BEING – NEW PHOTOGRAPHY 2018

Posted on 2018-07-23

Every two years, MoMA’s celebrated New Photography exhibition series presents urgent and compelling ideas in recent photography and photo-based art. This year’s edition, Being, asks how photography can capture what it means to be human.

At a time when questions about the rights, responsibilities, and dangers inherent in being represented—and in representing others—are being debated around the world, the works featured in Being call attention to assumptions about how individuals are depicted and perceived. Many challenge the conventions of photographic portraiture, or use tactics such as masking, cropping, or fragmenting to disorient the viewer. In others, snapshots or found images are taken from their original context and placed in a new one to reveal hidden stories. While some of the works might be considered straightforward representations of individuals, others do not include images of the human body at all. Together, they explore how personhood is expressed today, and offer timely perspectives on issues of privacy and exposure; the formation of communities; and gender, heritage, and psychology.

Exhibition runs through to August 19th, 2018

M+B Photo
1050 North Cahuenga Boulevard
Los Angeles
90038 CA

www.moma.org

  

RAS G & THE AFRIKAN SPACE PROGRAM – THE ARRIVAL

Posted on 2018-07-23

Oh Ras! One of the great beatsmiths of our age returns with a new album just in time for 4/20. Ras G brings something fresh to the table with each new release, and Stargate Music is no exception. Back in his Afrikan Space Program guise, the producer combines more J Dilla/Madlib-esque MPC work, an Afrofuturist hip-hop style recently seen being flexed by Shabazz Palaces, cosmic jazz-funk influences ala Herbie Hanckock’s Headhunters and some Erykah Badu-esque neo-soul stylings.

rasgtheafrikanspaceprogram.bandcamp.com

  

ADIDAS X SHEPARD FAIREY X BEYOND THE STREETS

Posted on 2018-07-16

The Shepard Fairey Samba ADV comes packaged with a custom skateboard deck and Montana spray paint can and other collectible items. A portion of the proceeds will benefit Homeboy Industries, a non-profit community-based organization that serves high-risk, formerly gang-involved men and women with a continuum of free services and programs. The collectible bundle will be sold exclusively at the Beyond The Streets Gift Shop.

www.adidas.co.uk
www.beyondthestreets.com
www.homeboyindustries.org

  

CHAMPION HERITAGE CZ NECKLACE

Posted on 2018-07-16

Created in collaboration with LA-based King Ice, each of the 14K gold-plated sterling silver necklaces comes with a logo charm, available in silver, gold, and pink.

www.kingice.com
www.champion.com

  

VINCENT FECTEAU

Posted on 2018-07-16

Five sculptures made from painted papier-mâché in a process developed by the artist over the last two decades are included in the exhibition. As Fecteau has described it, “There are forms or curves that I can only imagine making out of papier-mâché. It’s amazingly flexible and endlessly additive and reductive.” Arranged on pedestals, the sculptures include some of the artist’s largest works to date, yet they retain the uncertain sense of scale that is a central component of his art: “I long for the form that exists free of so-called understanding and that operates in a purely abstract, maybe unconscious way. Yet this utopian desire hinges on an idea of abstraction that not only might be impossible but, in the end,
might even be undesirable.”

The collages are installed on the wall. They combine images (clippings from architecture magazines, photographs by the artist) with materials such as cardboard and found pieces of wood or rope to create shallow reliefs. The effect is often an ambiguous sense of depth and an oscillation between abstract and domestic space. Like his sculptures, they admire the notion of the impossible: “I’ve often fantasized about making a form that would be so incomprehensible that it couldn’t be seen.”

Opposite – Untitled, 2014

Exhibition runs through to September 29th, 2018

Matthew Marks Gallery
1062 North Orange Grove
90046 Los Angeles
USA

www.matthewmarks.com

  

JACQUELINE HASSINK – UNWIRED

Posted on 2018-07-16

Unwired was born from Hassink’s desire to find places that offer neither cell phone reception nor wifi capability. The result is a series of arresting landscapes and interiors which stand in deliberate contrast to iPortrait (on view in the project room), featuring photographs of public transportation users in Shanghai, Moscow, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris and London.

For the photographs in Unwired, Hassink traveled to six locations globally as far afield as Yakushima, an island in the extreme south of Japan, and Svalbard, a Norwegian island near the Polar Circle. The landscapes are an intense study in blues and greens, by turns vivid and subdued, and shifting perspectives and horizon lines, some immeasurably vast, others foreshortened by curtains of vegetation. The contrasts make the viewer acutely conscious both of his or her body and its relationship to space. If the immediate effect is isolating, it gradually relaxes into the sense of being part of a different kind of network, global in the most literal sense of being “of the earth.” This feeling carries over into the exhibition’s two interiors, both of which emphasize the viewer’s perspective and the experience of looking, as well as the natural processes of decay and dilapidation. The message is clear: the things people make can be beautiful and useful, but they’re temporary. On the one hand, this reflects an awareness mono no aware, the Japanese aesthetic of the awareness of impermanence, but when we relate it back to the threatened environments in the landscapes we see a more pointed critique of an industrialized society.

Opposite – Onoaida 8 Yakushima, Japan

Exhibition runs through to August 17th, 2018

Benrubi Gallery
41 East 57th Street
13th Floor
New York
10022 NY

benrubigallery.com