“This is how it all begins: from blinding darkness enters light; soft, beautiful, expanding, violent, maddening, defiant”
ROOMS 16: The Fashtons The Cover Artists Uncovered
Photos by Alexandra Uhart
It’s that time of the year to join the festive reflections on togetherness. We here wouldn’t of course, resist revisiting the values of family when it’s novel and tantalising.
For ROOMS 16, we are welcomed to tap into the creative unity of The Fashtons – formed by husband-and-wife artists Ben Ashton and Fiona Garden. Ben being a figurative painter and installation artist, Fiona a music and fashion photographer: each is as adept in their own fields as in their collaboration.
I will always be drawn to the play of light on bone. The architecture of a face or body, as it stands, in light, whether made up or bare, discovered or intended, is what inspires me. It’s a constant wonder that in that interplay between light and shadow, I can capture the essence of a person – it’s an endless marvel.—Fiona Garden
I feel with every self-portrait I produce, I am constantly reminded of my own mortality and as a result I have become fixated upon the idea of legacy. I have plundered the history of painting, initially to teach myself to paint but after that I would always turn to the security of history to make my next decision.—Ben Ashton
For now, you can only read the eloquent and revealing exchange with Ben and Fiona in ROOMS 16, our hand-selected gift to you. And Merry Christmas for that matter.
ROOMS 16, out now
The music videos of 2014 we watched and loved
We dug deep to bring you artist and directors who are totally changing the conventions of music videos. Here are some of our favourites from 2014 (in no particular order):
FKA Twigs: Two Weeks
Two Weeks is a siren’s song in which FKA Twigs is seducing someone from another relationship. In the Nabil-directed video, Twigs looks nothing short of an Egyptian sun goddess, dripping in gold with a Twigian tribe as her court (she plays every role in case you haven’t noticed). The video is one long panning shot, slowly rolling out the grandeur of the entire scene. The video appears to be a nod to movie ‘The Queen of the Damned’ where Aaliyah plays a badass vampire. The video showcases Twig’s empowered brand of femininity.
Tommy Kruise: Hers
Director Martin Pariseau is demystifying our notions of mental illness in Tommy Kruise’s Hers video (I was really taken aback and pleasantly surprised the first time I watched it). The video follows Bogdan Chiochiu, a (real-life) fan of Kruise’s with Asperger’s syndrome. Pariseau met Bogdan in Cejep, a pre-grad institution in Quebec. Bogdan speaks six languages, is passionate about his music, and is obsessed with radio waves. Parsieau paints the picture of how isolating life can be when institutionalized, but also makes audiences realize that they have more in common with Bogdan than they think.
Arca and Jesse Kanda: Trauma 1
Trauma is an ongoing film project by Arca and Jesse Kanda that was first partially exhibited at Moma PS1. Their works together are wonderfully demented. Trauma’s score takes from Arca’s musical works. Scene I depicts a disfigured baby dance crew – think Missy Elliot gone totally off the deep end – celebrating their inner and outer beauty in the limelight.
Jamie XX, Four Tet, Koreless, and John Talabot score Sofia Mattioli’s Continuum
Blame it on my bias for these producers being some of my favorites, but the concept of this video is why it’s on this list. The London-based artist and writer, Sofia Mattioli and collaborator Rebecca Salvadori presented a silent film they made to the four musicians; each was given a different bit of the movie to compose music for. Although separately written, all the songs flow seamlessly together and bring out the essence of their various sections of film.
Tiga: Bugatti
Tiga’s Bugatti music video is as if Luis Buñuel remade “Aspen Extreme”. The video consists of a deadpan Tiga and bits of surrealist corporate and ski scenes. Humorous, twisted, and 80’s aesthetic-fueled, director Helmi has perfectly embodied the quirky, fun attitude of the song.
Future Brown: Vernáculo
Future Brown’s Vernáculo is a tripped out reggaeton track featuring the dirty rhymes of Maluca. The video sheds light on the ridiculousness of beauty advertising by appropriating its language and esthetics. Future Brown products function as the base for physical perfection. It was commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami, who describe it as “an exercise in capitalist surrealism”.
Perfume Genius: Queen
Cody Critcheloe (SSION) directed the video that follows the journey of Mike Hadreas (Perfume Genius) and a female companion. The two are on a quest to find themselves – or something – I think. The video was inspired by the reactions that Hadreas faces to his identity by macho insecure dudes. The video is a charming surrealist tale about embracing yourself.
Mykki Blanco: She Gutta
It’s been a busy year for Mykki Blanco. Between creating music with the legendary Kathleen Hanna, and showing non-stop love and support for her contemporaries in Russia (currently swamped with oppressive anti-gay legislation) through various means, Blanco dropped the video for She Gutta, and it’s hectic (in the best way possible, of course). The video is shot like a documentary and follows the fictitious LA gangs Hoover Locos, Shadow Park Locos, and the Columbia Lol Psychos (that last one gave me a good laugh). The mainstream media’s frigid stereotypes are shaken up as nightwalker-esque women are thuggish with agency and homosexuality is paralleled with machoness. Violent news clips intermingle with anime cartoons which further adds to the videos manic energy. Mykki Blanco is the dopest.
Jamie XX: Sleep Sound
Directors Sofia Mattioli and Cherise Payne explore the themes of silence and sound. Inspired by personal experiences, the video follows a group of hearing impaired people from the Manchester Deaf Center who discover music through dance, emotion, and imagination. Warning: this one pulls at the heartstrings.
GEMS: Sinking Stone
The video for GEMS’ Sinking Stone tells the story of two love struck youngings getting in trouble with a couple of gangsters. Directed by BRTHR, the trippy film stars everyone’s favorite ratchet siblings, the ATL Twins. It's the kind of short that makes you crave trouble and a Bonnie and Clyde style romance.
ArtEZ Institute of the Arts
On January the 19th, artists Hayden Kays and Benjamin Murphy will attempt to make this year’s Blue Monday a little less glum with a gift exhibition to be hosted at East London’s Lollipop Gallery.
ROOMS 15
The Breakable issue:
The Ultimate Manual for Creative Survival.
When something is beautiful, it is very easily consumed and it shouldn’t be about readily consuming. It should be about pausing and relooking. – Lara Jensen, the London based designer and artist takes over the main stage and opens our new issue filled with stories of life adventures, flourishing bravery and conquered barricades.
Giving a voice to our ever growing collection of cutting edge artists and creatives we bring you in this issue: exclusive interview with Another Earth's directing prodigy Mike Cahill who talks to us about his new film I Origins. What is it like to write the dialogue for the most famous geeks in the world? We meet The Big Bang Theory writer Eric Kaplan. Influential musician and now music video director, Douglas Hart from The Jesus and Mary Chain on the dependent music industry. Paper Rain founder Stephan Wembacher on creative entrepreneurial. Bloomberg Aspirations, we talk to Director Kirsty Ogg and the New Contemporaries. The Technê Revolution, when Science and Technology become Art, feat Liam Young, Koen Vanmechelen and Memo Akten. Also in this issue Mark Neville, Connie Lim, Charlotte Kingsnorth, Kate Simko and many more!
ROOMS presents KÖEN VANMECHELEN - Darwin’s Dream
ROOMS presents
Koen Vanmechelen - Darwin’s Dream
Interviews with artist Koen Vanmechelen, curators James Putnam and Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts
The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Church
15 November - 14 December 2014
*Read more about Koen Vanmechelen and our interview in the current issue ROOMS 15
ROOMS 15 present: ARI WEINKLE
After featuring his work in our latest issue, ROOMS caught up with artist Ari Weinkle for an exclusive insight into his working methodology
EGON SCHIELE: The radical nude
The Courtauld Gallery opens its doors to what is perhaps the most important exhibition of the year: ‘Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude’.
Today, the Courtauld Gallery opens its doors to one of the most important exhibitions of the year, ‘Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude’, a study on his drawings of male and female nudes that radicalised early 20th Century Art.
The collection brings together an exceptional body of works that are absolutely unrelenting in their technique and play on form. As the first exhibition on Egon Schiele in the last 25 years, ‘The Radical Nude’ proves itself to be a real breakthrough as the artist’s anguished, incessant and decisive lines reveal the terrible greatness in human bodies.
Fascinated by the human body in its simplest form, Schiele puts at the vanguard of his work his sister, his lovers, male friends, prostitutes, pregnant women, his later wife and himself. Through deliberate, almost awkward postures, he turns pink-fleshed bodies into haunting, emaciated figures that become even more intense and important, especially when set against the backdrop of the conservative, bourgeois atmosphere of Vienna in the early 20th Century.
There is a delight to Schiele’s unrestrained boldness – or perhaps curiosity, in tying in life and decay in such a vivid, complex way. Through his stark and raw drawings, he offers an electrifying and penetrative gaze that matters even in our contemporary times.
Egon Schiele, who trained in Vienna under Gustav Klimt in the early 1900s, quickly became known for his fascination with life, death, desire and sex –most of his works were considered pornography and he was imprisoned for two months in 1912 for contravening public decency. An unconventional artist, he subverted old traditions –his 1910 breakthrough was key in the radicalisation of the life-drawing room set-up and models’ poses, and his Gertrude studies (his sister) were crucial in his overturn of the passive, reclining nudes that adorned all the other walls of museums at the time.
Also present in the Courtauld’s collection are Schiele’s drawings of his ‘models from the street’, directly influenced by his vision that Vienna was a city with hypocrisy at heart, through which he shamelessly pulled out the most taboo issues of the time –poverty, vice, prostitution, at times rendering its subjects into creatures of desire, and at other times into tormented figures.
The intelligence of the Courtauld exhibition lies in its chosen chronology: from the nude self-portraits to his meticulous study of pregnant women and their newborns to his final years before his untimely death in 1918 from Spanish Influenza, aged just 28. It is fascinating to see Schiele’s evolution in technique and approach, and there is an honesty, an immediacy in his drawings that one cannot find in his paintings.
‘The Radical Nude’ is a unique collection that puts forward the palpable anguish, strength, provocation and desire behind Egon Schiele’s work. His unflinching portrayal of the human body is a must-see and places this exhibition at the forefront of London’s artistic cultural scene.
‘Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude’ is on at the Courtauld Gallery from the 23rd October to the 18thJanuary 2014.