If you’re in L.A. this summer, make sure to check out “Post 9-11,” a group exhibition featuring the work of nine artists — Dan Colen, Terence Koh, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Ryan McGinley, Agathe Snow, Dash Snow, and Aaron Young — referencing a collective history through works of painting, photography, sculpture, and installation.
Practicing in the new millennium, these New York based-artists, friends and collaborators, are brought together by a sense of community and shared history. Their relationships with each other cemented fully over the last ten years – a decade spent sharing ideas, studios, apartments, and themselves. The resulting work runs the gamut from defiant, irreverent and destructive; sublime, utopian, and filled with emotion.
The painting shown above exhibits the polarity. Created by Dan Colen, the painting of tar and feathers adhered to canvas (entitled “Blop!”) appears chaotic and abject, referencing the barbaric and archaic act of punishment and interjecting a strong sense of materiality with the use of unconventional media.
The aesthetic approaches of all nine artists involved, although disparate, present a visual memoir of a defining era. It’s the hope of the curators that the exhibition will not only inspire discussion and debate about the new legacies being formed by today’s artists, but also showcase and characterize the mood and complexities of a decade.
Post 9-11 runs until August 27th at OHWOW, 937 North La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. Details online at www.oh-wow.com.
Best friends with late rising art star Dash Snow and renowned for openings that demand police reinforcement to disperse the crowds, Ryan McGinley is quintessential Lower East Side art scene royalty. Like most aristocrats, he sticks to his own and recently convinced American beauty queen Carolyn Murphy (Estée Lauder’s lead face since 2002) to partake in his short film creation entitled, “Entrance Romance (it felt like a kiss).” Backed with monastic chants, the frames capture Murphy’s slow motion facial physiognomy dealing with exposure to fire, the lick of a dog’s tongue and collision with a fish bowl (and live goldfish). The result is a combination of the intimate intensity from McGinley’s more recent black and white nude portraits, and the perverse awkwardness of his more famous earlier work, in which apparently unstaged carefree – and usually naked – teenagers run through highways or cavort in trees. As for whether this film is inspired, spiritual art or just a misguided, misogynistic mess? Well, that’s up for you to decide. Check out the video below:
Another week, another new collaboration announced by Opening Ceremony. This time, the clothing boutique is teaming up with Levi’s for a capsule collection focused on corduroys. We love it already.
The spring “Levi’s + Opening Ceremony” collection will include pants and shorts in a fine-wale fabrication, corduroy shirts, and jean jackets in both corduroy and denim. The aesthetic is said to be vintage-inspired, though reports say the corduroys will come in some more modern and unique colors, like fuchsia, teal and lavender (Still, if anyone can make fuchsia pants hip and wearable, it’s Opening Ceremony). Photographer Ryan McGinley, who shot the current Levi’s “Go Forth” advertising campaign (seen above) will also helm the lens for the new campaign.
The unisex capsule range will be sold at Opening Ceremony stores and online at levi.com, as well as in select boutiques across the world, like Colette, Fred Segal and the Henrik Vibskov store. As for pricing: the pants will retail for just under $150, while the shirts will run you $128 and the jackets start at $178. The “Levi’s + Opening Ceremony” collection launches next month.
