Art And Culture

Interview: Lauchie Reid

Monday, January 30th, 2012

Mulierbus Quinque

Painter and illustrator Lauchie Reid (of the bizarro art collective, Team Macho) chats with The Block about the meaning of fine art, the brilliance of Queen, and his love of secrets.

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Interview: Pierluigi Fracassi

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

$pierluigi-fracassi-sculpturework-2$

Italian artist Pierluigi Fracassi lives Darwin’s theory of natural selection in art and life. His immense talent is winning notice and his insight into man and nature allows him to get right down to the viscera – sometimes literally. At first glance a bit macabre, his haunting, striking pieces are actually an intricate homage to beauty and nature. His latest group show, It’s Time to Say Goodbye, opens this Friday at Galleria Changing Role in Naples. Fracassi spoke to us about the honour of exhibiting at this year’s Venice Biennale, the driving forces behind his art, and giving his grandmother “flowers.”

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Kate Steciw

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

Love My Way, 2011

Like everyone with a laptop or a smart phone, bits and pieces of artist Kate Steciw’s life are stored away on hard drives. But unlike the rest of us – who may spend hours clicking through Tumblr and Facebook photos without much thought – Steciw is acutely fascinated by the use of screens to access images and memories. “Looking at my old jpegs on my camera phone, I really began thinking about the way that the digital photo is ubiquitous in our lives,” says Steciw, reached at her Brooklyn studio. “These images on cameras and computers are at once so much a part of us, and yet they never really find their way into the actual world.”

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Interview: Amalie Bruun

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

For someone from Denmark, rated as having the happiest population on earth, the music of singer-songwriter Amalie Bruun is filled with moody and melancholic sounds from low-fi guitars and tambourines reminiscent of alternative rock bands of the 80s and 90s. Born and raised outside Copenhagen, Amalie was brought up in a musical household which prompted her at the age of 20 to busk on the streets of Paris, London and Amsterdam before getting into songwriting for other musicians in Stockholm. One of these songs she recorded herself; ‘If You Give it Up’ ultimately became the theme song of Denmark’s version of the television series ‘Paradise Hotel.’

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Sam Falls

Monday, November 28th, 2011

When Sam Falls dropped everything in early 2011 to travel from his home in Brooklyn to California for a photography trip, he may have taken film with him. But the results of his latest work, Somewhere to Go,which debuted this summer at the Los Angeles location of OHWOW, were not developed in a darkroom.

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Peter de Potter

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

From i am an image machine, 2011

“I think that art needs to be seen, or better: to be distributed. I think the art world should make greater efforts to inject the world-at-large with its imagery. The series i am an image machine is to a big extent about the internet. It’s about the way the current generation approaches images. It’s not considered important anymore who made a certain image, when or how or why it was made, or even what it depicts. People go past things like authorship and reference, and simply respond to the emotional charge of an image.”–Peter de Potter

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Hannah Yelland

Monday, November 21st, 2011

As the child of two actors who met on stage at Cambridge University, Hannah Yelland’s career path may have been a matter of fate. Raised near picturesque Hampton Court – the infamous home of King Henry VIII – Yelland quickly became an actress herself, making her theatre debut at the age of 11 in a local production of Oklahoma!. “The music of Rodgers and Hammerstein kind of really affected me. I still can’t watch movies or see other productions without crying out of nostalgia,” the actress laughs. After watching her father, David Yelland, take the Broadway stage in 1996 as Sir Robert Chiltern in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, she thought, “Wouldn’t that be amazing to do one day!” and followed further in her parents’ footsteps. Fifteen years later, she made her own Broadway debut as the love-torn housewife Laura Jesson in a stage adaptation of Noel Coward’s 1945 film Brief Encounter, a role for which she received her first Tony nomination.

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Liu Wen/Abbey Lee

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

If you’re fascinated by what models look like off the catwalk, you’re probably already familiar with Altamira. The site, also know as Models Off Duty, has been operated by photographer Craig Arend since 2007, providing ample visual evidence that when models aren’t working, they still look like models. Need more proof? Witness Arend’s street photos of a glowing Liu Wen and ethereal Abbey Lee, en route to it-doesn’t-matter-where — totally casual, yet completely amazing.

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Alex Da Corte

Friday, November 4th, 2011

When Interview magazine dubbed Philly-based artist Alex da Corte the “heir to the American school of pop,” he thought it was kind of funny. The up-and-coming sculptor admits that while he “loves, loves to make pop art; I mean, who doesn’t?” he figures minimalism is maybe more his bag. His favourite colour is white, after all.

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