Oakazine

Chadwick Tyler’s name has long been at the tip of the fashion industry’s collective tongue, shooting everything from lauded fashion editorials for Russh, Dazed & Confused, and ELLE to memorable campaigns for Refinery29′s Save Fashion pop-up and Levi’s. Then came 2009′s Tiberius, the photographer’s first exhibition, featuring a string of disheveled and soot-faced models, established and unknowns alike, displaying a rich array of emotions before Tyler’s able lens. The gallery show solidified his fashion presence while making a steady stride towards the art world, although his formula of picking a great model, “establishing trust and waiting” hasn’t changed much since he developed it. After the jump, Chadwick Tyler talks more about his photography and background, including his hometown address, in case anyone’s interested in making a pilgrimage. — Text by Roxanne Fequiere. Editor: Peter Berwind Humphrey

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The art of joking (and offending) is a natural one for California artist/South Park, MADtv, and Seinfeld alumnus Eric Yahnker whose pieces are awash in pop cultural commentary and absurd satire. An artist of symbols, Yahnker communicates with puzzles and tricks; illustrating how everything in this world is slightly askew via realistic charcoal drawings that are hilarious, yet off-putting, in their weirdness.  A sharp observer of society, Yahnker’s ability to take comforting subjects (from pizza to Mother Theresa) and whip them into  multidimensional statements full of both irreverence (the shallow end) and wisdom (the deep end) is a rarity. One of Yahnker’s foremost weapons is his ability to juxtapose two very normal things, which when paired, create very strange connections. His language is light — jokey and insulting — but it reveals deeper truths once you wrap your mind around the punchline. No matter what, Yahnker’s images are bound to illicit some reaction in everyone in these blase times.  In the following interview Yahnker describes his process of creating, talks about the role of humor in art, the role of art in society, and making connections between random things. — Text by Stefanie Weber.

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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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