Azealia Banks is everywhere. Did you see that shoot that’s in Dossier? Did you hear that new track, Jumanji? In the spirit of summer and excess and hype, here are some outtakes from our shoot with Michael Flores of the young Rapunzel taking off a pair of sunglasses. Don’t be a Kool Aid dude, one-two.

Shirt: Fred Perry
Skirt: Jac Langheim
Sunglasses: Jeremy Scott
Necklace: Bing Bang by Anna Sheffield
Lingerie: The Lake and Stars

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New York City based photographer, painter, and videographer Marilyn Minter began her art career in 1989 with an unflinching series of paintings based on still images from hardcore pornography. Since then, the artist’s work has evolved through various mediums, while still examining the presentation of sexuality within the confines of fashion, art, and media. Despite, or perhaps because of, her no-nonsense approach to often delicate subject matters, Minter’s work seems to effortlessly draw commercial appeal. Her art has been a feature in the Whitney Biennial, her videos have been displayed in Times Square, and her images have graced Supreme skateboard decks.

I sat down with Marilyn at the opening of a show at Freeman’s to discuss the sexualization of her work as a female artist, her political leanings, and how she feels about the process of becoming successful.

Sway Benns: I don’t want to delve too far back in your previous work but I’ve noticed something that comes up a lot when people look at your work with women – they immediately start discussing the sexualization of it. However, when faced with similar paintings that you’ve done of men, there’s rarely any mention of sex.

Marilyn Minter: Isn’t that interesting?

Sway: It seems to say something about the audience…

Marilyn: It’s always been that way. When I did the food porn and I had a hundred paintings of hands taking food apart, I’d say at least a third of them were male hands. No one wrote anything, ever, except about women with long nails. Those images were from cookbooks. Half of the chefs were men, maybe more. I think that was so telling. And if a woman does anything at all sexual – I made those hardcore porn paintings twenty years ago, but everything I do is sexual. I could paint an apple and it’s “Marilyn, the erotic artist.”

Sway: Well, even in popular culture, male nudity is typically a joke, but female nudity is sexualized.

Marilyn: Yeah. Well everyone likes to look at young flesh. Girls and boys do. I remember the first time I saw a man photographed the way they shoot women. It was in Thelma and Louise, the way Ridley Scott shot Brad Pitt. And I thought “Oh, wow, it’s finally happening.” But of course anyone would do that with Brad Pitt.

Sway: A lot of contemporary art is less process based, less detailed, less pretty. As an artist that is known for having a hyper-realistic, visually appealing style, how do you feel about that in general?

Marilyn: Well, it’s a movement. The people that are really good, are also aesthetically pleasing with the back story, A really means B and I think the best of those artists are fantastic, but I think the eye starts to crave the opposite after being inundated with… I’ve seen shows that are so academic that it’s stunning. So there’s bound to be a huge backlash. I’m a teacher so all the practices are equal to me. I always look for the best of that practice. But that has been ubiquitous in the past five, ten years. But I don’t know, I think that that’s over.

Sway: Yeah?

Marilyn: Yeah, we’re already starting to see the backlash. People are writing about “Oh God, not that again.”

Marilyn Minter, Meltdown, 2011.

Sway: I’ve started to notice that too, outside of art criticism, even in casual conversation people mention they’re tired of it and how they want it to be….

Marilyn: Juicy! There’s something about, you can almost guarantee when it becomes the academy–like it is now, that there will be people in art school, where their entire job is to make the opposite. I tell my students that are doing abstract painting, “Keep doing this because when it turns around you’ll be good at it.” And up until now they would have stopped and started making work about identity. [laughs]

Sway: That seems to be the narrative to your success. Because it took you a long time to become….

Marilyn: Famous? You know it’s not like I was never making something interesting. I think what happened was I wasn’t communicating it. The same paintings that no one was interested in – or liked – look pretty good to people now.

Sway:What do you think changed?

Marilyn: When you’re in it you don’t know exactly what’s going on. I always thought I had something to say when I was told I didn’t. And now everyone tells me I’m the bomb and I don’t believe that. I’m trying to stay right sized about it all. When everyone wants the paintings as opposed to when I couldn’t give them away. Those experiences are anti- the creative process. You can’t believe either one. Somehow you have to put your pith helmet on and just forge through. You have to be a little delusional, when no one’s paying any attention to you. I read Steve Jobs said that you have to have passion. I guess that sounds like I’m comparing myself to Steve Jobs, but I think that to be an artist and to talk about the times you’re living in, if people object to what you’re doing–on moral grounds–then you probably have something interesting to say.

Sway: I think there’s something to be said about people who keep working through failure.

Marilyn: Oh yeah, I’ve been a failure, or mediocre, through most of my life.

Sway: When you look at most people who come out through the other side that have had long stretches of failure…

Marilyn: It’s probably a good cliché. I learned a long time ago, probably in college, never to write anybody off. I remember when Richard Prince said “painting is bankrupt.” [laughs] Those things come back to haunt you.

Sway: A lot of your work really translates to pop culture now.

Marilyn: I’ve always been interested in the times I live in. Movies, I’m fanatical about seeing. They inform me about everything, they tell me how people are seeing. I probably see three or four a week. I love this movie Bellflower. It was really well done, absolutely nothing I could have predicted.

Marilyn Minter, Glisterine, 2011.

Sway: There’s a lot going on politically in New York, particularly with the protests. To me it seems like more of a European endeavor.

Marilyn: We’ll see, I can’t say that because I’ve been in so many protests in my life.

Sway: I think it’s from my generation’s perspective.

Marilyn: Yeah, it’s your generation. Civil Rights, Act Out. I was one of the people that went through the system, followed people that got arrested through the system to make sure they got out alright. I’ve been doing this my whole life. I went to the one the other night, but now I feel like “Nah, it’s your turn.” [laughs] Just go do it, even if you are going to get arrested. It’s so exciting, it’s like getting high!

Sway: All of that is typically so far removed from my generation, I’m so used to the apathy, it seems surreal.

Marilyn: Well, it’s about fucking time! Before Occupy Wall Street I was so horrified by people like Eric Cantor and the Tea Party, and the job creators not being taxed. Nobody was saying anything about it. I literally said I was going to be an ostrich, I got so crazy. I felt so powerless. New York is not the rest of this country, it’s its own country. I have relatives from the south. The worst policy Barack Obama ever had is the fact that he’s black, but the Tea Party is so sophisticated they call it “everything else.” I want the protests to get bigger and bigger, and stay totally nonviolent. I hope the Democratic Party doesn’t co-op it either. I think it has to be an independent, non-violent thing. Because that’s where people are going to start listening.

Sway: I’m not sure that people even felt that anything was wrong.

Marilyn: It’s stunning to me. I just hope that it doesn’t become – because every movement that I’ve been in, sociopaths begin to take over. So that’s the one thing…

Sway: The charismatic leader? I think apathy is the reason why we don’t have as strong of a visual culture as other generations have, but maybe every generation feels that way.

Marilyn: It’s pluralism. It’s a cliché but you can guarantee what the next art movement is going to be: the exact opposite of the current movement. It’s best to be outside of the movement all together. They used to last hundreds of years, now they last 15 months.

Sway: It might have something to do with technology, shorter attention spans.

Marilyn: Well your generation is so much smarter, they have to be. They have so much access to information. I’m enjoying it. I played video games so I’d never be afraid of technology. I just go in and start pushing buttons. I haven’t read a manual in years.

Sway: When I hear criticism of your work it’s often about it being ‘glamorous’. Where do you think that comes from?

Marilyn: Well, I understand it. I work with really abject subject matter; fashion, glamour, pornography. These are things that people just despise and they’re shallow and vapid and easy. But the reality is, if it wasn’t for pornography there would be no internet. Fashion is a multi-million dollar industry and it tells you what tribe you’re from. People want to think it’s so insignificant but if you do think that you’re lying to yourself, it’s ludicrous. Academia has a hard time with my work because of the so-called superficiality of it, but that’s self hatred right there! Because you’re dressed in head to toe Prada. [laughs] I watch people with such suspicious projects going; they’re so vapid, but they’re about how A really means B, and they get so much praise because you can write about it. But visually it’s so non-compelling, I see that and I think it’s some level of self hatred just engaging them, somehow you have to not eat, and works just about ideas and not visuals because that’s more important than something about pleasure. If it looks too good it’s suspicious.

Sway: Wel,l when you think about it, the sole reason we exist on earth is to procreate. Sex…

Marilyn: Rules the world.

Sway: But I think as a culture we work to deny that in favor of intellectualism.

Marilyn: I know! It’s a joke. I just laugh at it. If that’s my only criticism, please, bring it on! I’ve seen curators hide their Italian Vogues and put out their Octobers. It’s ridiculous how people lie to themselves, all they do is see glamorous images all day long, and it gives you an enormous amount of pleasure, and it’s also going to make you feel like shit because you’re never going to look like that.

Marilyn Minter, Cheshire, 2011.

Sway: This work sort of touches on that. They’re babies, and the material is this precious metal, this gold, silver, and they take so much pleasure in playing with it. It seems to hint at it being ingrained.

Marilyn: Yeah, it’s great because when does it start? They’re blank slates.

Sway: A lot of your images use Photoshop, cutting from various photographs.

Marilyn: Only in the paintings, all of the photos are analog. I still use film. I use film because I get so much detail. I’m totally anti-Photoshop. I don’t use it. Even when I do commercial work. And I don’t use blonde haired, blue eyed models. These are all mixed raced models. I’m on a mission! Photoshop has become so ridiculous. I don’t even recognize the people on the cover of Vogue anymore. There’s no pores on the skin. I’ve actually had fights – I did editorial for Allure - and I wouldn’t let them Photoshop me. They took it all the way to the photo editor. I wouldn’t let them straighten the teeth, take the fur off the upper lip… I said, “ Why did you ask me to do this project if you’re going to Photoshop it?” No, I’m totally anti-Photoshop… I was just thinking though… When people take my picture I still think, “Could you take this wrinkle out?” [laughs] No, you know I just decided this is how you get old; Don’t get fat, get a good haircut. That’s it. Do not do anything to your face. I grew up in Miami. They didn’t have body surgery then, but it was de rigueur for older men to have young girlfriends. And that was really warped for me. Well… my father [laughs] when I was eighteen my father had a sixteen-year-old girlfriend. And his friends had twenty year old girlfriends. You know, I thought it was normal until I moved up north. Miami was really – I mean this is when it was flip flops and t-shirts and there was nothing cool about it. It warped me terribly.

Sway: I know you have a team of assistants that help with your paintings, I’ve noticed that is a source of criticism in art, but not necessarily in fashion, architecture, etc.

Marilyn: People get weird about it in art because they’re stupid. All of us do it. They just don’t see women do it. Jeff Koons does it. Murakami does it.

Sway: Damien Hirst.

Marilyn: I’m the only woman that does it. Yeah, Richard Serra is really going to bend that metal… I mean what am I going to do? I invented this technique, I did it all alone for a few years and then I got another person to do it, and then I hired someone else and she was better than both of us, so what am I suppose to do fire her? [laughs] I made a system. It’s my vision. And I’m making videos and I’m shooting photos. I still paint. I’m just not a finisher anymore, I don’t have time. It’s just stupid. I’ve never heard anyone sophisticated use that argument, it’s only people that don’t know any better. They believe the myth of the artist working alone in the studio and can’t even use a projector. That somehow more heroic! To draw it out by hand.

Sway: I read about some of the materials you use in the actual photographs and videos…

Marilyn: All of the stuff… vodka and cake decoration. Except for the work with baby, I used non-toxic paint with the babies. The cake decoration suspends in vodka, it cakes up in water. A make-up artist taught me that.

Sway: That’s a great choice for material.

Marilyn: Yeah, that’s the only way you can do it. So everyone is playing in this goo, kicking it up.

Marilyn Minter will be featured in The Riotous Baroque at the Kunsthalle in Zurich opening on May 31, which will travel to Bilbao next February. Marilyn’s next solo show will open the new Regen Projects space in Los Angeles next Spring.

All images courtesy of the artist.

New York-based photographer Weston Wells presents Outings, a seventeen-panel collage piece that examines the places and characters he has captured between his travels and day-to-day encounters. Shot entirely on film, each saturated plate delivers a tableau with loose narrative. The collages’ often bucolic and adventurous spirit reflect the photographer’s wanderings, both near and far.

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Last week, Todd Cole’s agent sent me a link to the new video he did for Kate Spade. So many fashion videos are boring, or cheesy, or just kind of mediocre, that I really appreciate when I see a good one. And this one is really good – so much so that I wanted to hear more about how it came about. I also realized that although I’ve known Todd for some time, I didn’t know much about his background and how he came to do what he does, so while I was at it, I sent through a few more questions.

Skye Parrott: I really love the new video you did for Kate Spade, which functions as a choose-your-own-adventure. How did the idea for it come about? Did you have a lot of input on the feel and style of the video, or did that direction come down from the brand?

Todd Cole: Kate Spade approached me with the idea of doing some films with this interactive concept. I thought it was a great idea, super smart and very forward thinking. I thought it was a great progressions to what these fashion brands films can be. They had the initial idea that you could choose whether the girl did a cannonball or swan dive, etc… and I just took that and fleshed out the scripts. Instead of a swan dive, I loved the idea of a swan landing in the pool and disrupting her perfect dive. Kate Spade has such an identifiable brand aesthetic, and that is always a great starting point. We just built on this. The bathing suits recalled the glamour of old Hollywood, and the history of movie stars escaping for long weekends of parties in Palm Springs. So Palm Springs was the obvious location to me from the beginning. I have an amazing production designer named Ruth de Jong who I worked with closely to create this girl’s world. It was so perfectly Kate Spade to me. I was heavily referencing the films of Douglas Sirk, real classic cinematography, graphic. And I only wanted primary colors in the frame.

Skye: It has an amazing shot in it of a swan wiggling its tail. Was that planned or just really lucky?

Todd: Animals are tough to work with…  and swans are generally not nice birds. It was planned. That swan was a pro. We just let her go in the pool and filmed her with long takes as I waited for her to do something spontaneous that would help tell the story and give the bird some attitude!

Skye: You shoot both still and moving images. How different is the process for you of making a video or shooting photographs? What’s the same? Which do you prefer?

Todd: I love doing both, but they are completely different to me. Videos in generally require you to tell a story, or at least string a series of images together over a period of time in a coherent way. Film/video is 24 frames per second, where with photography you can shoot thousands of frames to get just one good one. So film is much more challenging in my opinion. I am a photographer, and I really understand how to compose a frame, but I always work with a DP when doing a video. There are so many other things I need to worry about, and I would rather not have to worry about exposures and the specifics of lighting, etc. I feel like I would be very foolish to try to do it all myself, when I could work with a great DP who has been working in these situations with these cameras for ten years. But photography, especially fashion photography, is about directing your subject to get what you want, as well as lighting, composition, building characters. So I have been surprised on how much of this has translated to directing film/video.

Skye: Since we’re having this little email conversation, tell me a little about how you grew up. Were your parents creative? How did you become a photographer? What do you think you’d be doing with your life if you hadn’t?

Todd: I grew up in Houston, TX. My dad is a scientist and geologist and my mother is an artist and new age shaman for the Junior League and debutantes. So it was a fairly interesting childhood. I was a really good football player in high school – which means more in Texas than most places – so I went to college to play football and just got a business degree because I thought it might be useful. I got out of college and went to work for some stockbrokers and had an existential crisis. So I had a few astrology readings and a past life regression session, and then moved to LA to be a director. I assisted some directors and  I taught myself photography with the help of some good friends who had graduated from the art schools out here.

Honestly, I have always been very serious about creating the life I want to live, so I can’t envision it being any different from what it is.

Skye: Tell me about your first real job as a photographer.

Todd: Oh man. It might have been shooting Paul Verhoeven for Index back in the day. I had him at the Chateau for like 30 minutes. He is super intense, but cool… and one of my favorite films is Starship Troopers, so I fanned out on him for the first five minutes. Telling him he is a subversive genius and that no one got that movie. Then I asked him to hit ping pong balls at me at the ping pong table as I took photos. He went nuts and started slamming ping pong balls at me. He was sweating and had this crazy look in his eye. We did that for like ten minutes and then I took a couple of bad portraits and that was it. Index never ran the ping pong shots, but they were epic.

Skye: What’s the best job you’ve ever done (and – if you want to tell me – the worst)?

Todd: An early best in my career, was shooting a project for Martin Margiela for their SS 07 mens collection. I have always had such respect for him and the label he created. I love the clothes. And then one morning I received and email from the house asking me to do a project. I totally tripped out. I also LOVE my Rodarte films. There in no one I like working with more than Kate and Laura. I think the things we do together is my best stuff. Worst… hmmm… back when I was living in Houston, after I decided I wanted to be a director, but before I moved to LA, I worked for a corporate video company in Texas. We made infomercials and internal videos for home builders and hospitals. I remember some of those as being very dry, to say the least. I had NO idea what I was doing and spent a lot of time in trying to figure out how a camera worked in some track house on the outskirts of Houston.

Skye: When I get interviewed people always ask me what projects I’m working on now. On one hand that feels like a cliché. On the other, it’s nice to have an opportunity to talk about stuff you’re excited about. Can you tell me something you’re working on that feels like a departure? If nothing fits that description, is there anything you have brewing in your head that’s really different than the work you’ve done so far?

Todd: Eventually I would like to direct a feature film. I have written a script for a short film that I am trying to raise some funding for. I am pushing myself more into working with proper actors and dialogue. It’s a whole new world for me, and is deeper creative experience when it comes to making films. I have always been more drawn to quiet films, but  lately everything I write or pitch has a crazy car stunt or big explosion scene. I don’t know why. Hollywood is getting to me, I guess. I am seeing things with Sam Peckinpah eyes.

Opening tonight in Berlin, This Land Was Made for You and Me explores the idea of America, through the eyes of young American photographers. The title is taken from the Woody Guthrie song This Land Is Your Land, which was written as a critical retort to Irving Berlin’s saccharine God Bless America. Guthrie meant for his song to present not just the scenic landscape of the country, but also the social realities. The show looks to explore those present day realities: particularly the experience of being young, right now, in the USA.

When the curators asked if we would want to cover it for the site, I realized that although I knew the title, and the basic premise, I didn’t know much about their thinking behind the show. So I emailed them a few questions, which are answered below.

Skye Parrott: You guys curated a show that I contributed to that is opening in Berlin this week. The theme is America. Does that mean American photographers in particular, or just America as an idea? What is your idea of America?

Ann-Kathrin Obermeyer: The idea is about American photographers and photographers living in America. When I moved to America, I wasn’t surprised because everything was just like in the movies. Although it took me quite a while to feel really comfortable. Being German/European means it’s not always easy, since we lack the openness which America’s culture is based on. I feel so much richer now after succeeding and adjusting.

Adrian Crispin: I grew up in New York and New Jersey, so for me America has always been about the outsiders, the hero/antihero of subculture. Whitman, Steven Segal, etc.

Skye: I find one of the strangest things about being American that wherever you go in the world, your culture has been accessed by people via movies and television. How much has your idea of America been influence by those mediums?

Adrian: I think movies and TV are quintessentially American and equally important in the shaping and informing of my visual background.

Skye: Adrian, you’re a photographer, and Ann-Kathrin, you’re a stylist. How did the idea come about to curate this show? Has either of you ever curated anything before?

Adrian: We were asked by the gallery director, Kirsten Hermann, to curate a show based on our American experience. Despite having no prior curatorial experience , we both know what we respond to and decided to just do it.

Skye: I’ve curated a couple of shows and really enjoyed it. It feels like putting together pieces of a puzzle. How did you go about picking the photographers for this show? How about the specific images?

Ann-Kathrin: It was a long process of looking at lots of people’s work from all different types of backgrounds until we finally narrowed down the selection of photographers whose work we really responded to and then proceeded to choose images that would work together as a group either as a complimentary dialogue with each other or as counterbalance in opposition.

Skye: You’re a couple, right? How do you find the process of working together while being in a relationship?

Adrian: Yes, we are a couple. We met in Paris at a museum bookshop. I was looking at art books and Ann-Kathrin was looking at fashion magazines. We have a very natural, intuitive, and complimentary way of collaborating from grocery shopping to doing editorials together.

Skye: Do you have plans to curate any more shows together? What would be your dream space to curate something in? Who would be part of that show?

Adrian: It has been a great experience and was a lot of work but now that we are almost at the end and about to physically put everything on the wall.

Ann Kathrin: I would do it again any time. I think a dream space would be the MoMa and also a dream (we were always thinking about this) would be having shows in our apartment with some good food. I definitely would ask Juergen Teller to be a part of it.

Adrian: There is a lot of really talented people out there whose work remains to be seen, so I would include the unknowns.

This Land Was Made for You and Me opens Thursday, April 26 from 7-9 pm at the Galerie fuer Moderne Fotografie, Schroederstrasse 13, Berlin, and runs through June 9.

Top image: RJ Shaughnessy, Black Kid, Afro; Middle image: Anna Moller, Rooster, 2009; Bottom image: Grant Willing, Untitled (Capri Sun), 2009

Underline Gallery is holding an online raffle to help one of their artists, photographer Bhumika Bhatia. Bhatia was is a terrible car accident in India, cannot currently use her hands, and has an enormous hospital debt. The raffle tickets are $50, and the winner can chose from four prints. All proceeds go to support the artist.

“SPRING BREAK!!!”  Those two words seem like they should always be shouted together, perhaps accompanied by a fist-pump. Everyone has been there at one point in their lives—for some, spring break was about catching up on long-overdue coursework or heading back to parents’ places some R&R and a home-cooked meal. For the fancy ones, spring break was about the South of France or St Barts… but for 25,000 or so ‘SPRING BREAK!!!’ is all about South Padre Island.

Miles of white sandy beaches, sunny island temperatures… and a never-ending supply of booze, parties and blasting music. As they say, Texas does it bigger (and better, apparently). Beer bongs, writhing bodies and a relentless need to keep the party going 24/7—Spring Break down South is more than a little bit aggressive. Students seem to come from far and wide, but one thing they definitely share is a ‘Go Hard or Go Home’ attitude that just doesn’t quit. These pictures capture a slice of what Simon Cave witnessed in South Padre this spring break – just some good ol’ fashioned sloppy partying of Texas-like proportions.

“What really made me want to take pictures of these guys was this strange contrast between the ‘binge drinking’ (something that’s usually done in a dark bar in the small hours) and this gorgeous sun scorched beach setting. This great mix of something scary and something beautiful.”

Luis Gispert watches Mad Men; the design and form of the show appeal to his recent fascination with minimalism. It’s actually kind of a minimalist re-visiting for the Miami-born artist (who could pass for a character on the show with his swarthy good looks). Gispert was originally drawn to minimalism during his MFA studies at Yale University, and for the first time in his career, he’s stripping down to the bare essentials in his work. His first solo show with OHWOW Gallery opened on Saturday night in Los Angeles. Titled All Oyster, No Pearl, the show features five rich, grayscale photographs and three sculptures made of Hydro-Stone and chrome car parts. The photographs feature decontextualized objects sculpted into austere, stark totems, while the sculptures showcase Gispert’s affinity for the absurd. The fully chromed 1984 Dodge Aries sedan whose parts play a role in his current show will be harvested beyond the typical “for parts” situation, but in what form? Gispert discusses this, why he doesn’t live with his own work, how new processes are re-informing his subject matter, and how heartbreaks are good for art. Now if only we could get him in one of those Don Draper suits, we could call it a day.

Emma-Louise Tovey: Tell me how your new work is different from your last project.

Luis Gispert: It’s tough to say, because it’s different, but it’s ideas that I’ve been thinking about for a few years now that I’ve been meaning to get to. You know when you get a project started that takes two or three years to complete, you have to finish them before you move on so, the work that I just finished last year which was the Decepcion show. That was a project that was two-and-a-half years in the making. The following ideas I’d been working with for the last 10 years, so, in a way, this new work is really going back to the work I did before. The work I became known for, which was photos of cheerleaders or car interiors, were things that had some kind of reference to hip hop culture. And before that, the work that I was really influenced by was more of a conceptual minimal history of things, more formal ideas, and it’s always been in my work, but now it’s about returning to those roots of mine that I really want to address. Also, I’d been working with a series of ideas for a while and I’d exhausted them. Dealing with that side of pop culture for that spectacle doesn’t seem as relevant to me anymore as it did 10 years ago in the late-’90s, early-2000s when the concept of bling was just starting and pop culture had gone to this extreme wealth. That is not interesting to me anymore, but the ideas are still there though: being critical, or having a critical distance of things in culture. I wanted to pare things down to more essential basics—formal, beautiful things. I’m referring to sculpture now more. I’ve done sculpture all my life. I’ve done photography and film, but now I’m returning back to thinking three-dimensionally. It’s been this great process of relearning how to think in three dimensions.

Emma: Those speakers you made with the love hearts in your 2008 show, El Mundo Es Tuyo (The World is Yours), were they functional?

Luis: Yeah they actually work! They had a motion sensor, and when they would go off, the base speakers would thump and the hearts would really go in and out like a heartbeat would.

Emma: Do you have some in your house?

Luis: No I don’t. I don’t live with my work.

Emma: Is that typical of other artists? Is there a reason you don’t really want to live with your work?

Luis: I think so. Now that I think about it, most of my artist friends, I’ve never seen their work up on their own walls. It’s something that you live with all the time in the studio; bringing it home would be an egotistical thing to do. But it’s always better to have someone else’s art, like friends that you create with or something you buy.

Basketball Chair, Silver Gelatin Print

Emma: So tell me about the car that’s in the show—the 1984 Aries.

Luis: The car is not exactly physically in the show. It’s a very absurd project. We found a car that was chrome-dipped entirely, except for the wheels, because of the tires. We then took the car to the studio and photographed it. So there’s going to be a photograph of this car, so it’s going to exist in a photograph and the car’s doing something special in the studio. And then the car is going to be destroyed. I’m going to crush the car, physically, into a form, and then that crushed chrome hunk of steel will become part of a sculpture that’s going to be like the sculptures that I’m doing now, which are made out of white Hydro-Stone and chrome car parts. Basically it’s this idea that you take something that doesn’t necessarily have beauty or design qualities with this unattractive, cheap, mass-produced car, and then by chrome plating it, you’re exalting it into this high commodity luxury item. The thing is, Jeff Koons takes kitsch or something that’s low and then turns it into a shiny, golden, or reflective material, like what he did with the inflatable bunny rabbit. I didn’t want to reference that, so the idea was not about dealing with the history of that kind of thing, the idea was to make the thing, which was extremely difficult and extremely expensive, but then actually destroy it. All that will exist is a photograph of it, but it’s not just a straight document photograph like you would see in a catalogue, it’s going to be a photograph that’s designed to be an art photograph. So, the car was a very, very expensive prop, but then it’s going to be transformed into another sculpture, and you may not recognize it to be a car. It’s going to be a crushed piece of chrome, that’s manipulated and combined with other parts to be it’s own sculpture. And that will be shown at a later date. So, in this show what’s going to be present is the idea of this car.

Emma: That’s a really interesting idea—having something that’s really expensive and then destroying it to create something else entirely. How do you think that reflects your life, outside of your art?

Luis: Hmm. It speaks to me just as an artistic prop, the process of making art, which is impossible to define, because anything can be art, and it’s the artist who defines what will be or not be art. I’ve always had an affinity for the absurd and that whole thinking process. There was a lot of thinking involved in this project, and the execution of it required a lot of physical effort and a lot of people collaborating and spending time to plan it. It reflects the way art is, because ideas for art can start many different ways, and a lot of times it can be started as a joke. But it’s like when you do something in your life, and you kind of plan it out, but you don’t plan it fully, and you know it’s absurd, and you go through with it, and you hope to see it on the other side. But here’s the thing: I don’t know how it’s going to come out. It could be a complete failure. We’re talking about something that doesn’t really exist yet. It does exist, but the car hasn’t been crushed yet. Sometimes you have an idea that starts out pretty absurd, and when you think too much about it, you won’t do it. It’s like when you say, ‘I’m going to run a marathon,’ or, ‘I’m going to get married’—when you think too much about it, you’ll probably talk yourself out of it, so you kind of have to jump forward.

Emma: What was it like studying at Yale?

Luis: It was fun. I had a lot of great classmates—and we’re still friends—who are great artists, people like Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Wangechi Mutu. We were just kids at the time, just convening there, but it was a great experience. The weirdest thing about Yale is the city that it’s in, New Haven. It’s a very strange place. There’s a weird tension that you can feel that’s palpable when you’re walking around the city. (Yale is) the number one employer of people in town, and all these people who don’t have privilege are employed by this institution. In the sculpture department, we had a very big building, and we would throw these big parties. And the parties were spilling over to where people in the neighborhood or town were showing up. The administration freaked out and they shut us down several times.

Emma: In terms of resolving certain things—like in concepts within your own work—how long does it generally take you to collect ideas and form them in your mind, and actually see them to fruition? What’s your process like?

Luis: It’s varied. But I would say that I’m pretty slow. I wouldn’t consider myself prolific. I have a ton of ideas, but I’m a huge believer in editing, and so a lot of times an idea will just hit you on the road when you’re driving, and you put it away. But I never go with a first idea. Usually every object is an accumulation of five or seven ideas that I’ve been thinking about, and they’re sort of rattling into each other. So it’s a pretty slow, painful process for my photography or film projects. [Laughs.] With the sculpture, though, what I’m liking about it is, it’s a different way of thinking, because things are happening in the moment in the studio. [Before going into the studio], there might be a lot of thinking about, ‘What are these sculptures going to mean?’ or, ‘What are the materials going to be?’ But once you’re in the studio making them, the process takes over. It’s more of an unconscious muscle memory thinking where you’re basically mucking about in the studio and you see what happens. Of course there’s a lot of failure, and then something sticks. It’s schizophrenic for me—sometimes I like to think about something for six months or even a year. I’m doing a series of bronzes that I’ll have done by the end of the year. They’re an idea that I’ve had for a couple of years, and they slowly modify and they slowly change to the point where I know they’re going to be good enough to put out there. And then again there’s some sculptures in this show now, that happened in the studio. They weren’t planned at all; they were completely improvised and intuitive.

Emma: How do these ideas come to you? Is it through travelling? Through watching a television show? What are you most inspired by?

Luis: I would say all of the above but, more specifically, I would say situations that are a little bit odder than normal. I like to drive. That’s the reason I like L.A. Every time I come to L.A., I spend time in the desert. I love the desert. Earlier this year, I was doing this photo project and I would go on these 10 day, 15 day trips alone on the road, for 5000 miles, in the middle of the desert or up to the wastelands, and that’s when I get ideas: driving for eight hours, just listening to music. I got an idea for a bronze sculpture that I’m working on while I was riding on the train. I saw a man with his hands folded and he had rings on each one of his fingers. He had these big, black, powerful hands and he had a golden ring on each finger. And I said, ‘Wow, that needs to become an object.’ So, it’s varied. Or sometimes you come out of a really bad relationship with somebody and you’re depressed for like a month, and then out of that you get some amazing ideas.

Emma: Break-ups are good.

Luis: Yeah. [Laughs.] They are. And then you meet someone new and you’re totally inspired and then you get 25 more ideas.

All Oyster, No Pearl is up at OHWOW Gallery in West Hollywood through May 12th.

Top Image: 40 Oz. Chair, Silver Gelatin Print

When photographer Jordan Sullivan returned to New York City after spending 12 months in “middle-of-nowhere Texas,” working construction in the land of ranches and wide-open places, the urban setting proffered a profound jolt, placing him on a new path of artistic investigation.

“I wanted to explore our relationship with nature at a time when I was feeling particularly disconnected from it,” Jordan says about curating “The Wild & The Innocent,” the photography exhibition currently at Clic Gallery in Manhattan. So through the unique perspectives of 30 photographers, he investigated this modern dichotomy, which in fact had interested him since his teenage days. The resulting featured images reflect the duality that exists in this rapport. Rather than taking the simplistic solution of damning one side (urbanity) or sanctifying the other (nature), the images express the infinitely nuanced ways in which we experience opposing realities.

Humanity becomes part of nature and nature is represented in a very human way. If Skye Parrott’s picture of a palm tree speaks a lively language, the objectification of Brea Souders‘ sun-burnt back emits a sense of peace. Bodies are juxtaposed with landscapes in a thoughtful way, redefining the conflict rather than marking it; Alexis Gross’ provocative shot of a naked female in a men’s workshop perfectly balances Samantha Casolari’s dreamy, abstract flower prints.

Jordan’s curation is lighthearted, and the juxtaposition of purity and darkness reads as a gentle reminder that the beautiful is beautiful principally because the ugly exists. Further underscoring the exhibition’s theme is the wide array of photographers—both established and up-and-coming—featured, bestowing the show with a true sense of community and exploration. “I selected work that not only fit with the theme but also that I had some sort of emotional or spiritual connection with,” Jordan explained. “I think this show brings together a small group of people whose work exemplifies what’s really great about photography right now.”

The Wild & The Innocent runs through April 15 at Clic Gallery. 255 Centre Street, New York, New York.
Above image by Samantha Casolari.

Left: Image by Brea Souders. Right: Image by Kohey Kanno.

In getting to know a person, separating them from their art becomes more and more challenging. So it is with a certain biased pleasure that I ask the German-American photographer Sarah Girner about the creative geyser from which her images spring. We are at a table at a Vietnamese place in New York City’s Chinatown. She is loosely holding one of the two pendants that hang from her necklace between strong, graceful fingers. When she was a child, she says, she traveled to the Danish island of Bornholm on a family vacation. There, for the first time, she witnessed glassblowers yanking at sheets of glass like taffy, shaping this clear liquid into solid pieces, and recalled walking around with her siblings, marveling at the rows upon rows of smoked herring that later dried into shimmering karats of bright gold under the Scandinavian sun. Around her neck, today, remain two mementos from this trip. What stuck with me was the magic imbued in the details of her recounting: gold-hued fish, the great expanse of blue and white on this tiny island, and her young eyes transfixed on the simple beauty of an artisan’s skill. And yet, I know I shouldn’t be surprised, because somehow it is always like this when Sarah tells a story.

Image 1 (above). On a hill, against a saturated blue sky, what looks to be the top of a miniature house juts out of the foreground. Tall, dry shrubs, ascend diagonally from frame right to frame left. Or are we just short? The scale tampers with our perception and for a second we can’t tell if we’re looking at a treehouse, or a birdhouse—or a just a house. Surrounding this house is an almost perfect connect-the-dot-like-explosion of branches, as if fireworks made out of twigs were frozen in the air. These little points of frizz are incongruous with the rest of the image’s lines; they are like busy neurons, reaching out and shocking us, shocking to us. The beauty lies in the mystery of this little house, its blues and branches and our point of view, too, which can go in no direction but up, gazing curiously towards its windows, left open.

Of this photograph, Sarah tells me that she didn’t think much of it when she shot it. When she saw it on the contact sheet, it shocked her because it looked so different from what she remembered—as if it had taken on a new life. To her, it looked like something out of a fairy tale or, as she describes, as if the “tree had grown underneath a house and just taken it with it.” Elaborating further, she reveals, “[This photo] reminded me of my childhood, and being uprooted and kind of feeling like that little house. I had no idea when I made it.” That what we manifest in our images is partially due to who we are is no huge surprise, but it speaks to the beauty of inspiration; that sometimes what we create is less deliberate and therefore more surprising than what we expect. Photography seems to constantly pit our intent against its will. This, I suppose, is part of that little bit of magic we often speak of when referring to photography and its processes. We can inspire ourselves by virtue of just living and being attentive to our gut, our dreams, our fears or our younger, less inhibited selves.

Image 2. The blue-and-white Room. It is a spring day, 2009. The wallpaper is immaculate, like fine china that has been deconstructed and then plastered back up, vertically. Everything is bright blue and crisp white, save a hat on the bed, slumped, and a child’s abandoned toy on the elegant cream-colored chair. What has she stumbled into? Now we, too, are standing in the room’s entrance. Beyond that floor-length curtain is perhaps a manicured lawn, just perhaps. And beyond that, a quiet street, perhaps. Beyond that, a 12-year-old is raking leaves, working for an allowance, perhaps. And under that duvet, perhaps, you might find the residue of years and years of waiting to grow up and carry out the plan of getting the hell out of Westchester! And never looking back. This room is a mother’s broken heart.

Sarah’s photographs are inspired and directly related to her upbringing. She grew up distinctly German-American and bilingual. You know, ties to home—but also to this home. I find that she often has the words for emotions and expressions that I lack in English; her language has them in spades, sometimes for things as subtle as the manner in which one touches their face. She is able to access this duality when shooting. These two pools of culture, language, stories and myth are of great resource as an artist, as I do not read the quiet tension present in a lot of her work from “Away” (ongoing) as a negative feeling. Tension exists in her photos because it exists in her. I read this tension to match that of a person from two or more cultures, who has parents who grew up “like this” and next to siblings who grew up “like that.”

I ask her what inspires her as a photographer. Where does she get her motor? For whom does she create? Among other things, she mentions that she is inspired by the likes of the “Grimms’ Fairy tales and German children’s books like Struwwelpeter (Shaggy-Peter),” a collection of stories wherein children are taught via parable to groom themselves, eat their soup, sit correctly at dinner and behave around other children, which is completely different from the fluff I grew up listening to and watching and digesting, all of it unchecked, like a Happy Meal. I understand these fairy tales and personal myths we grow up with to be a place of constant, if not subconscious, reference for us, even now. I understand these stories, too, as inextricable from Sarah’s various worlds. They are necessary to her creativity. Lines are consistently blurred in her images, as in where her two cultures meet or where her dreams meet the shock of Monday mornings, where “documentation” meets nuance and where stillness and conflict manage to co-exist. This constellation of conflict and beauty inspire Sarah to keep shooting. And she does so for no one but herself, because she “must.”

Image 3. A soft, tan and gray, foggy sandscape fills us and the frame. This is a portal to somewhere else. Maybe Sarah knows where. It is so still here. It is a timeless scape, a timeless sea, void of modern photographic signifiers, irony or pretense. Objects for objects’ sake, no: the ocean for the sake of the fucking ocean! She does not shoot just to see what “the thing” might look like on film. This is a gorgeousity of an image. Original, too, in the way the ocean is depicted—not blue, not violent, not insurmountable. The water and the smooth sand are almost one in the same plane, and they are so in love that they have no other choice but to join in mercurial matrimony. The white foam of the sea waves makes no discernible pattern as it sputters into the background. This is time lapping at our shore.

Of the third image, Sarah says the “fog was so thick you could just disappear into it.” As viewers, the fog envelops us, too. We become embedded into the scene. She tells me this image is one that reminds her very much of her dreams. She says she often has vivid nightmares but that she wouldn’t give her dreams up for anything. They serve her, too. She says she thinks there are themes and recurring patterns to everyone’s dreams. “For me it’s water—always water.” Rarely is she in the water in the dream, but in shooting she comes marvelously close. She says she once attempted to make a “dream series” (portraits of people that she’d bumped into in dreams), but that her initial efforts came out “unintentionally hilarious—they looked forced and kind of silly. Things that make absolute sense in dreams are nonsensical when you wake,” she tells me. “We have a very limited vocabulary to relate our dreams in the real world and that same thing carries over to relating dreams through photography. I find it very difficult to relate specific visuals from my dreams.”

Back to the childhood fairy tale, “Struwwelpeter.” I looked it up after dinner. I sat dazed after finding numerous illustrations of Shaggy Peter, each of which relayed more or less the same thing. Here was a boy standing legs akimbo like an awkward starfish, frozen unhappily with what looked to be long twig-like fingernails protruding from each finger and a head of unruly hair, shocking because it looked like an entire tree had sprouted from his little head. Sarah may not be looking for any kind of “fairy tale” where her life or work is concerned, but they seem to be manifesting themselves around her just the same. If there is one to be told, yet, one distinctly German-American, one part-fantasy and part-nightmare, she is the only one who will be dreaming about it tonight.

Sarah Girner is a German-American photographer who lives and works in New York City. She graduated from the International Center of Photography in 2009 and has since exhibited domestically and internationally. Her on-going work, including “The Transcience of Things” and “Away” can be found on her website. She has recently been accepted to Giorgia Fiorio’s Reflexions Masterclass.