Oakazine

A pile of boxes in an Ikea aisle tilts to the side a little too sadly and gesturally. A lumpy pebble-encrusted oval has a slit of peony pink ear flesh shining through on one side; two blank sockets as eyes. The bottom of a man’s face melts into a pastel glop of sprinkles, ice cream, and sticky red sauce, a greedy bite cutting into the side of his head where his ear should be. All of these images are of humans; a peek of flesh, fingers, or shoes — even just a human-like silhouette — there to ascertain this. But what these images, and the rest of the artfully-curated images in Gestalten’s new release Doppelganger Images of the Human Being, do is question what exactly constitutes a human portrait in a time when what it means to be, and even look like, a human is up in the air. With science on the verge of allowing us to trade in our natural forms — like shabby old suitcases — for new, technologically-augmented forms, we have to wonder at what point we’ll cease being humans and start being objects. Indeed, it doesn’t take much au naturalness these days for something, anything, to be labeled a human. Prime example: GaGa who recently took to the red carpet in a giant white egg. “There’s Lady GaGa” commentators remarked, referring to the big white orb.

The artistic approach to the human form — a constant subject since the beginning of art itself — has been constantly reconfigured throughout history. According to the preface essay on Post-Digital Identity by Robert Klanten, the rendering of the human usually changes dramatically in times of technological upheaval. During the Renaissance, when science first began locking horns with religion, the human form and its every sinew, tendon, and muscle, was studied and drawn with exhaustive scientific precision. With the dawning of the Industrial Revolution, Cubism, and Futurism, the human form was fractured into geometric pieces and interchangeable parts. Now, in this so-called “post-digital” age where we are morphing into what we Tweet, post, and blog, traditional corporeality is becoming less and less relevant. This online identity is referred to by Robert Klanten in his preface essay as “the doppelganger.” It is an extension of self that may soon overtake the self as we know it; it lives and breathes in the digital realm and instead of blood has black and white 0s and 1s coursing through its veins. This doppelganger has the means to build empires, make friends, and influence people without any physical interaction — it’s an idealized and hyperbolized identity, free to grow without flesh as a limit. So how do we embody this doppleganger and capture its essence via art? This is the question that Doppelganger poses and seeks to answer.

Ranging from embellishment and reverse tromp l’oeil to sculpture and collage, the works in Doppelganger are creative expressions of the human during this time of uncertainty. The works seek to define what drives the modern day human emotionally, sexually, physically, and philosophically. Check out more pictures after the jump. — Text by Marlo Kronberg

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When I trawl through one-pound bins of exhibition catalogues and obscure artist books it makes art feel very fleeting and vulnerable,” explains London-via-Oz artist David Noonan about his bent for rummaging around the dusty piles of London’s antiquarian bookshop. It’s this understanding of evanescence — and the curiosity for what will subsequently materialize — that informs Noonan’s  sepia-toned silkscreens which seem to be culled straight from that interstitial fade between movie scenes. Emulating screen grabs from experimental 1920s Dadaist or German expressionist films (that, or lost Tim Burton flicks), each Noonan piece is a little self-contained narrative unto itself; prodding us to connect two or more seemingly unrelated images using our own subjective experiences as the binding threads. Thusly, the surreal double exposed tableaus suggest emotional states and cross-dimensional relationships: a hazy trio of owls superimposed over a man and woman seem to comment on the psychic states of the humans; meanwhile the visage of a handsome young guy fading into a band of half-naked zombie warriors — his eyes turning into alien white slits as the leg of a female zombie warrior materializes where his pupil used to be — suggests a relationship between the natural and supernatural. Indeed his characters are so theatrically ghoulish — ranging from Edward Scissorhands lookalikes to possessed pierrots to one-dimensional plywood mimes with heavy black stripes bifurcating their faces — that it’s not hard to see why so many people automatically ask Noonan to list off his favorite directors. Despite this, the artist maintains that it’s still images, not moving ones, that have the ultimate impact on his pieces.

Originally from Ballarat, Australia — a grey and rainy town apparently best known for the “1854 Eureka rebellion — the only armed civil uprising in the history of Australia,” Noonan has called London his permanent home since 2005.  Since 1993 he’s consistently shown worldwide, and has opened solo at places like the Palais de Tokyo, David Kordansky, Foxy Productions, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, with a show slated  to open later this year at The Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. OAKAZINE talked to David Noonan a bit about what drives his amazing work. Check out the interview after the jump. — Text by Marlo Kronberg. Images courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.

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Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Oglander’s love of trespassing in abandoned houses naturally led him to the subjects of many of his mixed-media canvases — in moldy piles of forgotten books and magazines. It is in the most daunting of such piles that Oglander’s heroines have sought him out — luring him in with a sultry bedroom look as if to huskily intone, “What’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this? You know you want to save me.” And save them he does, giving them life anew in his colorfully abstract fantasies. Favoring buxom broads of a certain Annie Get Your Gun school of vivacious sensuality, Oglander’s technical sophistication merged with his winsome little-boy-ogling-the-bods-of-bodacious-vixens perspective  manages to give the “sexy woman”  life anew as a subject.OAKAZINE let Oglander take his story into his own hands. Read it after the jump. — Text by Marlo Kronberg. Photo courtesy of United Culture TV.. — Text by Marlo Kronberg. Photo courtesy of United Culture TV.

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The recently opened art exhibit called “Seduction, Queer Visions of Masculinity” is the result of a focused mission to discover NYC’s most prominent gay artists’ erotic fantasies.  In conjunction with The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, P.S.J. hosted the event to support gay art but also to have a glimpse into the spirit of gay attraction today.  “My wife and I live and work in the West Village/Chelsea area and feel it’s extremely important to be active members of our community,” says Patrick Sullivan, founder and director of P.J.S. Exhibitions. “The LGBT Community Center does great work throughout New York, and we’re excited to help this organization continue to flourish.”  It is with uncertainty that we view images of sexual men, while similar images of women are everywhere.  On display are 24 artists and many visions and mediums, but the common denominator of the exhibit was masculinity sexualized or men being sexy, raising questions of why is it taboo to sexualize a man, or rather, why is it acceptable to sexualize women.  From pure phallus fantasies to slow Sunday mornings in bed, it was a hodge-podge homage.  About 100 works are on display at P.J.S. in Chelsea (14^th Street between 7th and 8th) until May 10. More images after the jump. — Text by Stefanie Weber. Editor: Peter Berwind Humphrey

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Huge canvases filled with movement and color recline against the walls of the bright Brooklyn studio. Katherine Bernhardt’s latest series of paintings depict and blow-up details of intricate Moroccan carpets, yet their acrylic renditions are far from static. Vibrant colors, quick lines, and dripping shapes bring Bernhardt’s internationally-known paintings to life, and the same can be said of her coveted portrait series of pop icons and fashion models. While Bernhardt’s work is largely representational – check out her fantastic Swatch watch series – her paintings echo the style of abstract expressionism. Each work illustrates her ability to see beyond the surface, and allows her to transform a recognizable object, pattern, or face into an expression, a color, or a design. Her upcoming show The Rites of Spring Passage at Carbon 12 Gallery in Dubai will feature enormous paintings imprinted with original henna designs, as well as a series of pop icon portraits (this time of Rihanna and Nicki Minaj among others). The Missouri-born artist, whose past collaborations include paintings for Chanel’s Manhattan store and 2 covers for Flaunt Magazine, cites for current inspiration Gee’s Bend quilts and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. When asked what music she prefers, R & B is her immediate response. When asked about her plans for the next several months, her response is equally decisive: “Well, the henna design paintings, then the show in Dubai. Then I don’t really have anything scheduled because I’m having a baby.”  We caught up with her at her Brooklyn studio one rainy afternoon and talked shop. Interview after the jump. — Text by Eugenie Dalland

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South African-based artist/photographer Roger Ballen’s black and white photographs are so dizzyingly incoherent – with stray narrative threads sticking out in all directions — that they make you feel as if you’re peeking through the lens of insanity. They oftentimes focus on an odd cast of unwashed, gnarled-visaged characters posed amidst utter squalor: wires inexplicably dangle from the ceilings; juvenile stick figures are obsessively scrawled on the walls; broken toys litter the floors; and stray, mangy animals chew on dirty doll parts. Despite hinting at photo-documentary, the photos’ surreal tableaux and recurring motifs (dirty feet, wires, stick drawings) are too pitch-perfectly composed to be natural. They possess the lo-fi brand of dereliction characteristic of outsider artists like Miroslav Tichy and Gerard Petrus Fieret, while their lighting and well-thought-out textural juxtapositions also speak of a highly developed and refined talent. Although there is a lot that is still unanswered about where exactly fact ends and fiction begins in Ballen’s photos, there are some things that are for certain.

The truth is that, as far as we know, Ballen is neither a derelict nor a madman, but instead a world-renowned photographer whose works are in the collections of the MoMA, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Brooklyn Museum (just to name a few). A New York native and Geology Ph.D, Ballen moved to South Africa in 1982 to work as a geologist, but soon found this career usurped by his passion for art and photography (an early passion, as his mother was a prominent NYC photography gallery owner who knew the likes of Cartier-Bresson, Steichen, Arbus, and Kertesz). During the last few years of Apartheid, Ballen began photographing an overlooked population of impoverished white South African platteland folks in their dorps (Afrikaans for ‘villages’) and houses. Initially these were documentary photos unreliant on photographic trickery or staging. As Ballen evolved, as both an artist and a photographer, he began casting these people as players in his fictive narratives; setting up staged scenes in their actual dwellings. Since 1979, Ballen has published eight books and won almost a dozen awards worldwide. In 2008 he set up The Roger Ballen Foundation in order to promote photography education and bring applicable cultural programming to South Africa. He remains one of South Africa’s national artistic treasures. OAKAZINE had the honor of talking to Roger Ballen a bit about his past, present, and future. Interview after the jump. — Text by Marlo Kronberg.  Portrait of Roger by Marguerite Rossouw

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I first met artist Korakrit Arunanondchai at an underground dance party I was invited to by a friend who had been his classmate at RISD. Even in the sweaty sea of cleverly attired art school kids, Korakrit stood out;  his long black hair, coke bottle glasses, and dizzying psychedelic t-shirt glowing brightly under the black lights. Certain people wear their artistry on their sleeve, and you can automatically tell that they move to a different rhythm, constructing their worlds according to an inherent aesthetic law that comes to them as naturally as breathing. People like this, with little effort, alchemize plain white rooms into palaces, rags into couture, and blank canvases into new realities. Everything they touch is catalytically turned into art — even their gestures, accents, and footsteps are aesthetically loaded statements. Immediately, from across a pretty dark dance floor, I could gauge that Korakrit is one of those people. And] I was correct.

Later on in the night after being introduced by mutual friends, I learned that Korakrit hails from Thailand, is studying for his MFA at Columbia, and recently did a reinterpretation of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Before we parted ways, he slipped me his website URL, and the next day, as promised, I checked it out. I was blown away by what I found, which was an intricate universe constructed according to a completely singular, and uniform, visual code.  In most of the works, neon-colored  figures fit together to comprise fractal-like psychedelic landscapes, calling to mind everything from moon craters to neon leafage to flowers. Even though psychedelic art can sometimes be a bit of an eye-roll-inducer, Korakrit’s work is so charged with his own charisma that you can’t help but get drawn in.  The works seem as if  Korakrit himself was liquified and splattered all over a canvas, or melted down then molded back into a black-lit statue.  It’s always an amazing thing when self-expression is so secondary, and Korakrit is particularly skilled at infusing everything he creates with himself — loudly and unmistakably.  Korakrit answered some questions for OAKAZINE, and brought out the hidden artist in even his scanner. Interview after the jump. — Text by Marlo Kronberg

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