"Making pictures is one of the earliest memories I recall. Before learning to write the alphabet I was drawing from my imagination in crayons. And over all the years that followed, there has never been a period where I didn’t continue the practice. I remember for example just after graduating high school and living on my own as a dishwasher with no ambitions in life but to get drunk and high. But when the party was over I would be in the kitchen of a house I didn’t live in, drawing past dawn. Or even when I was a student at the University of California Berkeley, on my way towards a corporate life, having never conceived even the possibility where art could be a profession, I filled my notebooks not with words from lectures, but with sketches of teachers and classmates. And though later I would become a ‘professional artist’, I sometimes look back at such moments if confused with the roots of my creativity. It started purely as an act of autonomy, where nothing outside myself influenced or affected it. I simply drew because I enjoyed it above all else. Sure, like anyone I’ve had plenty of typical life experiences that have brought their own joy, but nothing compares in consistency and meaningfulness that making art has provided. Even during those unavoidable periods with living that challenges us most, drastic life change/loss/death, art has functioned as a medium with giving meaning to suffering, transforming it into an experience with healing. This I hope, begins to describe the art I make. The drawings and paintings you see on this site, are similar to snapshots with the lens pointed in Life's direction with penetrating force. I hope you enjoy any of what's reflected back. Thanks for visiting." - Akira Beard
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Steve Kim is an artist and illustrator. Born in Seoul, Korea, he immigrated to the states at the age of two and currently resides in Oxford, Mississippi. He received his undergraduate degree from Art Center College of Design in 2006 and his masters from Claremont Graduate University in 2010. He has shown in Korea, Italy, London, Amsterdam, Krakow and throughout the United States and clients include The Outline, FRAMƎ, Matter/Medium, Adobe, Hohe Luft, The New Republic, Arc/New Scientist, and The Verge. His work has been featured in print in Quiet Lunch, New American Paintings, Computer Arts, Beautiful Decay, PRINT Magazine, and American Illustration and online on Hi-Fructose, Juxtapoz, BOOOOOOOM!, The Fox Is Black, Supersonic Art, and Tumblr's Radar. Most recently he completed a 3 month residency at the Red Bull House of Art in Detroit.
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Colin Chillag, born in 1971, is a painter based out of Phoenix, AZ.
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Casey Gleghorn grew up in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He is the Director @ Booth Gallery and Last Rites Gallery in New York City. He has been a gallery owner/director for over 9 years, has curated international museum exhibitions, and currently works with various international established and emerging artists.
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Ian Daniel is a filmmaker, producer, writer, and curator. He is the Co-host and Executive Producer of the Emmy-nominated television show GAYCATION on VICELAND, where he and actress Ellen Page explore LGBTQ culture around the world. He is currently in post-production on a feature-length documentary film he directed and is developing other documentary, television, and art projects.
Daniel is also the former Director of Artistic Programs at The Civilians, a theater company in NYC that derives their work from intensive investigations into today’s vital questions, on topics such as death, crime in the US, LGBTQ issues, the porn industry, and the Women’s Prison in Bogota Colombia.
As a curator, he has organized several exhibits and multimedia events at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, Exit Art, LaMaMa Gallery, Storefront Bushwick and the Waterpod Project in NYC and Brooklyn.
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Dave Elitch first garnered attention with his band Daughters of Mara’s debut album “I am Destroyer” in 2007, but his time touring with the American progressive rock band The Mars Volta in 2009-2010 is what really put him on the map. He has since worked with Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, M83, The 1975, Juliette Lewis, Big Black Delta, as well as many others. He is a regular in the LA session scene, including performing on various records, syncs and film scores for major motion pictures, (most recently “Trolls” and “Logan.”) In addition to playing, he also conducts master-class lectures worldwide and keeps a busy private teaching practice in Los Angeles where he has developed a reputation as THE technique/body mechanic specialist who has helped many of the industries top players as well as educators.
“Ever since I decided that I was going to be a drummer, I wanted to be the best I could possibly be, and I put all my faculties toward that. Eventually that can take a toll, so I kind of hit a wall and needed a break. I’ve always had an appreciation for art, and luckily where I live in LA there are all these rad galleries – the Getty, the Hammer, Thinkspace, C.A.V.E., Giant Robot – so I frequent those. I get a different vantage point on the creative experience. I started getting inspired by documentaries about artists, like The Radiant Child about Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rivers and Tides about Andy Goldsworthy, the Gerhard Richter documentary Painting, Francis Bacon movies on YouTube… It’s just such a fascinating take on making sense of the world around you. Plus, I’ve dedicated my life to knowing all there is to know about drums, and I’m expected to know everything, With art, I can just go from my gut, so there’s a huge sense of freedom and escape for me there.” – Dave Elitch
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With iconic photography of young iconoclasts, musicians, and bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, The Circle Jerks, Ice Cube, and Bad Religion, as well as hundreds of other early punk and hip hop bands, Edward Colver was an insider to the turbulent and burgeoning underground music scene of early-eighties Los Angeles. Since active in photography for more than forty years, he first documented an average of five local shows a week using only a 35mm camera, flash, and Kodak Tri-X film.
Colver’s book, Blight at the End of the Funnel, collects some of the best of his hardcore punk and promotional work for record companies. His shot of Henry Rollins for the cover of Black Flag’s “Damaged” album was used on billboards and lamppost flyers throughout Los Angeles during the Annenberg Space for Photography’s Who Shot Rock and Roll installation in 2012, curated by Brooklyn Museum curator and author Gail Buckland. In addition to numerous other openings, including Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects gallery and a solo show at Lethal Amounts this last year.
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Winning the Archibald Prize as Guy Maestri did in 2009 would be a defining moment in most artist’s careers, but he is quick to cite physical immersion in the landscape as revolutionary to his painting practice. It’s easy to gloss over the history of plein-air as a European tradition, born of gentle grasses and mild sunlight. Practiced in Australia, away from the slip of green coastline, plein-air demands rigor of vast dimensions. For Maestri, the material and temporal challenges of extended painting sessions in the hard country around Hill End, Wilcannia and Broken Hill has been instrumental in a new understanding of local art histories and ecologies, as well as the atmospheric and elemental qualities of landscape. Beholden to intimacies of place, the artist stakes out a subtle void or stillness in these dry landscapes without surrendering his animated, almost kinetic approach to paint.
Masquerading as a shady retreat, the studio retains its disciplinarian attitude but demands a different kind of focus. Here the void is more theatrical, Maestri’s compositions orchestrated with operatic tempo. Desiccated road-kill (the anti-trophy of inland highways) perform as contemporary Gothic vanitas, shot through with equal measure of beauty and pathos, the eye and the heart facing off.
A graduate of the National Art School, Maestri won the 2014 Kings School Art Prize and the 2013 Premier’s Plein Air Painting Prize. He is a regular finalist in the Wynne Prize for Landscape at the Art Gallery of NSW and his work is held in several public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery and Parliament House collections.
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Virginie Picot – originally from Paris – has devoted the last 17 years of her career to talent management and visual creations, specializing in the fashion and music industries. Currently living in NYC, she is an agent and Executive Producer for Iconoclast Image and leads the print department. She represents emerging photographers such as Olivia Bee, David Uzochukwu, and Mathieu Cesar, as well as established talents such as Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Cyrille de Vignemont, and Gus Van Sant. She has worked alongside globally renowned recording artists such as Katy Perry, Future, and Kesha, as well as fashion designers including Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy, Damir Doma, and Zaid Affa.
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Brad Kunkle was raised in rural Pennsylvania and graduated from Kutztown University with a BFA in painting in 2001. Rather than continue his artistic pursuits in an academic environment, he became a house painter. That dubious, professional beginning however, taught him valuable lessons that became crucial to his later success. Having taught himself how to gild with precious metals for some of those residential projects, he later implemented those skills in his personal, fine art works.
His debut, fine art exhibition in 2010 at Arcadia Contemporary in NYC sold out before the show's opening night and was followed by a second sold-out exhibition two years later. Since then he has exhibited his paintings in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, Miami, and his works can be found in private collections all over the world. His paintings have twice graced the cover of American Art Collector Magazine and have been published extensively online and in print in such highly read publications as Hi-Fructose, American Arts Quarterly, Lapham’s Quarterly, Juxtapoz and Fine Arts Connoisseur. Kunkle continues to be represented by Arcadia Contemporary in Los Angeles, where he had his debut, West Coast solo exhibition in November of 2016. More recently, Kunkle collaborated as an Art Director with the award-winning, special effects house, Imaginary Forces as his paintings became the foundation for the main title sequence of the Netflix original series, “Anne With An E.”
He lives and works in New York's Hudson Valley.
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“What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin—to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.” - Henry Miller
Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe’s expansive discography—a theme that ties together her ceaseless explorations in unorthodox textures, haunting melodies, and mining the grandeur embedded within ugliness and pain. With her sixth official album Hiss Spun, Wolfe adopts Miller’s quest to become empowered by embracing the mess of the self, to control the tumult of the soul in hopes of reigning in the chaos of the world around us. “I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free,” Wolfe says of the album before extrapolating on the broader scope of her new collection of songs. “You’re just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting fucked over and killed for shitty reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months, and then you remember it’s been fucked for a long time, it’s been fucked since the beginning. It’s overwhelming and I have to write about it.”
Hiss Spun was recorded by Kurt Ballou in Salem, Massachusetts at the tail end of winter 2017 against a backdrop of deathly quiet snow-blanketed streets and the hissing radiators of warm interiors. While past albums operated on the intimacy of stripped-down folkmusic (The Grime and the Glow, Unknown Rooms), or the throbbing pulse of supplemental electronics (Pain Is Beauty, Abyss), Wolfe’s latest offering wrings its exquisiteness out of a palette of groaning bass, pounding drums, and crunching distortion. It’s an album that inadvertently drew part of its aura from the cold white of the New England winter, though the flesh-and-bone of the material was culled from upheavals in Wolfe’s personal life, and coming to terms with years of vulnerability, anger, self-destruction, and dark family history. Aside from adding low-end heft with gratuitous slabs of fuzz bass, longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm contributed harrowing swaths of sound collages from sources surrounding the artist and her band in recent years—the rumble of street construction at a tour stop in Prague, the howl of a coyote outside Wolfe’s rural house in California, the scrape of machinery on the floor of a warehouse at a down-and-out friend’s workplace. Music is rendered out of dissonance—bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.
The album opens with the sickening bang of “Spun”, where a lurching bottom-heavy riff provided by Chisholm and Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age, Failure) serves as a foundation to a sultry mantra of fever-dream longing and desire. The first third of Hiss Spun—whether it’s the ominous twang and cataclysmic dynamics of “16 Psyche”, the icy keyboard lines, restless pulse and harrowing bellows of Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, SUMAC) on “Vex”, or the patient repetition and devastating choruses of “The Culling—all carry the weight of desperation, lost love, and withdrawal. Wolfe’s introspection and existential dread turns outwards to the crumbling world around us with “Particle Flux”, an examination of the casualties of war set against an aural sea of static. White noise is a constant thread through Hiss Spun, with Wolfe finding solace in the knowledge that radio static is the sound of the universe expanding outwards from the Big Bang—a reminder that even dissonance has ties to creation. The electronic thump of “Offering” serves as an ode to the Salton Sea and the encroaching calamities stemming from climate change. The obsession with white noise and global destruction carries over into “Static Hum”, where the merciless percussive battery of Wolfe’s former bandmateand current drummer Jess Gowrie helps deliver the dire weight of a sonnet dedicated to a “burning planet.” By the time the album closes with “Scrape”, Wolfe has come full circle and turned her examinations back inward, reflecting over her own mortality with arguably the most commanding vocal performance in her entire oeuvre.
“The album is cyclical, like me and my moods,” Wolfe says of Hiss Spun. “Cycles, obsession, spinning, centrifugal force—all with gut feelings as the center of the self.” And it’s an album that Wolfe sees as a kind of exorcism. “I’m at odds with myself… I got tired of trying to disappear. The record became very personal in that way. I wanted to open up more, but also create my own reality.” Every Chelsea Wolfe album is cathartic, but never before has both the artist and her audience so desperately needed this kind of emotional purging. Sargent House is proud to release Hiss Spun to the world on September 22nd, 2017.
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Nika Roza Danilova has been recording and performing as Zola Jesus for more than a decade. As a classically trained opera singer with a penchant for noisy, avant-garde sounds, she launched her career with a series of lo-fi releases that pitted her soaring vocals against harsh industrial clatter and jittery synths. The signature Zola Jesus sound became more hi-fi as she began to explore her own skewed vision of pop music on releases like Stridulum, Valusia, and Conatus. With the release of Conatus, Danilova was propelled to regular appearances on festival stages all around the world, as well as a special performance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. That era culminated in the release of Versions, a collection of string quartet interpretations of her most beloved work, conducted by J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus). That album and subsequent tour were followed by her most hi-fi outing to date, Taiga. Now, coinciding with her return to both the Wisconsin woods in which she was raised and her longtime label, Sacred Bones Records, Zola Jesus has produced Okovi, her darkest album yet. It is, in Danilova’s words, “a deeply personal snapshot of loss, reconciliation, and a sympathy for the chains that keep us all grounded to the unforgiving laws of feral nature.”
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"Jesse Draxler is an artist best known for his collage and mixed media works, though with his new exhibition "Tire Fire" we find him returning to the medium that sparked his love of image making, drawing. As a child growing up in rural Wisconsin Draxler drew incessantly. Being that his father was a mechanic he would spend hours upon hours drawing cars, trucks, and engine parts. Later in adolescence, his attention changed as circumstances became bleak.
Draxler’s mother was in a near-fatal car accident when he was nine. Upon her recovery, over a year later, his parents were divorced. His mother, whom he was now living with, soon remarried. Then just months after the wedding she was ran over and killed by her new husband in his truck, an event to which he arrived just moments later.
In the following years, Draxler states that he barely remembers a thing. These times of pervasive uncertainty and loss changed him forever and his focus shifted to much darker interests. He was always an outcast from his peers, but from this time on Draxler leaned into his outsider lot in life. It wasn’t until almost two decades later that he began to see a light at the end of a very dark tunnel.
Themes of bewilderment, isolation, ambiguity, and absurdity are all strongly represented in Draxler’s work, along with frustration and aggression. Yet these are not endpoints but have rather become the in-roads to deeper understanding and acceptance. It is clear he has spent the better part of his life straddling the line between fear and ecstasy, the beautiful and the grotesque. The result is Draxler’s unique ability to present a point of view in which the subtle nuances of the human condition are concisely illuminated, satisfying a psychological and emotional itch that so seldom gets scratched."
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"Photographer John Kilar’s site will tell you, simply, that he is a nomad. Portraits and landscapes by Kilar will show you that too, with a raw presentation of untamed characters and equally wild and beautiful locations. Variety does not shake the colorful, documentary aesthetic that is true to his photos, which show a curious admiration for each subject.
John Kilar’s images can be found in Oyster Magazine, VICE, Dazed & Confused, Purple Fashion, and DIS Magazine. His client list includes Heineken, Urban Outfitters, The Cobra Snake, and several other lifestyle-saavy brands which Kilar worked with while living in Venice Beach, California."
Text by Linnea Stephan @ Juxtapoz
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Originally hailing from Toronto, Canada, Michelle Groskopf is a Los Angeles based photographer. Her work is a mix of photo journalism, portraiture and street photography. She holds a BFA in film and video production from the School Of Visual Arts in New York where she also taught as an adjunct professor in the graduate film and video dept. She is a member of the celebrated flash photography collective Full Frontal Flash. Michelle is dedicated to empowering youth through photography and education initiatives working with the Lucie Foundation, Educare and Youth Arts to inspire the next generation of photographers and artists. Her work has been shown around the world and featured in publications such as The British Journal Of Photography, American Photo, The Huffington Post, Vice Magazine and It’s Nice That, among others. Her clients include, Refinery 29, Bloomberg Businessweek, Vice Magazine, Marie Claire France, Aftenposten, and Stern Magazine. Her first monograph is being published by The Magenta Foundation and will be released in the fall of 2017.
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Writer / photographer, Scot Sothern, bounced around for forty years. In 2010, at 60, his first solo exhibit, LOWLIFE, photos and stories of life with street prostitutes, was held at the notorious Drkrm Gallery in Los Angeles. His first book of the same title was published in the U.K. by Stanley Barker in 2011. The British Journal of Photography called LOWLIFE, “The years’ most controversial photobook.” Scot’s work has since been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, London, and Paris. In 2013 he began a biweekly column, Nocturnal Submissions, for VICE Magazine, and Curb Service: A Memoir, was published by Soft Skull Press. STREETWALKERS, stories and photographs was published by powerHouse Books in February 2016. Writer, Jerry Stahl, called it “An absolutely amazing and essential book." BIG CITY, published in 2017 by Stalking Horse Press, is Sothern’s first novel.
Guest Interviewer: Nolwen Cifuentes
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GEMS is the evolving ethereal pop project of former lovers Lindsay Pitts and Clifford John Usher. After an agonizing romantic split, the duo are continuing to make music together with the project: ‘Every Full Moon’. The full moon represents a time of culmination and fulfillment, of coming full circle, and a symbolic illumination in our inner lives that is mirrored in the night sky. GEMS will be releasing a new song with every full moon as they work through the ghosts of their past and face the uncertainty of the future. Their hope is that the music they create can serve as a vehicle to transform the pain and work through things that otherwise seem totally overwhelming.
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"I'm an art director, motion designer, and illustrator from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I've been working online since 2003 with an extensive list of creatives in music videos, live visual packages, lookbooks, and everything art related.
I have studied Beauty Arts in Bachillerato de Bellas Artes in my natal city, La Plata. I also have a teaching degree in Beauty Arts." - Gustavo Torres (aka Kidmograph)."
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John F Simon Jr. is a multimedia artist and software art pioneer who work and installations are found in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. In 2011, he collaborated with Icelandic singer Bjork to write an app for her album, Biophilia. Simon's newest publication, Drawing Your Own Path: 33 Practices at the Crossroads of Art and Meditation, is out now by Parallax Press. Simon grew up in central Louisiana and currently lives and works in Sugar Loaf, New York.
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Casey is a painter based in New York City.
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Rebecca Farr (b. 1973, Los Angeles, California)
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Rebecca Farr recently exhibited her most recent show at Klowden Mann, Out of Nothing and was reviewed by New American Paintings. In 2015, Farr was awarded a residency at Kaus Australis in Rotterdam, and was featured in a group exhibition at Kaus in the Fall of 2015. Farr has exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Houston, Istanbul, Rotterdam, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Her work is held in private collections both nationally and internationally, and she recently completed two years as faculty artist in the education department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she has been developing youth driven public works. Rebecca is the founder of CREATE/ACTION, an artist driven community organizing collective based in Los Angeles.
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This podcast episode was originally recorded in Los Angeles, CA @ NOH/WAVE's event entitled MIND/WAVE on March 18th, 2017 with guest speakers Joshua Hagler, Jarell Perry, Maja Ruznic, and Yoshino.
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Unit London is an arts space and gallery founded in 2013 by Joe Kennedy and Jonny Burt. Unit London was born from a desire to break down the barriers of elitism and to include people in the contemporary art world - whether they are enthusiasts, first-timers, new collectors, or seasoned collectors and institutions - they strongly believe that everybody should be able to enjoy the world's most amazing art.
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Justin Hopkins interviews Martin Wittfooth and Sergio Barrale.
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About Elly: Originally from Ottawa, Elly Smallwood graduated from OCAD University in 2011 and now works as an artist in Toronto. Her paintings are intensely personal, a visual exploration of her mind and body, and those of the people around her.
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