[FILM REVIEW]: My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To

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The heart is a lonely hunter in Colombian-American Jonathan Cuartas’ new film about two siblings, Jessie (Ingrid Schram) and Dwight (Patrick Fugit), who stalk, kill and spill the blood of unassuming and easily forgotten victims to feed their younger vampiric brother, Thomas—expertly played by Owen Campbell. Much has been made of the biblical lengths that a family will go to survive, which makes My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To an especially pertinent allegory during the dark days of a pandemic when the pallor of death and disease has swept across the world. In the canon of vampire films, this one belongs at the top of the most eerie and brilliantly crafted, with an insouciant blackness that continually makes these characters with a predominantly blood-based diet so fascinating. Like F. W. Murnau’s iconic 1922 silent film, Nosferatu (released at the tail end of another deadly pandemic), or Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish classic, Let the Right One In (2008), and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To is an instant cult gem that seethes with uncanny pathos, despite the unrelenting physical and psychological violence. The film’s pacing, while creeping at times, like a slow penumbra, makes for a vivid and gripping filmic experience, and each scene is cast in a domestic, near-Gothic painterly glow, thanks to cinematographer Michael Cuartas (the director’s brother).

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To opens today in theaters and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms.

Auroboros Presents The World's First Digital-Only Ready-to-Wear Collection Styled By Sita Abellan@ London Fashion Week

 
 

Auroboros is a fashion house merging science & technology, and digital-only, ready-to-wear, housed within the late Lee Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande Foundation. Styled by Sita Abellan, Auroboros presents a gamified and interactive shopping experience, introducing the world to a fully sustainable, sci-fi, digital collection.

Watch Magliano's SS22 Digital Presentation For Milan Fashion Week

There are four humoral fluids: Melancholic, Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric. These are the temperaments of Magliano's Spring/Summer 2022 characters, inspired by Hippocrates' Humoral Theory. A mash up of new appearances, the central role of upcycling introduced through fabrics recycled from past seasons, new organic dyes and stylistic pastiches. The collection is enriched by a daily gesture of typical Italian good luck charms: the classic broken heart, the chains dedicated to Saint Sebastian, the lucky baby tooth. 

This change of temperaments is the core narrative of the video presented for Milan Fashion Week. The models walk on a white limbo in a melancholic/phlegmatic way, gradually becoming more and more agitated and syncopated. This escalation is guided by the wind of a cinematographic machine, which more and more insistently gives drama to the walk. The choreographer Michele Rizzo organises the movements and their transformation, Tommaso Ottomano films the show, and the music is left to the improvisation of Edoardo Lovazzi, a young 12-year-old drummer.

 
 

Watch The Premiere Of Katie Schecter's "How Many Flowers" Directed By Buckley

Katie Schecter is a Nashville-based and New York City-bred singer and songwriter does not belong to any one genre or style. Her new album Bad for Business features Amy Winehouse’s legendary rhythm section, Homer Steinweiss (Holy Hive, Sharon Jones & The Dap-kings) and Nick Movshon (Menahan Street Band, Charles Bradley), a heavy combination that informs the record’s soulful core temperature. Recorded in New York City at The Diamond Mine, the LP shines with a dutiful sense of where Schecter has been while signaling to the new heights she is set to scale. Bad for Business will be available on vinyl via Soul Step Records this summer.

Ring Down The Curtain Group Show @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Ring Down the Curtain is an idiom borrowed from theater that marks the end of a performance. After more than a year of isolation and lockdowns, digital surrogates and Zoom fatigue, this group exhibition signals a return to embodied optimism by offering works that embrace materiality and empiricism.

The show includes artists working to parse the complexities of gender, sexuality, identity, and power through a dedication to labor, design, and craft. A carefully considered intersection of ceramic, textile, paint, video, and installation engages sensory perception, creating somatic markers that challenge histories of cultural performativity, particularly as they apply to women. Each artist expresses their unique interests in the relationship between tactility and the significance of elicited bodily experience.

Featured artists include Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Oona Brangam-Snell, Trulee Hall, Isabel Yellin, Sarah Zapata, and Bari Ziperstein. Ring Down The Curtain is on view through June 19 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles.

 
 

Rodrigo Amarante Presents New Single/Video, "I Can't Wait"

Rodrigo Amarante today releases a new single/video, “I Can’t Wait,” from his forthcoming record, Drama, out July 16th via Polyvinyl. The track opens with cascading melodies from a harpsichord and an eerie guitar, later unfurling with synthesizers and sparse syncopations as he ruminates on hope, freedom and urgency. The accompanying video, which was written by Amarante, is cinematic. It beautifully depicts a morning of a fleeting dream, as Amarante wakes up, gets dressed, and walks to send a letter. 

"I wrote this song because Jesus is followed by traitors,” says Amarante. “I wrote it because Darwin's ideas are serving the purpose of turning ourselves against one another, because I believe freedom does not stem from independence, separation or disconnect as the dictionaries suggest, but rather from the acknowledgement of our interdependence, because freedom is belonging. I wrote this song because hope isn't enough. I wrote it after bumping into an entry at a Latin dictionary: Noster Nostri -  1: Our, Ours. 2: Our hearts beat as one. 3: That old dream of ours."

Read Our Interview Of Agnes? Following Her Transition Cum Durational Performance @ Belsize Park In London →

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Agnes? has made waves in London with her most recent exhibition, Transgenesis. Spending twenty-three consecutive days in the abandoned Belsize Park leisure centre, performing for eight hours straight, Agnes? has welcomed visitors to watch in awe as we see her transform into a larger-than-life, human-octopus creature, a form that symbolizes both life and death. Transgenesis, meaning one or more DNA sequences from another species being introduced by artificial means, is explored by Agnes? through her experience of transitioning from male to female. Since beginning her transition, Agnes? has explored the symbolic connotations behind water and its relationship to her experiences of ‘mutating’ from one being to another, using the liquid to wash down her hormone drugs, an action that is simultaneously transformative and destructive all in one swallow. Read more.

Read A Conversation Between Ferrari Sheppard & Michèle Lamy On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition @ UTA Artist Space →

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Ferrari Sheppard is an enigmatic, multi-disciplinary artist whose practice defies classification, and lives firmly at the center of a three-dimensional venn diagram. Likewise, the work of Michèle Lamy is as fluid and instinctive as it is crystallized in her unmistakable and ever-expansive character. She is not just a maven of fashion, design, and art, or an innovator of music and former restaurateur. She is a cultivator of community and expression. Sheppard is not just a painter, writer, photographer and music producer. He is an activist who has worked to provide relief aid in Haiti, shape economic policy and development in South Africa, and shine light on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It makes perfect sense that the two of them would fortuitously meet at Mr. Chow’s while stepping outside for a cigarette. Sheppard’s recent solo exhibition of paintings, Positions of Power, at UTA Artist Space is a testament to the mistreatment of a generation for profit by the criminal justice system. They are love letters to those who carried the weight of the “war on drugs” and risked it all in pursuit of freedom in the United States. Their structural composition is the result of an almost unconscious, improvised dance. A process that the artist refers to as “walking while painting.” The figures are laid heavy with dark brown and black pigments that visibly absorb light, and are gilded with a reflective gold trim, creating a balance that feels harmonious and befitting. At the center of the gallery’s main space lies a brutalist, three-pronged elmwood bench of mythical giant proportions. A place to put everything down and spend some time with the work. A creation that could only come from the collective minds of Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens. And the perfect place for these two chameleonic masters of material, sound, and ceremony to discuss their work. Read more.

Watch CLONES: Balenciaga's Spring '22 Runway Presentation

Balenciaga’s Spring 22 presentation considers our shifting senses of reality through the lens of technology. We see our world through a filter—perfected, polished, conformed, photoshopped. We no longer decipher between unedited and altered, genuine and counterfeit, tangible and conceptual, fact and fiction, fake and deepfake. Technology creates alternate realities and identities, a world of digital clones.

To illustrate this concept, every look in the Spring 22 collection is seen on Eliza Douglas, an artist who has either opened or closed every show and appeared in most campaigns for the past several years. In a video directed by Quentin Deronzier, Eliza appears as a series of digital clones, some of which are deepfakes, or models with Eliza’s photogrammetry-captured and CG-scanned face digitally grafted on.

Some looks are styled to illustrate artificial manipulation using props, like chainmail headpieces in silver, gold, chrome, and rusted metal. The models march down a minimalist runway to a sci-fi-inspired soundtrack composed by BFRND and an AI voiceover reciting the lyrics of “La Vie En Rose.” The video’s post-production processes include planar tracking, rotoscoping, machine learning, and 3D modeling, implemented in order to achieve a hyper-realistic effect.

ANEMONES: Alexander McQueen's Fall Winter 21 Womenswear Collection

 
 

photographs by Paolo Roversi

“It feels like now is a time for healing, for breathing new life, for exploring echoes from the past to enrich our future. More than ever, a sense of humanity, of the team working together with a single aim – to make something beautiful, something meaningful – feels both precious and important. We looked at water, for its healing properties, and at anemones. Anemones are the most ephemeral flowers, here made permanent in cloth. The women wearing the anemone dresses almost become like flowers, like their embodiment, their character – but amplified, grounded, radiant and strong.”

Sarah Burton, Creative Director.

The Parapsychic Sculptor: Read Our Interview Of Corin Johnson →

 
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Artist Corin Johnson has spent over thirty years traversing the art world with his exceptional stonemasonry and wood carving craftsmanship. Corin has collaborated with some of the world's most renowned visual artists including Paul Noble, as well as focusing on his own practice (which includes drawing, modeling, and unique stone, marble, and wood carvings), the work is varied with a unique and colorful story behind each piece. Recently, he has found himself locked down in his studio with the musically-acclaimed Nick Cave. They met in the ‘90s when the musician reached out having seen a bust of himself created by Johnson; a commission by a Cave fanatic. During lockdown, the duo have formed a creative bond and partnership. Read more.

Honoring The Murkiness: Read Our Interview Of Estefania Puerta & Abbey Meaker On Curating The Ephemeral →

Brian Raymond Tree Hollow Composition, 2021 Maple tree hollow strung with harp strings, processed thru OP1, eh95000, and Sponge Fork Run time: 10:00

Brian Raymond
Tree Hollow Composition, 2021
Maple tree hollow strung with harp strings, processed thru OP1, eh95000, and Sponge Fork
Run time: 10:00

Is it in our nature to make art? Is art inherently ephemeral? Is there a boundary between art and nature? How can we look to nature as a blueprint for the art that we make? These are all questions that come up as I consider Land Chapters, the inaugural exhibition by Artist Field, a platform for projects that respond to and engage with natural environments. Curated by Estefania Puerta and Abbey Meaker, this exploration of the boundary between nature and self is a deep dive into the works of 16 artists split into three chapters. The first chapter is comprised of installation works that can be found deep in the woods of Richmond, Vermont on the Beaver Pond Hill Property. The second chapter comes in the form of a tape with recordings from six different artists. And the third chapter is a print publication with text from seven additional artists. All together, these works serve as an attempt to embrace all of the hard-to-pinpoint expressions of art within nature that so often fall under the towering shadow of negated space left by the Land Art movement. Read more.

Love Letter to L.A.: New Works By Beverly Fishman @ GAVLAK Gallery In Los Angeles

Love Letter to L.A. is GAVLAK gallery’s first solo presentation of new work by Beverly Fishman. The exhibition’s declaration of affection signals a pivot to the personal in Fishman’s new body of work, for which she has developed a distinctive color palette for objects that occupy a liminal position between two and three dimensions, subtly acknowledging a debt to styles with California roots, including the Light and Space and Finish Fetish movements. The enticing and deceptive optical effects the new works produce also expand upon Fishman’s long-standing investigations of how physical and mental states with no fixed visual forms of their own—namely, pain and wellness—are articulated in the marketing of pharmaceutical conglomerates to an increasingly medicated general public.

Love Letter to L.A. will be on view through June 5 at GAVLAK Los Angeles.

From the Same Cloth: An Exploration Of Body Image & Identity In Menswear

photographs by Valerio Nico
styling by Enrico Caputo
set design by Alberto Simoni
f/x and grooming by Greta Giannone
styling assisted by Alessandra Lato


jacket and pants: antimasturbasion
shoes: Marsèll

bra: Maria Do Carmo

set design: Alberto Simoni 

full look: Maria Do Carmo

 
full look: Maria Do Carmo

full look:
Maria Do Carmo

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jacket and pants: Rin Choe
knee pad: Maria Do Carmo
shoes: Marsèll

jacket and pants: Rin Choe
shoes: Marsèll

 
 

dress: Maria Do Carmo

jacket and pants: antimasturbasion
shoes: Marsèll

jacket: Rin Choe

jacket: Rin Choe

coat: Thomas Spooner

onesie: antimasturbasion

Follow the team on Instagram:
Photography Valerio Nico 
Styling Enrico Caputo 
Set design Alberto Simoni 
Special F/X Greta Giannone 
Styling Assistant Alessandra Lato 
Chair by Finemateria

Global Fax Festival: A New Performance Film By David Hammons In Collaboration With Monday Evening Concerts

‘Global Fax Festival’ a new performanceby David Hammons dedicated to Butch Morris in collaboration with Monday Evening Concerts and pianist Myra Melford Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 10 May 2021 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography © 2021

‘Global Fax Festival’ a new performance by David Hammons dedicated to Butch Morris in collaboration with Monday Evening Concerts and pianist Myra Melford
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 10 May 2021
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography © 2021

Hauser & Wirth’s digital art magazine Ursula presents ‘Global Fax Festival’ – a new performance film by David Hammons dedicated to composer/conductor Lawrence D. ‘Butch’ Morris and created in collaboration with Los Angeles’ venerated Monday Evening Concerts and virtuoso pianist Myra Melford.

The film documents Hammons’ first-ever restaging of his noted 2000 project ‘Global Fax Festival’ here conducted in the gallery’s outdoor courtyard in early May 2021. After more than a year of isolation during the pandemic, Hammons conceived this event as a gesture toward the reawakening of Los Angeles, set within the space that two years ago hosted the largest survey of his work ever organized.

The new ‘Global Fax Festival’ performance film features a solo improvisational piano performance by Myra Melford. A former Butch Morris collaborator, Melford plays in dialogue with projected footage of Morris, who passed away in 2013, performing Conductions®, his trademarked technique that merges conducting and improvisation.

Space Talk: Read Our Interview Of Retrofuturist Designer Candice Molayem On The Eve Of Her New Collection Release For Animal Crackers →

 
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A serendipitous trip through Europe was the inevitable catalyst for Candice Molayem to begin her ascent into design with her evergreen clothing line, Animal Crackers. Since its conception in the July of 2020 with the intention of inspiring empowerment for her audience through wearable art, Molayem has been creating her circum-vitae of ethically-crafted garments full of futurist visions that harken eras past, sharp tailoring, and avant-garde silhouettes. Molayem transcends the norms of the traditional fashion calendar and the constant urge for the new, emphasizing on season-less collections that are made to endure and be worn year-round. Read more.

A Visit To The Miles C. Bates “Wave House” In Palm Desert

With it’s patented curving roof that mimics the peaks of the surrounding San Jacinto Mountains, the iconic Miles C. Bates “Wave House” has been brilliantly and expertly restored by Los Angeles-based Stayner Architects and is now available to book for overnight stays. Every inch of the home in its original incarnation—before a devastating series of remodels—has been reconsidered with exacting precision, save for a few minor modern amenities that enhance the home’s livability and that continue the architect’s vision for domestic desert bliss. Built for an archetypal, midcentury American playboy and sculptor, Miles C. Bates in 1955 by architect and inventor Walter S. White—a former apprentice of Rudolf Schindler—the house exudes the charm of high, but moderate living and square footage devoted to only the essentials; a less-is-more ethos that gives midcentury architecture its understated grandeur. But, while the physical footprint might be minimal, the house feels anything but cramped. The maximization and utilization of space makes the Wave House feel larger than life, a type of floor planning that belongs to only the greatest architects. Large sliding steel-framed glass doors and clerestory windows create a seamless transition from the great indoors to the great outdoors. The roller coaster roof undulates, giving the entire house a kind of oneness that is alluring and near mystical. With original terrazzo floors and ash wood panels, the house is a masterpiece of materiality and sensuous glamour; even the automated curtains have a kind of burlesque eroticism. A small cactus enclosure feels like a private peep show for thirsty and thorny flora. At night, a soaking tub beckons just steps from the bedroom. As architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius opined in his treatise for Roman architecture, that in order for buildings to have the perfect proportions, they must have three attributes: firmitas, utilitas and venustas (strength, utility and beauty). The Wave House has all three in spades. Click here to book your stay.

Carhartt WIP Releases Spring '21 Campaign In Collaboration With Clay Arlington

 
 

For its Spring 2021 campaign, Carhartt WIP has worked with artist and designer Clay Arlington, creating a series of images that reference the artist’s past body of work, as well as the brand’s own cultural rooting. Fire extinguishers, floral motifs, and basketballs — in this case, one created by Spalding for Carhartt WIP S/S21 collection — all draw from Arlington’s signature aesthetic, and are combined with text-based works that offer a knowing interpretation of the brand’s DNA.

To mark the campaign, Carhartt WIP has released two t-shirts featuring these works combined with other text-based components. Each t-shirt will also come with a limited edition posterzine.

One image features artist and model Ivy Johnson, her back turned to the camera while wearing a white hoodie, with the words “it’s just work” scrawled on tape across the bottom.

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