Pioneering Streetwear Brand Slam Jam Opens 30-Year Archive In Ferrara

 
 

Founded by Luca Benini in 1989, Slam Jam was born to serve the underground long before the term “streetwear” existed, becoming the first Italian importer of then unknown brands such as Stussy. From its HQ in Ferrara, far from the European fashion establishment, Slam Jam has honed a unique and highly distinctive style guided by art, music and clubbing, connecting tribes of like-minded people across the world. From the rural outskirts of Ferrara, in the last 30 years Slam Jam has become a globally renowned cultural institution, its name on urban subculture clothing and goods a seal of guarantee.

For the first time since its establishment over 30 years ago, Slam Jam, is opening the doors of its archive with an exclusive project devised by Nationhood. The project comprises a new location in Slam Jam’s headquarters in Ferrara, and a consultable online atlas stemming from an experimental publishing plan focused on the brand’s cultural heritage. Formerly the private collection of Slam Jam founder, Luca Benini, this ultra-refined pastiche of eighties-to-the-present-day underground culture is now a new cultural resource with its own digital platform, a long list of publishing products, and various offline off-shoot activities hinging around visual art and culture. Nationhood has designed an infinite scroll, a digital flow that unites different contents in a sequence of images which is a collision of Lo-Fi cinema and “eBay aesthetics” visual brutalism. The upshot is a new digital device collecting the anthropology of the look and underground subcultures of which Luca Benini was a founding presence: from clubbing on the Riviera Romagnola, London and early ‘90s New York, to the international hip-hop scene and Japan‘s noughties fashion neo-avant-garde. Once again, Nationhood takes the idea of the archive apart and talks of how customs are the cultural custodian of the contemporary world. And so it has designed a hyper-photographic atlas mixed with soundscapes from the around 10,000 vinyls in the collection, offering up the archive in a visual stream that confirms the potential lyricism of chaos and cyberspace as the symbolic place of a new digital romanticism.

Hollywood's Greatest Hits: John Waters Solo Exhibition @ Sprueth Magers In Los Angeles

 
 

Hollywood’s Greatest Hits marks John Waters’ first solo exhibition with Sprueth Magers. Featuring a selection of works, most of which have never been seen before in LA, the series sheds light on the artist’s decades-long, wide-ranging art practice, and in particular, his humorous and irreverent takes on the movie industry. The over 30 works on view encompass videos, photographs, sculptures and installations that skewer film tropes and culture while also offering cutting, but loving, critiques of mass media, celebrity and insider art-world knowledge.

In the early 1990s, Waters began shooting photographs straight from his television screen. The results were grainy, arty-looking images that he pieced together into evocative photomontages, creating storyboard-like sequences read from left to right. These playful acts of appropriation and juxtaposition, which transform favorite or forgotten films into what Waters calls his "little movies," create condensed stories or testimonies that offer narratives the original directors never intended.

Hollywood’s Greatest Hits is on view through May 1 @ Sprueth Magers 5900 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles

James Gobel Presents Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedne’no She Betta Don’t @ Bozo Mag In Los Angeles

BLACK SCREEN

Twenty-five lines of bright light slowly open across the screen. The lines continue to broaden, revealing that we’re looking through window blinds that are being opened. The light is from a rising sun. Handclaps fade up. Cheerleader claps. A hypervariation of the old “Wipe Out” riff. Stomping feet come in. Then a bass line. The sound is jagged and jubilant. The martial music of the suburban high school tribes. The title track surges in and we:

CUT TO

CHEERLEADERS

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedne’no She Betta Don’t is on view by appointment through April 4 @ Bozo Mag 815 Cresthaven Drive, Los Angeles

Read Our Interview Of Film Director Fiona Jane Burgess →

Fiona Jane Burgess, UK-based film director specializing in music videos, commercials, documentaries and fashion films, owes much of her career success to experiencing a number of challenges. Burgess found herself having to rethink her career path at 28, a time when she was also facing the realities of motherhood and the breakup of her band, Woman’s Hour. Fortunately, her natural flare as a director, which she exercised when shooting her own music videos, determined her career segue into film direction. Since delving into the film industry, Burgess has worked on diverse campaigns that span music videos, personal projects, working with the UK’s No.1 Baby Feeding brand, Tommee Tippee and some of fashion’s most recognised names, including Gucci and Burberry. Read more.

All That Spring Promises Group Show @ Tyler Park Presents In Los Angeles

All That Spring Promises serves as a precursor to the season of spring, which will run through the meteorological beginning of spring (March 1) and end on March 20, 2021, the almanac's astrological first day of spring. Through various mediums and artists of varied practices, the exhibition includes elements of flora, animals, the body, and mysticism in reference to the season, which has long been associated with new hope, new beginnings, and inspiration. From this, All That Spring Promises seeks to point ahead that better days are on the horizon with new life and new possibilities, as winter succumbs to spring.

Featured artists include Louis Heilbronn, Daniel Ingroff, Angie Jennings, Anabel Juárez, Christina Mesiti, Paul Pescador, and Evan Whale.

All That Spring Promises is on view through March 21 @ Tyler Park Presents 4043 West Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles

Zandile Tshabalala's Enter Paradise @ ADA \ contemporary art gallery In Accra

 
 

Zandile Tshabalala’s latest series of paintings, titled Enter Paradise, places the Black female figure at the heart of her sensual dreamscapes, thereby revisiting the representation of the Black woman throughout art history. Marking the artist’s debut solo career, and the gallery’s third consecutive debut solo show since opening in October 2020, the new paintings include a selection of figurative self-portraits in which Tshabalala revisits the representation of the Black female figure.

Enter Paradise is on view through April 18 @ ADA \ contemporary art gallery Villaggio Vista, North Airport Road, Airport Residential Area , Accra, Ghana 

Static: New Paintings By Vanessa Prager @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery In Los Angeles

Vanessa Prager’s recently completed series of oil paintings, Static, continues her exploration of sculptural impasto techniques and revisits 19th-century post-Impressionism in the 21st century. Prager’s new paintings pack a sensory and emotional impact, redefining perception in a high-def world. Her impasto pieces resist the quick take and allow us to discover the hidden treasure of the work itself; in these paintings, more is more. In this time of pandemic, when screens dominate as a means to work, play, connect and exist, Prager is the analog compass directing us back to the tangible. With big, heavy, drippy canvases and what can only be referred to as extreme painting, Prager rejects artificial crispness and reminds us how an abstract work can help us locate feelings so precisely.

Static is on view through April 10 @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Avenue, Los Angeles

Samson Young's Closer Reading @ ORDET In Milan

Formal construction and imperfect forms, time and consciousness are just a few territories that Samson Young (b. 1979, lives and works in Hong Kong) explores in his first solo exhibition in Italy. Renowned for a practice that weaves multicultural paradigms and cross-media experiences, the artist takes a group of works that he created during a residency at the Ryosoku-In at the Kennin-ji temple [1] the oldest zen temple in Kyoto—as a point of departure for Closer Reading. During those weeks, Young carried on his ongoing research on what form and its rethinking are.

At ORDET, Young deploys video, drawings, sound works and installations to generate an articulated, absorbing environment. Each work is connected and at the same time reveals its uniqueness in the hope of unveiling some fundamental beliefs about the way things work. There are different truths that await exploration. The video installation Sonata (2020, revised 2021) is a sequence of actions and images with a sense of a general direction and a recurring motif, in a choreography of events happening in time and space. A few objects complete the installation: a group of light clay pieces bear on their surface indented impressions of architectural features of the temple and a book of Zen scriptures with a circle drawn on it.

Closer Reading is on view through April 17 @ ORDET Via Adige 17, 20135 Milan

Robert Nava's Angels @ Vito Schnabel Gallery In New York

 
 

Angels debuts a new series of paintings devoted to the archetype of the seraphim, the winged figure that has animated art history since the early Christian era of the 4th century. With these works, the angel takes its place in Nava’s contemporary visual mythos, joining riotously colored monsters, knights, and chimerical beings that populate his deceptively carefree canvases and works on paper.

Angels is on view through April 10 @ Vito Schnabel Gallery 455 West 19th Street in the Chelsea Arts District. photographs courtesy of Vito Schnabel Gallery

Digital Mourning: A Solo Exhibition By Neïl Beloufa @ Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan

The French-Algerian artist, Neïl Beloufa, is one of the leading voices of the past decade and a keen observer of our times, offering vivid representations of the world through films, videos, installations, and sculptures. 

Avoiding direct judgments and forceful declarations, Beloufa successfully conveys a reality that, in its subtlety, is often awkward to behold, focusing on highly topical issues such as power relationships, the technological control, the perils of data collection, as well as on a possible collapse in the management of a pandemic. 

Digital Mourning is on view through July 18 @ Pirelli HangarBicocca Via Chiese 2 20126 Milan

Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection In Miami

Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection celebrates their most recent acquisitions, which consists of a sizable selection of international African and African Diaspora artists. Inspired by his upbringing in a number of Latin American countries, Pérez began collecting the work of Cuban and Afro-Latino artists several years ago. Recently he has expanded that focus to include artists of the full African diaspora. Allied with Power shows the result of these years of dedicated effort and exploration.

The exhibition highlights artists whose works embody the possibilities and complexities of our contemporary moment. Allied with Power showcases a wide range of practices and thematics, including abstraction, representation, politics, spirituality, and race. Collapsing national borders, the artists in the exhibition ally with power, representing a kaleidoscope of voices that declare their authority.

The exhibition includes works by Igshaan Adams, Juan Carlos Alom, Firelei Báez, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Kudzanai Chiurai, Jonathas de Andrade, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Tomás Esson, Genevieve Gaignard, Sam Gilliam, David Goldblatt, Sonia Gomes, Nicholas Hlobo, Pieter Hugo, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Rashid Johnson, Isaac Julien, Kiluanji Kia Henda, David Koloane, Guido Llinás, Arjan Martins, Misheck Masamvu, Manuel Mendive, Zanele Muholi, Christopher Myers, Odili Donald Odita, Naudline Pierre, Robin Rhode, Deborah Roberts, Chéri Samba, Yinka Shonibare, Elias Sime, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Mickalene Thomas, Guy Tillim, Kara Walker, Stanley Whitney, Sue Williamson, and Portia Zvavahera.

Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art is on view through summer 2021 @ Pérez Art Museum Miami 1103 Biscayne Blvd.

Hugh Steers: Strange State Of Being @ Alexander Gray Associates In New York

Strange State of Being is an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Hugh Steers (1962–1995). A figurative painter, the artist was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, ultimately succumbing to AIDS-related complications in 1995 at the age of 32. The gallery’s show takes its title from a 1994 quote by the artist, “There seems to be a buzz. … I’m in such a strange state of being, and nothing’s ever going to be the same.” Reflective of his state, Steers’s compositions, enigmatic scenes of sickness and tenderness, unflinchingly bear witness to the true cost of the AIDS epidemic while speaking to our present health crisis and political fragility.

the majority of Steers’s compositions articulate his inner fears and desires as he made art under the specter of the virus. Highlighting the influence of the Western canon on his practice, a series of images, including Girl in Blue and Red (1987), feature an imp-like child whose eerie presence recalls that of the creature from Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781). In Gold Box (1988), Steers presents this being blinding a man as a snake slithers from an open box. Referencing the myth of Pandora, who released sickness into the world, this menacing painting—created one year after the artist tested positive for HIV—expresses his despair at the diagnosis. Similarly ominous, additional canvases from this period also contain snakes, as well as harbingers of death like crows.

Despite these portents, while indelibly shaped by the AIDS crisis, Steers’s work always rises above its grim realities. As the writer Justin Spring suggests, at the core of the artist’s oeuvre is “… a lingering desire for something transcendent.” Searching for transcendence in the midst of the epidemic, Steers’s paintings gain new resonance in 2021. Their imagery, limned by what the artist once described as the “soft glow of brutality,” anticipates the isolation, loss, and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Strange State of Being is on view through April 3 @ Alexander Gray Associates 510 West 26 Street, New York

Devendra Banhart's The Grief I Have Caused You @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

“Nothing is more gall-bitter than suffering, nothing more honey-sweet than having suffered.” 
— Meister Eckhart

The recursive abstracted forms within Devendra Banhart’s canvases are a non-hierarchical alphabet of allegories for the diminishment and destruction of ego. Each mouth, prick, eye and ass breaks apart and reconstructs itself until they become a collective commune of equally all-important, yet weightless pieces of the tantric universe. They are a cycle of mala beads through the fingers of time.

The Grief I Have Caused You is on view through March 20 @ Nicodim Gallery 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160. photographs by Lani Trock

Simphiwe Ndzube Presents Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

My skin is tightening
soon I shall shed it
like a monitor lizard
like remembered comfort
at the new moon rising
I will eat the last signs of my weakness
remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare to enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
for changes
I shall be forever.
— excerpted from Audre Lorde, “Solstice,” 1978

With Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon, Simphiwe Ndzube continues to develop and expand his cosmology, reimagining Black bodies as mythical and fantastic beings capable of inhabiting multiple dimensions. His figures fly, flail, fall, and dance their way from sculpture, to sound, to canvas through multiple environments, highlighting the fluidity and permeability of identity itself. Like the snake, his characters can be cold-blooded and stealthy; like the chameleon, they are capable of change.

Whereas the bodies in Ndzube’s earlier works are often faceless or headless, this series includes detailed portraits of a number of the individual characters and further develops their unique personalities. In prior exhibitions, Ndzube’s figures reckoned with drought and desolate environments, but the landscapes in Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon have grown fertile and sensual along with the humanoids that populate them. Where once the earth was dry and barren, it has now been sown and is ready for harvest. Within the paintings, pink flowers rise to the sky and spread their fleshy petal-tongues to the sunlight, begging to be kissed. Around them, a sculptural cornfield grows throughout the exhibition. A seven-foot dandy traipses throughout the proceedings, peacocking his vibrant couture to anyone who will pay attention. A Bacon-esque figure in a Garden of Earthly Delights, perhaps he is trying to draw the eyes of the couple making love in the sunlight on a canvas nearby.

Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon is on view through March 20 @ Nicodim Gallery 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160. photographs by Lani Trock.

Joe McKee Releases Ultra Letizia Album On Salmon Universe

horizon2 (1).jpg

Over his varied career Californian-based Australian Joe McKee has been an ever curious sound-traveller, from singer to field recordist and conceptual sound artist. Here he has created the other-worldly musical experience of ULTRA LETIZIA - a cargo ship, on which he crossed the North Pacific ocean from Japan to Vancouver, Washington.

As Joe says: "The sounds you are hearing were collected from me 'playing' the ship like a giant gamelan. I hit, scraped, listened and spoke to the strange industrial beast." Every sound collected is turned into a musically engaging and spiritually elevating piece, reflecting an experience of isolation but in turn revealing a connection to the vessel, it's workers, and the vastness of the ocean itself.

Ultra Letizia is available now on bandcamp and soundcloud. Watch an excerpt of the accompanying film below


Stephen Neidich Presents New Kinetic Sculptures @ Wilding Cran In Los Angeles

Two years ago, at the end of the summer, Stephen Neidich set about creating a new kinetic sculpture, Wake Me Up When It’s Over for the L.A. On Fire group show at Wilding Cran Gallery. The piece was constructed from a fully fabricated Venetian blind, rendered in steel with exposed motor sprockets, roller chain, and backlit by a fiery red light. When Neidich began thinking about five more minutes please, his second solo show with Wilding Cran—his 2019 debut with the gallery, oikkm56, which featured a single kinetic installation fit with over a dozen steel chains affixed to 14 camshafts that monotonously smashed the chains against rubble sourced from construction sites around the artist’s Frogtown studio—he wanted to reexamine the movement of kinetic blinds, this time using the chain as a more painterly line within the works.

“Without the light you only see the movement, but with the light you get this eerie flicker, the shape and projections of fire masked by these sharp, simple movements that are a result of the shapes and shadows of the blind. The kinetics of the sculpture become the fire. But it’s not fire, it’s this hollow idea of a fire…. Ultimately these are machines, and the integrity comes not from their obsolescence, but from the grace of their intended performance,” says Neidich. “I started to think about the movement of this often dysfunctional object and how best to enhance it to the point of being performative.”

The gallery is lit only from the glow of each work and visitors to the space activate the dozen works in the exhibition (each varying in blind orientation and size, from 24 x 24 inches to 9 x 16 feet) by tripping a motion sensor upon entry that sets off a subtle symphony, placing each visitor inside a surround sound panopticon, a voyeuristic platform with a vantage upon a series of abstract horizons.

five more minutes please is on view by appointment through April 3 @ Wilding Cran Gallery 1700 S. Santa Fe Avenue, unit 460. photographs by Lani Trock

Alexander McQueen & Vestiaire Collective Are Pioneering Circular Practices In Luxury Fashion

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN VOSS finale photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN VOSS finale
photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Alexander McQueen and Vestiaire Collective have just launched a pioneering collaboration aimed at empowering a move towards sustainability and circular practices. Supported by innovative technology, the collaboration marks the launch of Vestiaire Collective’s new ‘Brand Approved’ programme and reinforces Alexander McQueen’s growing commitment to the durability of luxury fashion.

A select group of clients will be contacted by a sales representative at Alexander McQueen. Any pieces the clients wish to sell will be assessed and if eligible assigned a buy-back price. Once the pieces are received and authenticated by Alexander McQueen, the client will be issued with a credit note with which they will immediately be able to purchase new items from specified Alexander McQueen stores. Once processed by Vestiaire Collective the pieces will carry an external NFC tag giving prospective new buyers access to information confirming the authenticity of the piece. The pieces will be available to purchase on a dedicated ‘Brand Approved’ page on the Vestiaire Collective app and site.

There are currently two pieces available for purchase.

Tuxedo jacket ALEXANDER MCQUEEN Sarah Burton’s first show as creative director SS11 photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Tuxedo jacket
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN
Sarah Burton’s first show as creative director SS11
photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Tartan skirt ALEXANDER MCQUEEN ‘Widows Of Culloden’ AW06 photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Tartan skirt
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN
‘Widows Of Culloden’ AW06
photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Nikita Gale's Thank God You're Here @ 56 Henry In New York

“Thank God you’re here” is an exclamation of relief at the presence of another person. This presence offers a sense of safety or comfort—delivery from whatever was occurring before they arrived. The phrase is also a simple instruction: thank God—a body that is both present and absent, a body whose presence is contingent on social agreements that are substantiated through ritual and repetition—that you are here.

The differences in meaning are less important than the situation that is implied: an experience of the presence of others. Each of the works presented in this exhibition is a meditation on the indeterminate boundary between presence and absence, and, in particular, how presence is read in the absence of bodies.

Like lungs, caves are hollow spaces within solid forms. They delineate—and facilitate exchanges—between inside and outside, whether by providing people with shelters or forums for sharing information. Caves are the ancestral homes of homo sapiens. In caves, we began to tell stories to one another with sounds and images—around fires, surrounded by walls inscribed with records of our experiences. (In a cave in Indonesia, archaeologists recently discovered a life-size painting of a wild pig that was made 45,500 years ago, making it the oldest known cave drawing.) Just as caves were spaces in which domestic, social, and theatrical life coalesced, COLLAPSE I–IV, a series of collages, compresses images of caves onto those of coliseums, arenas, and other types of performance venues. The formal gesture of collapsing these images into a single plane allows the prehistoric to haunt the present. The erasure of the distinctions between the contemporary categories of domestic, social, and theatrical throws into relief the discursive relationship between them.

Thank God You’re Here is on view through March 22 at 56 Henry Street New York

Patrisse Cullors' New Short Film Whispers: Pray for LA is a Meditation on a City Reeling from Compounded Crises

Whispers: Pray For LA is Patrisse Cullors’ latest work developed amidst an unprecedented surge in COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles this past winter. As part of a larger ongoing project entitled ‘Pray for LA’ launched by her artist collective The Crenshaw Dairy Mart at the beginning of 2021, the initiative and forthcoming works are an offering to the thousands of Angelenos and their families suffering from the intersections of COVID-19, racism and the ultimate neglect of a county, state and country that has deliberately focused on profit over people.

Cullors’ Whispers specifically calls us to the ocean to offer up our hearts, our grief and our fight to see the death and sickness that surrounds los angeles county as it fights to keep afloat amongst the terror of COVID-19.

Whispers asks all of us to call for a world where every family has access to healthcare, to food, to shelter.

Whispers asks us to dream and practice this vision through abolition.

This video project was commissioned by Tilt West, a denver-based arts nonprofit. It will be included in the third volume of the Tilt West journal, devoted to the topic of art and labor, scheduled for release on september 2, 2021. You can check out the second volume of the Tilt West journal, on art and community here.

Directed and produced by: Patrisse Cullors 

Edited by: Giovanni Solis

Scored by: Meshell Ndegeocello