David Howard

Mad Bones

In the suffocating stillness of the summer night
he was left alone to count his ribs and metatarsals;
to pray
that the silence would lift from
the cocoon of his cartilage;
that his heart would burst
scattering shrapnel bones and
oozing marrow like blood.
Detached, he saw
his pelvis a moth in the light of a candle;
his spine a worm in the moist garden earth;
his fingers spiders' legs--sticky; strong:

In the darkness, disassembled, he was almost whole.

-Kate Kremer

photographs Grant Willing

Cliques For The Dead

When we were little, we died of broken bones. All of our bones shattered inside us. They came out as dust through our mouths and ears. They came out as dust between our legs. They came out as dust through our pores. What was left in our bodies was connective tissue. We were filled with connective tissue that had nothing to connect. This was the cause of our deaths. We were buried on Cloud Top Hill. The funerals were neat and small and the wakes were dry. When we died, we came up to the top of Cloud Top Hill before our funerals. We could see all the layers of the worlds superimposed on one another. We could not pick out our world among them, but we could find pieces. We eventually saw our caskets; they shimmered in and out of being. We were glad, now, that our bones had come out. We were suppler, and in death we could exist without bones. Living people called us ghosts—the way we could fit through a keyhole. We could talk to each other. We were glad we had died together. We could see other people that died. We could talk to them, but everybody liked the people that they died with best. The cliques of the dead are somewhat like the cliques of the living, but they are less superficial.

-Kim Parko

David Markey

just thinking out loud/possible video collage in progress

Both of these videos have been ingrained on my psyche from the moment I saw them, can't quite put it into words yet, but soon. This is the antidote to all the super glossy dryly edited pop trophies being produced by hot young directors. Charmingly lo fi and dark as hell in the case of DIRT.






www.sterlingcrispin.com
www.S4LEM.com

Charles Avery

'A trio smoking minutes before entering the eternity chamber' 2007

R.I.P. Dash Snow

Untitled 2006

Carlos Valencia

"I make Pencil drawings depicting images appropriated from the mass media... By using pencil as a medium I wanted to prove as in life, even though you can seem to erase mistakes, memories will always remain." -Carlos Valencia

UNTOUCHED

Been working on some illustrations for a mini group show next week. The work is pretty epic and dark, but I wouldn't expect any less from these guys.

NEW WORK ON THE THEME OF
THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY

CHRIS BABIDGE
BEN CATON
TIM HILL
JAMES HINES
ANDREW KERR
MARGARITA LOUCA
LAURA O'CALLAGHAN WHITE

10-14 JUNE
CHICKEN SHACK GALLERY,
24 (BASEMENT) STOKE NEWINGTON RD
LONDON N16 7XJ

Bettina Komenda

I first came across Bettina's photography thanks to one of my favourite labels Awareness & Consciousness who she's been collaborating with over the last four seasons (see above). Her photograph's are so sensual, no wonder she's shot for the likes of Purple and Fashion Paper (see below).



All images taken from www.bettinakomenda.com

I know it's an obvious choice, but I there's something about the way that Mapplethorpe shot Patti Smith that just blows my mind.

LURVE

cover shot Chadwick Tyler


brush & ink drawings (those flint helmets took forever) & found photos
I was really excited when Lyna, the creator of LURVE magazine asked if she could use some of my images from the Dark Horses show last summer, so I quickly reworked them for a double page spread. It was supposed to be six page deal, but I didn't have time (total bummer). Still, I'm just happy to have something included on the same pages as the likes of Anna Peaker, Chadwick Tyler and Terrence Koh.

Zana Bayne aka Garbage Dress, painted a pretty sweet window display at the Wood Wood launch in Berlin, couldn't help myself from reposting her photo of it with the awesome Daul Kim. (hope you don't mind!)


you can buy it online at Colette

Von Sono vs Marcos Rosales

Is this crochet or macrame? I can't tell, either way I want one of these so badly. I have to admit, I've always despised crochet and macrame thanks to elderly relatives houses being littered with hanging baskets and doilies but I'm quickly being won round by the likes of these Von Sono head dresses, as well as Marcos Rosales awesome sculptures.



Marcos Rosales macrame sculptures at Steven Wold Fine Arts Gallery, 2008

Emily Wardill

test shoot, chicken suit

I've had the pleasure of watching Emily Wardill shoot her new piece in the studio over the last few weeks. I've ambled into the studio each morning wondering what new prop will have appeared, and haven't been disappointed by a beautiful seahorse headpiece, chicken suit and numerous other seemingly disparate objects.

I stumbled across an article in frieze in which Emily lists the films that have influenced her practice, which got me wondering how much the following might inform her new piece;

'Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films, especially Lola (1981) and Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation, 1979), where the actors and set are lit like cartoons – in simple shapes and saturated red, blue, greens and pink. Fassbinder was influenced by Douglas Sirk – especially in the way he used melodrama as a structuring device that glosses over the deviance of his content.

Cartoons lead me to Sally Cruikshank’s animated film Quasi at the Quackadero (1976). The characters’ chewy voices emerge from felt pen on soft paper, broken up in hallucinogenic timing like the black outlines. Also, I imagine the biblical parable Greaser’s Palace (1972), directed by Robert Downey Sr., as something that Captain Beefheart might have made in 1969 if his album Trout Mask Replica had been a film instead. I have never seen a funnier scene than the zoot-suited Messiah on his way to Jerusalem to become an actor/singer performing a song to Greaser’s people with the misplaced vocal confidence of someone who can walk on water.'

BURN IN HELL

Ultimate marriage of Horror and Fashion: Leatherface style stitching & dreamcatcher dresses. Supernatural chic.

Genesis

Can love be thought of as anarchic concept?

'Well, it's interesting that people have become so blase about relationships and they take so much for granted in terms of the randomness of the body you receive! It baffled us (Throbbing Gristle) that people, on a whole, didn't seem particularly puzzled at the strangeness of being in a body and having a gender. You know, it's very bizzare and it's very arbitrary. We wanted to really explore a re-awakening of the human species that would, in a sense, give the human species a loving self-respect. We had moments where we really did blend our consciousness, became one, and it really was a strange and wonderful experience, but we were always looking at what was happening around us. And what we came to perceive or believe was that the survival of the behavioural genetic code in the early eras, like the Stone Age... well, it's a miracle that there's any human beings left at all given the brutal enviroment we moved through in early times. In those days, the very early part of human history, humans survived because we had this very aggressive, instinctual fight-or-flight adrenaline aspect to our behaviour. Anything that was a threat had to be attacked and anything that was different or outside our knowledge, as a clan, would be suspect and considered an enemy to be violently attacked.'

Excerpt and photograph taken from Vested Interest Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in conversation with M. Beasely in DOT DOT DOT 16

David Noonan

My boss is a good friend of Noonan's and they're currently working on an artists book together, so I've been looking at a fair few spreads of his work. I had always wondered where he found such amazing photographs of performers sporting obscure costumes and odd stances, well, it turns out that they're taken from 70's performance art/theatre pamphlets usually sourced in mainland Europe.
Wish I'd thought of that first.

Bidjan VS Van Herpen

In my mind, they make perfect sense together.





and also remind me of Kako Ueda's epic paper cutouts