020. Since then, multiple monoliths of varied fashion have been appearing and disappearing around the world, leading to a magnifying force of everything from commercial opportunists, to alien conspiracy theorists, to a Christian military LARPing crusade. Meanwhile, Gisela has been installing her solo exhibition, EXISTENTIAL TIME, Exploring Cosmic Past, Present and Future, of monolith and rectanguloid sculptures created in quarantine from optical acrylics and aerospace carbon fiber. Her unique sculptural language embodies the way that time expands, retracts and collapses. Her two short films express the anxieties that result from isolation and inertness. Her inquiries into the laws of physics address non-linear time flows and they provide the viewer with a sensory and intellectual experience in the grand cosmic sense of time and space. In essence, these “organic minimal” forms inherently attract a diversified coterie of forces that might point toward all the reasons we could be feeling our fragmented world suddenly culled together by a mysterious ping. click here to read more.
Friday Playlist: Mood Ring Cycle
Friday moodz. Saturday nudz. Music that hits that oxytocin. Call your crush and say I luv U.
Liu Shiyuan Presents For Jord @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery In Los Angeles
For Jord, Liu Shiyuan’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, is comprised of photography, video and drawings, that revolve around a fictional character named Jord. In Danish, the word jord translates to ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’, and as a name, it means ‘divine being’ or ‘peace’. In Liu’s work, this character is not human, not from the past or the future, and has no race or gender. They are the amorphous, symbolic protagonist who binds the work across ideological and formal narratives.
In her photography practice, Liu uses personal iPhone videos and Google image searches as primary sources for her work. By searching words and phrases online, Liu identifies images with multiple meanings that can be attributed to the same word, offering a diversity of perspectives and interpretations. At her studio in Copenhagen, Liu searched the word “Jord” on Google images, resulting in images of dirt. Interestingly, many of the thumbnails featured two hands holding soil - giving the dirt a border, a containment and a sense of belonging. As a country, a culture, or any community with boundaries, the character Jord represents our connected and shared nature. For Liu Shiyuan, a Chinese national living in Denmark, this common ground of all humans is an important aspect of our livelihood.
Liu’s new film, For the Photos I Didn’t Take, For the Stories I Didn’t Read, is inspired by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s book The Little Match Seller. The story portrays a penniless young girl on New Year’s Eve trying to sell matches to make money for her family. From the cold and snowy street, she peers into other homes, imagining a better life. As she fantasizes, she peacefully passed away in the dawn of the new year, an abrupt and tragic end to the tale. In 1920, The Little Match Seller was translated to Chinese and included in educational books throughout the country. The story was used by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution as a way of explaining how the communist party was saving China from the problems of Western capitalism.
Liu reintroduces the audience to The Little Match Seller with a stream of images the artist found online by individually searching every word in the entire text. By recontextualizing the narrative, the viewer simultaneously reads both stories: the written version from 1845 and a parallel story created by today’s imagery. Every time the word “SHE” or “HER” appears in the text, Liu uses portraits of young girls from around the world - girls from poor families and wealthy families, from refugee camps and of different ethnicities. The result is surprisingly complex and unified. From one perspective it is clear to see the shadow of post-war society; from another, there is no change at all.
Set softly behind the rolling text and images, otherworldly environments create an atmosphere of the unknown, as if the viewer is looking onto earth from another universe. The idea of being a foreigner, an outsider or an alien is a frequent theme in Liu’s practice. Having lived in many different countries: growing up in China, studying in the United States and now living in Denmark — the same country as Hans Christian Andersen — Liu has a unique perspective on the cultural and political differences in these countries. For the Photos I Didn’t Take, For the Stories I Didn’t Read contemplates and questions larger issues of communism, socialism, capitalism and the affects on the individual — especially during the holiday season when indulgence and extravagance are celebrated, disparity and inequality become more pronounced. By bringing up these questions, Liu leaves the viewer to observe our differences, consider alternative perspectives and most importantly, understand our shared connection as humans.
For Jord is on view through January 30 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 1010 N Highland Ave Los Angeles, CA 90038.
Unreachable Spring Group Show @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
![Edra Soto Detail: Let Love Win , 2020 Ink on embossed metal 60 x 295 in (152.4 x 749.3 cm) [Variable Dimensions] Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/544cb720e4b0f3ba72ee8a78/1607480784994-VPHD57EJAXKQVHXS3CML/Edra_Soto_Let_Love_Win_Breonna_Taylor_2020.jpg)
Unreachable Spring takes its title from the eponymous painting by Laura Krifka. The painting was slated to be featured as the sole work in her first Viewing Room on the gallery website, accompanied by an essay by the writer and art critic Andrew Berardini. Laura began the painting in late March—within days of the start of the Covid lockdown in the U.S., and shortly after learning that she and her husband were expecting their first child. By summer it had become clear to us that it was the lede for a deeper exploration of ideas and subject matter.
Over many months we watched as the Covid-19 pandemic transformed the world and like an earthquake of biblical proportions exposed the fragile fissures of our deteriorating human ecosystem, turning one crisis into many. As the author Daniel Susskind writes in Life Post-COVID-19, "This crisis is focusing our collective attention on the many injustices and weaknesses that already exist in how we live together. If people were blind to these faults before, it is hard not to see them now."
These crises have also inspired artists to respond in kind, prompted by a desire to take refuge in their work and address this transformational moment in their own personal way. By creating art that inspires contemplation and elicits discourse these paintings, sculptures and photographs bear witness and provide a record of how these artists have experienced life over these past six months.
Participating artists include June Edmonds, André Hemer, Laura Krifka, Kambui Olujimi, Edra Soto, and Peter Williams. Unreachable Spring is on view through December 19 @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles 2685 South La Cienega Boulevard.
Friday Playlist: Pillow Talk
Robert Mapplethorpe, Larry and Bobby Kissing, 1979
Soft. Tracks. Makeup Sex. Pillow talk.
Cole Sternberg's FREESTATE @ El Segundo Museum of Art
Taking ESMoA and LA’s South Bay City of El Segundo as ostensible “campaign headquarters,” FREESTATE features new artworks by Cole Sternberg conceived as fabricated historical ephemeras and objects, sovereign documents, and fictional propaganda. The gallery space is split into three rooms, forcing the viewer to experience each as a separate moment along the path to the Free Republic.
Room one is an elaborate canvasing office, replete with posters, buttons, lawn signs and other public activation propaganda. Sternberg has even drafted a new Constitution for California, published in pocket form for easy mass dissemination. Room two is the brain of the concept. As “California Dreamin’” plays on repeat, the walls of this room are filled from floor to ceiling with works on paper chronicling the artist’s mind map of secession. They explain the historical heartache, the environmental elegance and the logistics of a peaceful and beneficial transition. The final stage is the largest and calmest. Feelings of escape and freedom permeate from Sternberg’s environmental sculpture and collage, which sit quietly against a traditional museum backdrop, demonstrating a future where one can breathe.
FREESTATE is on view through March 2021 at ESMoA 208 Main St, El Segundo, CA 90245. To learn more go to www.thefreerepublicofcalifornia.com
Marc Horowitz "Diagrams For Living" @ No Gallery LA
No Gallery is pleased to present Diagrams for Living, an exhibition of paintings, collages, and video work from Marc Horowitz. The first room of the gallery is occupied by new paintings completed in Los Angeles during quarantine. The second room hosts collage works on paper and collage-like video culled from the artist’s vast archive of personal footage gathered throughout pre-pandemic travels. Marc Horowitz - "Diagrams For Living" will be on view until December 13 at No Gallery, 961 Chung King Rd Los Angeles, CA 90012.
Watch The Premiere Of "Dedicated To Pooch" By Very Nice Massage
Very Nice Massage are back with their sophomore album, Based On The Data. Released on all streaming platforms as well as cassette tape by Baby Race Records, the album maintains their signature dream-like approach to song structure steeped in post-algorithm schizophrenia, yet there has been a complete overhaul of their palette. This new sound brings their spacey ambitions into full fruition. Very Nice Massage have created a mysterious world that refuses to be solved and the endless pleasures of investigation that keep you coming back for more. Follow @verynicemassage and @babyracerecords on Instagram, stream them on your platform, or better yet, get yourself a limited-edition cassette.
Watch Mused's New SS21 Campaign Video And Interview With Designer Lindsay Jones →
Two fashion insiders discuss the fashion industry’s pivot, and why fashion need not be considered frivolous, especially in ugly times. Click here to see more.
See Our Favorite Art Documentaries From DOC NYC →
Click here to read more.
Read The Eleventh Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs' & Brad Phillips' Serial Novella →
People emphasize the importance of beginnings and endings. One always wants to “get off on a good foot,” “go out with a bang,” “start strong,” “leave them wanting more,” etc, etc. These truisms are, at their core, about manipulation, and manipulation is, at its core, about control. If our “exquisite corpse serial novella” has taught you anything, which it really shouldn’t have, it’s probably that control is for suckers. Click here to read more.