All posts from the 'Art' category:
Announcing two new titles from Scary Topiary press!
CRYSTAL MARYS by Feliz Lucia Molina
Written from the impassive surface of the Internet and the high desert of Southern California, CRYSTAL MARYS is a field study of social-media fatigue, suburban youth, Filipino immigrancy, a denim day job in LA's garment district, and other sites of crystallized dis/enchantment. Molina traces life's "beautiful unreliable narrative logic" by the devotional images of our times—the Virgin Mary, emoji, family photos, profile pics, etc.
Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Emily Pauline Fanny Dart-McLean Harris, Shola Wynne Lawson, and Feliz Lucia Molina. Edition of 129.
ABSOLUTE LOVE by Chris Kraus
A parable of activist youth, mellow courtship, and lost time told with Proustian pathos by our best chronicler of modern relationships and romance.
Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Matt Fishbeck. Edition of 212.
I'm terrifically excited for the first ever Free & Natural Poetry Faire in Los Angeles next weekend! Co-organized by Dorothea Lasky, Elizabeth Metzger, Max Ritvo, and myself . . .
The Free & Natural Poetry Faire is a gala of poetry, art, and arcana. It is our belief that poetry itself is by its nature transdisciplinary, and, to that end, the Faire will create a collaborative and unrestrained space where poetry will coexist for two days with many other art and knowledge forms. True to its name, the Free & Natural Poetry Faire is free and open to the public. This will be the first of a series of Free & Natural Poetry events.
The Free & Natural Poetry Faire is being graciously hosted by the gallery Commonwealth & Council, and will occur on Friday and Saturday, November 20th and 21st. For these two days, the Faire will provide a festive exchange for many brilliant people and happenings. Semiotext(e), Penny-Ante Editions, and other LA small presses will be present during the day. Asher Hartman and Stuart Krimko will offer readings psychic and astrological. At nightfall, poetry will ascend, with over twenty-five poets and performers reading over two nights—Cedar Sigo, Micah Ballard, Feliz Lucia Molina, Fred Moten, Kate Durbin, Amber Rose Tamblyn, and many others. Somewhere in the middle, there will be a new one-act play premier by "Tall Paul" Gellman & Friends. Visit the official Free & Natural Poetry Faire site for more details and the full schedule of events!
A new poem appears in Noon on the Moon, Sternberg Press Poetic Series #4, co-edited by the lovely Fiona Bryson. Other contributors to this issue include Luna Miguel, Dafna Maimon, Pablo Larios, Bernadette Van-Huy, Mark von Schlegell, Gerry Bibby, Natalie Häusler, Josef Strau, Judith Goldman, Andrew Kerton, Dena Yago, Kenneth Goldsmith, Karl Holmqvist, Alejandro Cesarco, Sophie Collins, Sarah Wang, Barry Schwabsky, Dorothea Lasky, Andreas Schlaegel, Veronica Gonzalez Peña, Óscar Garcia Sierra, Matthew Dickman, Keith J Varadi, Jacob Wren, Madeline Gins, Charles Bernstein, and Nora Schultz.
The fourth issue in the “Poetic Series” is a seasonally themed special issue, a festive anthology composed of contributions from more than twenty writers and artists. Each interpreting the theme in an unconventional and abstract sense, it is an alternative omnibus of everyone's favorite and most controversial holiday. Artwork is provided in the form of a colorful collection of romance covers illustrated by Vicki Khuzami. The “Poetic Series” brings together works of poetry and literature in combination with visual art, introducing young as well as established writers concerned with challenging the boundaries of traditional forms of narrative. Initiated by Keren Cytter and coedited with Fiona Bryson. Copublished with A.P.E (Art Projects Era).
€12.00. To order, e-mail order@sternberg-press.com.
I believe we all work with a fundamental rupture within ourselves. What is important is to dare to know, to accept and address it through artistic means . . . What I write, what I've been able to do and to experience, is a question of being. Much more than the body, being is what torments me, if I can use the word torment for this. I mean quite simply the fact that we exist.
Source: Bomb
Raymond Foye has guest-edited a brilliant arts feature for the December-January issue of the Brooklyn Rail. The selection includes an essay on "Reading Cookie Mueller Today" by Jarrett Earnest; interviews with Shiv Mirabito (of Shivistan Publishing) and Henry Threadgill and Jason Moran; and, best of all, Foye's own wonderful encomium for Rene Ricard, whose apartment in the Chelsea Hotel is pictured above.
As soon we look at Mayer’s images, we immediately find ourselves in a different territory—one that appears explicitly personal and autobiographical, fraught with memory and subjectivity. The color is lush, and the look and feel hews closer to the diary films of Jonas Mekas . . . than to models of conceptual photography. Yet unlike the overt markers of subjectivity and personal style in Mekas’s work . . . the quasi-systematic aspect of Mayer’s project—36 photos a day, every day—has the effect of abstracting the images and foregrounding their generic quality: they are from her life, but they could be almost anyone’s . . . the very intensity of surface detail in Mayer’s Memory paradoxically atomizes personal experience into an endless flow of pictures and recited recollections; its authorship is distributed among various functions that don’t necessarily cohere into a single self . . . Needless to say, in their look and feel, Mayer’s photographs could not be further from the resolutely “banal” black and white snapshots that we usually associate with conceptual art. Their frequent nighttime lighting and dim interiors at times bring them closer to Nan Goldin’s early work, though without the cloying stagey feel. Images resonant with narrative and personal history are followed by fire hydrants and parking lots—not the carefully chosen “architectural banal” of Ed Ruscha, just the parking lots that surround everyday life in almost any city or town . . . It is all too easy to imagine a present-day artist selecting out the “poetic” moments from such scenes, making tableaux of artfully arranged trash to strategically reference Arte Povera or site-based art. Mayer’s hippy profusion of randomness breathes in a way that the claustrophobic pictures of more recent so-called “post-conceptual” practice cannot.
Source: Concreta
