Deer Mother, Joshua Van Dyke

The Block is no stranger to the slightly morbid. Couple that with an unhealthy addiction to Twin Peaks reruns, and it’s not hard to see why we went knocking on Joshua Van Dyke’s door. The Vancouver-based artist’s evocative sculptures are a marriage of teenage skateboard culture and the more ceremonious ritual of the hunt. His trophy-like pieces, antlers and masks carved from salvaged skateboard decks, come from a deep fascination with the act of collection and display.

Van Dyke invited us to tour his Bowen Island studio off the coast of Vancouver, a short ferry ride from civilization. As we watched the city skyline fade away, feeling the tug of trees and totems at our backs, we experienced what the artist would later describe as a liminal moment, a psychological and geographical transition. This is where he positions his art: settled uneasily between urban and rural, adolescence and adulthood, life and death. He filled us in on his upcoming show at Galerie Rauchfeld in Paris and his artistic forays into wild and sacred realms. While we chatted, he showed off some trophies of his own: two sets of interlocked elk antlers, the product of a fateful duel; stacks of skateboard decks in various stages of deconstruction; a deer skull that featured prominently in our conversation.

TB: So you’re going to spend the month in Paris? Have you been before?

JVD: That’s the plan. Yeah, when I was seventeen, with a friend. We spent two nights camping in a tent in the center of the city. We didn’t know anything. I’m excited to get tapped into the scene there. It’s going to be like going from one extreme to another. I like the peacefulness here, but it will be like coming out of a cave.

Impala, Joshua Van Dyke

TB: Tell me about the deer skull, and Deer Mother, the piece you created from it.

JVD: It’s a departure from the antlers; it ties in with an actual experience I had. Where I live on Bowen Island, it’s tied into my approach right now, being on the edge of an urban space but in a very rural area. A mother deer died near my house. A family of eagles lives above my home, and they just devoured the body in about two weeks. I would just sort of see the body in different stages of being eaten. That was quite powerful, and when it was all cleaned away I brought the skull to the studio and it just triggered this piece I’d been thinking about for a while, about a new kind of morbid way of working.

TB: I had seen photos of this piece, which is part of your upcoming Paris exhibit, and I wondered how you made it. It looks almost like resin or painted wood.

JVD: It looks like painted wood but it’s layers of skateboard decks laminated together and carved out; it’s more labour intensive. The skull was really fun. It was hard getting out of my comfort zone a bit and it was something I’d wanted to do for a long time. So it was more of a study, but I want to do more. I photographed a bear skull that I want to work on. It was an adolescent bear that somebody on Bowen had when he was working up in a logging camp that they ended up having to shoot, but he kept the skull. It’s got that bullet hole in the top of the skull – I want to recreate that.

The Hunt, Joshua Van Dyke

TB: Have people just started bringing you skulls and antlers and things?

JVD: Yeah, they’re starting to. I like the accompanying stories as well. I got started with skateboard decks and now they’re bringing me skulls.

TB: You’re getting that reputation around here. So you’re into skateboarding?

JVD: I was when I was younger. I was six was when I first started. I wasn’t really that good. One of my first experiences was breaking my wrist when I went off a launch ramp in our alley. For me it ties into that whole youth thing and all the associations I have with it.

TB: How did you decide to start using skate decks as material?

JVD: It was experimentation. It began with just liking something about the scarred quality and the faded ink; it attracted me. Sometimes you just pick something and it sticks, right? For whatever reason, I’m not finished with it yet.

St. Francis and the Birds, Joshua Van Dyke

TB: Okay, let’s back up a bit here… Big question: how did you know you wanted to be an artist?

JVD: It sounds a bit cliché, but I had just graduated from high school and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I found myself in the career office and I was looking through this thing of careers, looking at the artist one, and this guy was quoted, “do anything you can not to do it, but if you can’t not do it, then do it.” That resonated with me. I started as a painter actually. I’ve always been a painter. I can’t explain it. I just enjoy it.

TB: How did you transition from painting to sculpture?

JVD: I wouldn’t say it’s a transition. I do both, and it’s more like rotating the crop in a way. You get inspired to do one thing one day and another the next. I’ve always painted but I’ve always had a real sculptural affinity. I’m ready to start combining the two. I worked quite hard on the forms for a long time, just developing my skills to do what I wanted to. Now, the surface is going to take on another quality.

The Hunt, Joshua Van Dyke

TB: Your sculptures are based on the hunting trophy, which has this whole fetishization in society. What about it appeals to you?

JVD: I don’t know why I’m so fixated on them but I guess it’s got to do with being a kid and growing up skateboarding. I have this idea about adolescence and rites of passage, and how we use rituals today. That’s what got me into the whole connection with hunting. I guess it’s the connection with the original object. I was working through these urban/rural comparisons. When you go through the transition between these two spaces, you feel this psychological shift happen, it’s like that liminality of moving between two spaces, it could be geographical space, or it could be a psychological space. Hunting is a representation of that, that other, our desire to go into the wilderness. I’ve done a lot of extended wilderness trips.

TB: Have you ever done any hunting?

JVD: No. Not yet. I guess I shouldn’t say not yet. No, I haven’t hunted. There are parallels with the urban youth rituals, with skateboarding. Hunting was probably the original test, challenge.

TB: What types of people display your work, or buy your work?

JVD: I guess there’s something in the work, in the pieces, in the energy of that work that resonates with people who are doing their own thing, maybe.

Altar, Joshua Van Dyke

TB: What direction do you see your art taking?

JVD: I’m pretty happy with this body of work, which comes under the idea of the Hunt. Recently I came across this poem by Charles Bukowski, “My doom smiles at me.” There’s a line in the poem that goes, “I run with the hunted.”

The newest pieces I’ve been working on are these icon paintings. I was driving to the studio one day and I came across this book on the side of the road by an early Renaissance Italian icon master. I got really fixated on it and I started appropriating his characters, his images, and working them on to the old skate decks. The decks are discarded objects that look kind of old, and it’s a bit like layering two forms of propaganda on top of each other. There’s this commercial advertising that’s been scraped away from the decks by use, and there is – I don’t want to call it propaganda, but the religious iconography, right.

TB: Another sacred object, like the hunting trophies.

JVD: Actually, yeah. I got a lot of inspiration for this from a friend. He was on mushrooms at a party, and really he had taken too many, but at the end of the night he was laying on the ground. I think I’d just found this book a few days before and I started connecting this idea of how we perceive religious experience, or sacredness in objects. At the time, he was having a pretty sacred experience on his own, so I thought it was interesting to try to connect that, in a way deconstructing these old images. I guess it’s like taking a painting and undoing it, taking it apart and then putting it back together. At what point does something hold a sacred value, if that’s possible, or is that just a perception we have?

Interview Darcy Smith

Joshua Van Dyke’s work appears this month in Panorama at Galerie Rauchfeld in Paris. The exhibit opens April 24 and runs through May 26.

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.

The Block: Tell us about the zine you started in college, Tiger Press Books.

Lauchie Reid: My friend Stephen Appleby Barr and I started doing zines under the name Tigerpress Books during the summer before our final year in college. We really liked the idea of independently released and hand made things and saw a great culture surrounding that in Toronto. We also liked the idea of working together on a project and sharing sensibilities. Our books were about cat burglars, a mummy, and the third dog in space. We didn’t know what to write in our first one about cat burglars so we decided that it would be better in German. We don’t speak German, but the words looked great. It was great fun and really well received. It sort of set the ball rolling for Team Macho, as it proved our instincts that art/illustration folks should band together and thrive instead of letting ego and auteur-ship get in the way

TB: With Team Macho you’ve had this incredible opportunity to do exhibitions in New York, Amsterdam, Berlin and so many other amazing cities. What have been some of you’re favorite inspiring places you’ve visited through exhibitions?

LR: Amsterdam was incredible. The gallery we were with set us up in a houseboat on the Amstel, which just fit into our narrative beautifully. It was November, so the water was really rough at times. It made it feel like we were really on a voyage. Plus the city is outstandingly beautiful and the people were all tall, friendly and gorgeous. Our first show in New York with Giant Robot was amazing too. We did all the things. And we always enjoy our work-related trips to Montreal, as it may be, scientifically speaking*, the most fun city in the whole world to spend two days in.

*not scientifically proven

TB: Do you think that being raised in Canada has had any impression on your work?

LR: I think so. I grew up pretty far north in a pretty dodgy city called Thunder Bay. It’s incredible natural grandiosity juxtaposed with it’s mind-blowingly backward, shockingly awful social problems instilled me with a huge appreciation for big, raw, aloof natural settings and a deep-seated interest in the way people interact. Specifically how they can be awful or amazing given context.

TB: What would you say is the biggest difference between working in a collective, and working by yourself?

LR: The distinct lack of other people. Also, the idea that you have to go it alone and are 100% accountable for your decisions. It’s pretty lonely though. Working with Team Macho, there’s this definite sense of purpose and you can sound out ideas while shouting out Queen songs across our giant messy space. Working alone is a lot more meditative and precise, but you can still sing Queen if you want to.

TB: What music do you listen to when you’re working?

LR: Well, Queen, obviously. And a healthy mix of German power metal like Blind Guardian, good Toronto music by like-minded friends like Owen Pallett, Diamond Rings, and the Hidden Cameras. And hundreds of hours of audio books about science, cryptography, and economy in 15th century Europe. You know… The usual

TB: When you think back to doing your Illustration degree, what are some of your stand out nuggets of wisdom you learned in school?

LR: Your first ten thousand paintings are always your worst, When painting, you should always start with a broom and finish with a toothpick, and remember that you are not your work.

There has been a lot of discussion, at my school at least, about whether or not illustration is considered a part of fine arts, based mostly on the sticky discussion of commerce. I personally believe that it is art.

TB: What do you think?

LR: How is the commonly conceived “fine art” in the world not commercial? It’s a giant, unregulated speculative investment machine, second only to the drug trade in profitability. I think that the dichotomy between fine art and illustration resting on commerce is bullshit. You could say that intent is really at the centre of the debate, but that’s also pretty dodgy. I always tend to look at it like this: Was it made in way that it needs to be accompanying/accompanied by a body of text that it supports/is supported by? It’s illustration. Can it be talked about and written about but doesn’t need to be to be enjoyed? It might be art?

TB: What artists inspire you?

LR: My main painting interests are Sargent, Velazquez, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Whistler, Freud et al. I’ve always really liked figurative painting, even when I was studying illustration. It’s just incredibly compelling. I don’t pay a lot of attention to contemporary art. Things where craft and dedication are apparent always excite me, like Nicholas di Genova or Heather Goodchild (both from Toronto). I find things that are intentionally aloof and obtuse to be maddeningly boring

TB: From most of the fine print I’ve read under your work I’ve noticed that you work a lot in oil. What’s the charm in this medium for you?

LR: The connection to history feel very apparent when working in oil. It helps me to understand the thinking behind a lot of my favorite work. It’s also just really pleasant to work in and can achieve so many subtle and beautiful effects. Acrylic paints just feel too much like the product of their era. And they gum up quickly and tend to feel flat.

TB: Your work tends to have figures, sometimes masked, situated in front of vague backgrounds. What are they thinking about?

LR: Secrets.

TB: Your paintings are generally quite small. Is it an attempt to pull the viewer into a secret?

LR: See above. I think working smaller has a few benefits to it though. As you point out, it helps to pull people into a painting a bit more when it’s more diminutive and can be easily beheld. It also allows me to work on a bit faster timeline and is really challenging (sometimes maddeningly so) to paint. I have plans to work on larger things very soon, but the thought of working on a four six foot painting with a brush the size of a toothpick kind of gives me the horrors.

TB: If you could be from any era what era would it be?

LR: Probably the Enlightenment? Provided I didn’t get the plague… Or about a hundred and fifty years ago, when painting was actually a job still.

TB: If you can imagine yourself being anything other than an artist, what would you be doing?

LR: Lumberjack. Or carpenter. Or maybe a farmer? Something where I could draw a huge amount of satisfaction from process.

TB: What’s next?

LR: Next is a big series of projects with Team Macho. One with a museum and possibly another show in Europe? Paris, we hope. And more paintings to be produced constantly. And one amazing secret thing that’s going to take a good bit of time, but excites me incredibly.

Interview Kristen Geekie

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.”

The Block: How did you become an artist?

Pierluigi Fracassi: Art has always been present in my life but it is only recently that I decided to devote myself completely. I believe that being an artist can not be a hobby: it is a full time job that requires lots of energy and sacrifices and with time it returns you huge rewards. Art is like a lover who wants more and more; so, a few years ago I quit my job to begin my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts.

TB: I see you do sculpture, painting, and photography. What is your favourite medium/technique to use?

PF: It is always a matter of time! There are works like “Damn Perfection,” where the baroque console made of ceramic bones took me so long before I finished. It has been a long work (about a year) because I wanted each piece to be made by my hand; it has to be original and not a copy of another one so I made it one by one. At that time sculpture was my favorite medium because it gives you the knowledge of an ancient power of creating something by your hands, from clay. In other works like “Orchids,” the series of self-portraits, the photography with its speed allowed me to capture an idea or a movement that I wouldn’t be able to do with other mediums. So I believe that there’s a strong and inevitable connection between my subjects and the medium I use to build it.

TB: What is it like to be an artist in Italy, surrounded by the great Renaissance masters?

PF: Italy is a beautiful crystal ball, filled with the most beautiful things ever, from the best painters, architects, and poets. What is missing in my country is the “now;” as long as we will not consider the idea that art is not only framed in old golden wood or ancient marble we will not grow up. And considering the cultural issue that we are living now I’m pretty pessimistic about being an artist in Italy. We give so much importance to what there was that sometimes the contemporary scene is obscured by the magnificence of the past.

TB: Where do you get ideas for your art?

PF: Mostly inspiration comes by the observation of human behavior and the perfection of nature. I love to mix intangible and shapeless human moods with the formal perfection of nature. I’m fascinated by Beauty in its various forms and my challenge is to find it in the unexpected places. My research is similar to that of a mathematician and my goal is to demonstrate that beauty can be revealed in any place, at any time and in every way if we could train our mind to look beyond.

TB: Your self-portrait is abstract. What made you represent yourself in this way?

PF: I thought it might be the easiest way at that time to do a little self-analysis. After a big fight with one of my best friend I felt like a selfish guy of 29 years old, that year after year embroiders itself with 29 needles to be just like it would like to be. I guess this is the other side of living with art: I have an altered vision of the world and relationships and I often forget that the world is not only black or white. So the self-portrait was a “mea culpa” to remember that art and life doesn’t stand on the same layer and that comparison is needed for a man who wants to grow.

TB: Can you talk about your use of bones?

PF: I’ve always been interested in the anatomy of the human body: the amount of colours and forms hidden under the skin are a microcosm often unknown. I use archetypal forms and subjects to load my work with a simplicity immediately usable by those who observe it, and bones allow me to speak of man without the risk of straying in subjectivism.

TB: Your art seems morbid, thanks to the skulls, but you make so many connections to living, organic things, blending bones with feathers or leaves.

PF: What is very clear in my work is, without a doubt, the strong connection between man and nature. I fully support the Darwinian theory and as a child I was fascinated by the great respect that this man has always given to nature, a nature that was not just something nice to see or where the men live but something living and changing just like a man. In this way the Darwinian Naturalism influences the hybridity of my work: man is no longer to the top of the chain of evolution but at the same level of nature.

TB: Tell me about one of your newer works, “Naturation.”

PF: Naturation is a consequence to the last answer: silhouettes of insects that are actually composed of a mosaic of leaves stand on a wall as king or queen, framed in glossy cameos almost like winning a hypothetical battle of man versus nature. The boundaries between vegetable and animal kingdoms become blurred in search of a common language that looks to a future of mutations in which man loses the anthropocentric perspective. The light that surrounds them is a cold one, a neon, just like could look the light of a postwar sun and the colours that once were soft and natural are brilliant and phosphorescent now, radioactive and genetically modified.

TB: If you hadn’t chosen art, what would you be doing?

PF: I believe that if I had not started an artistic career now I would be an entomologist or a botanist. I’m fascinated by all the grace that one can find in the natural micro/macro cosmos. The elements that I love to combine all come from the animal and plant world, my research aims to discover the archetypes of the forms and I have always found in nature everything I have needed.

TB: You were involved in the Venice Biennale this year. Can you tell us about the Biennale, and the work you submitted?

PF: A big dream come true…. that’s all I can tell about the Biennale! I always thought that working hard and believing in my dreams could draw me somewhere one day but I didn’t expected so soon. It was a huge gratification to see my work exposed between hundreds of artists I always admired and now, after a few months, I don’t see it as a goal anymore but as a start to the next step. I believe is a kind of responsibility because somehow people trusted my work and me and now it is time to show how much I’m worth. “Damn Perfection” is the work I submitted: a research that concerns limits, intended as physical and emotional extremes, and the race to the state of perfection conceived as coexistence of opposing elements.

TB: What are your long-term goals as an artist?

PF: To restore the concept of beauty and study a new canon that adapts it to the contemporary logic. At the same time I want to pursue my research and extend it to other fields such as music and videos. I believe that hybridization between multiple languages is one of the keys to understanding the world we live in, of which the art must be a consequence and not an escape.

TB: What do you hope your art achieves?

PF: Sincerely I wish that the first reaction of somebody looking at my work could be: “Oh…it’s beautiful!” because that would mean that I reached my goal. I wish I could find a way to make look beautiful what is not considered beautiful in a canonical way. At the same time I want to offer to the viewer an art that is not obtrusive: something that can easily be confused with the furniture of our houses and that slowly makes us reflect about much bigger issues. Last year I gave one of my bones sculptures to my grandmother and to see it hanging on the mantelpiece among the dishes, it’s just wonderful because she keeps thinking that they are flowers!

Interview Darcy Smith

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.”

Steciw brings these fleeting moments into the real world the same way your aunt might immortalize her pet Collie on a mousepad. “I was getting interested in on-demand printing on rugs or pillowcases,” she explains. “Those services are a mediating factor with images that are no longer film.” With the help of online custom print services, day-to-day iPhone snaps can inhabit unexpected tactile surfaces.

But Steciw isn’t interested in merely translating the digital into physical. Seen throughout her debut exhibition Love My Way at the Primary Photographic Gallery in New York, the 33-year-old photographer skillfully twists her images with layers of tongue-in-cheek abstraction.

Love My Way, 2011

Curated by Tim Barber of Tiny Vices, Steciw’s show highlights the intangible, altered nature of the contemporary visual experience. From photos skewed onto 70-by-3 inch wooden planks to three-dimensionally remixed shapes, her art juxtaposes playful and contrasting “image data.” “My work as a retoucher exposed new worlds of strange and interesting computer abstraction,” she explains. Removing blemishes from top-end fashion spreads by day, Steciw is well versed in the creative language of Photoshop. “I’ve worked in retouching for seven years now,” she says, adding that beauty, portraiture and product gigs help hone her skills.

But Steciw’s literacy in digital distortion is still expanding: right now, she’s reading Vilém Flusser’s Into the Universe of Technical Images. “He’s a philosopher that was writing in the 70s and 80s, at the same time as Marshall McLuhan,” she says. “He kind of foreshadows our modern relationship to images via the web. It’s mind-blowing, if only for the fact that he preconceives things like Tumblr.”

Writer Sarah Berman

Steciw currently has a group exhibition at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where she is showing a series of new site-specific installations. The 2011 Next Wave Art exhibition runs to December 18.

A longer version of this story appears in Issue 25 of The Block, available on newsstands, via subscription, or from Zinio.

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.’

Her move to New York in 2009 after winning the NY Songwriting Circle’s International Award in 2008 has not only altered her musical style but has introduced her to some of the city’s most influential artists, allowing her to embark on a diverse slate of creative projects. These include her latest EP Flesh & Ghost, shooting a Chanel commercial with renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese, and working with acclaimed music producer Mark Saunders (The Cure, David Byrne). The Block had the chance to talk with the rising artist about these things as well as her love of Scandinavia, Nirvana and the challenges of being a young musician.

The Block: Where do you come from and how did you first fall in love with playing music?

Amalie Bruun: I grew up north of Copenhagen right by the sea and the forest in a musical circus: my father is a songwriter and guitar player so it all started very early for me. I started writing songs when I was a kid and I played with my dad.

TB: You started at a young age busking on the streets of various cities around Europe; have you incorporated those experiences into your songs at all?

AB: Not so much the songwriting, but I did that because I was too afraid to go on stage. I had never played a show when I was 20. I could barely play for my own family, so I thought I’d go play on the streets because they’re so ungrateful, they just don’t care. It did help me to not be so shy, and it still affects me in a positive way.

TB: Does being from Denmark and Scandinavia inform your music? Do you feel like a Danish musician?

AB: Not particularly, I am very Scandinavian and I love Scandinavian composers. I grew up playing the violin so I love classical music. As for now, I’m inspired by the whole world, so what is Danish music really?

TB: You left there for New York a few years ago, how did that come about? AB: I lived in Stockholm right before and I was actually going to move there permanently for some years and work with musicians there and then I kind of saw into the future and asked myself where was it I wanted to be, and that was New York. So why stay in Stockholm? Why not move? So, I just booked a ticket and ended up there. I think a lot of New York people do that right? You just jump on a plane, sleep on people’s couches for three months and then all of a sudden something happens that makes you stay, and then you’re stuck, in a good way. TB: Did that move to New York and your time there change your style and sound at all?

AB: Very much, but the essence of what I play is the same as when I was a young child. I played with a band called MINKS in New York, they’re still playing but I decided to focus on my own stuff. They’re sort of more new wave-y, and all those genres that are big in Brooklyn right now, so that inspired me a lot. Life here can be tough and lonely at times, which is a cliche but the good thing about writing music and playing songs is that you can use that for something good.

TB: You’re working with music producer Mark Saunders for your next EP. Could you tell us more about what the mood and the sound of that will be?

AB: It’s going to be very whimsical and light and kind of eerie as well. He and I both love bands such as The Sundays and Mazzy Star, that vibe of the 90s. There is also a Rolling Stones cover on there as well, so some kind of 60s vibe as well. A little surf-y guitar; I have a new guitar and a tambourine so that will also be on there.

TB: Being a young musician or artist can be quite trying. Have you faced many challenges? What were some of your biggest ones?

AB: Yes, you have to pay rent right? But I have a very nice Irish landlord who is old and does not care if the rent is late, just as long as it’s there. My deposit for this apartment in the East Village was ten dollars, he was just like (puts on an Irish accent): “Just pay me ten dollars, its fine!” (laughs). But, New York can be incredibly judgmental, so sometimes I just want to move to the forest and play music because then I’d be happy. There’s a lot of stuff you have to deal with, all the time, but I think it’s hard for everyone.

TB: Do you have any dream musical collaborations?

AB: Keith Richards. That would be fun, that would be really great.

TB: That would be a very epic collaboration.

AB: Yes, that’s also how I felt about working with Martin Scorsese, you know I had never done any movies or anything before and here he is telling me how to act, it was amazing.

TB: Let’s talk about working with Martin Scorsese. How was it to meet him? Is he as intimidating as he could be?

AB: There is absolutely nothing intimidating about him, he’s so kind, so sweet, just rocking the eyebrows. I was in his office; he doesn’t even have a computer, it’s filled with books and there’s a little phone with a little old circular dial. He was going to brief me about the commercial and I thought we were going to talk about the role but all he wanted to talk about was music. He saw the ring I had on and he was like, ‘Oh that’s the one Keith (Richards) has!’ He also talked about shooting ‘Shine a Light’ [2008 Rolling Stones documentary directed by Scorsese] and how they zoomed up on the ring.

He also asked for a copy of the EP, and I told him he can check out my older stuff online and he just laughed and told me to look around his office to see if he had a computer.

TB: There seem to be a lot of young Scandinavian musicians making it big these days [Oh Land, Robyn, The Raveonettes, Lykke Li]; does their success encourage you at all?

AB: Well, I think it’s great that there is a lot of focus on them right now and yeah, it’s inspiring. I haven’t thought about that before, really. I mean, I was here in New York before a lot people I know that are here now but I was never thinking that being from Denmark would make it more difficult. I mean, look at Bjork, she did it before.

TB: What is next for you? Where can we see you in the near future?AB: The EP I’m working on with Mark Saunders is the next thing, alongside a music video with an amazing photographer named Kava Gorna.

TB: Any plans to come back to Europe soon?

AB: I hope so, I miss Scandinavia so much, it’s aching in my heart.

Interview Alexander LeRose

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.

Rather, they were painstakingly created over three months on a sun-marinated plain in Val Verde, California. The artist hiked to a secluded mountainside in the rural canyon town an hour northwest of Los Angeles to hammer swaths of hand-dyed muslin to the ground with garden sticks, weighing the fabric down with eight-foot-long two-by-fours. Falls used sunlight and rain in these perennially green hills to process the muslin, bleaching and washing away portions of fabric that weren’t protected by lumber. The result? Abstract, textured images that reveal the shape of the wood and an impression of the place where they were created.

The works in Somewhere to Go present an exploration of photographic trends and their relationship to minimalism in painting. At first look, the work might be mistaken for experimental painting or fiber art. The work’s ties to photography are admittedly tenuous— but this was precisely the artist’s aim. “That’s what I wanted,” Falls tells me over the phone from Brooklyn. “Work that comes out of photography, but at first glance isn’t materially photography at all.” Despite this, Falls says he is foremost a photographer. He was attracted to photography as a medium precisely because it allowed for experimentation.

Falls’ inventive techniques are characterized by a method and persistence that reflect his upbringing; he is an artist who emerged not in a studio, but a science lab. The son of an artist and a physicist, Falls uses art to understand human perception in the manner of a scientist. He studied physics, neuroscience, linguistics and theories of the brain at Reed College, a notoriously experimental liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. However, when it came to graduation time, the only department where he had earned enough credits to qualify for a major was Studio Art. “I came to the production of art pretty late,” he admits. “Before, I was just doing it for fun.”

Somewhere to Go, 2011

Falls followed his Bachelor of Arts with a graduate degree at Bard College in New York City, where he translated his scientific inquiries into artistic ones. “I wanted to investigate the problem of how a viewer relates to the object of photography rather than the content of photography,” he says.

This study is the subject of his current OHWOW show, the concept for which evolved from a series of experiments with construction paper that he intentionally faded to achieve an imprint effect. From there, he played with materials and scale, making his own paper and moving on to large fabric pieces.

With Somewhere to Go, Falls hopes to draw the viewer’s attention to the substance in front of them. His complaint is with photography’s ubiquity. Seeing it everywhere from magazines to newspapers, billboards and social networking websites, people don’t often reflect on the form of photography itself. “Photos are always taken at a distinct moment and when they are shown, the viewer is alienated from the moment of production,” he says. “They are more a window into the past than an object.”

Rather than show viewers the image of a place, Somewhere to Go brings a piece of that place to them. “That’s why I used thin thread-count muslin,” Falls says, “because I wanted [the prints] to feel like they were worn, and torn, and exposed. That way, they become really an imprint of the place and not just the object making the fade.”

“But,” I ask him, “isn’t this work, too, a window into the past? Does it not capture a place at a very distinct point of time?” Images of that Val Verde mountainside in the spring sunshine come to mind.

He pauses.

“Not to get too far out, but I think the sun and the elements are somehow still available in the piece in real life.”

Writer Deanne Beattie Photographer Taea Thale

A longer version of this story appears in Issue 25 of The Block, available on newsstands, via subscription, or from Zinio.

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

Peter de Potter’s Raf Simons-curated i am an image machine photographic installation showed in Berlin this July; his Tumblr, where many of the images are hosted, is at i-am-an-image-machine.tumblr.com.

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.

While thespian DNA may have played a major part in shaping Yelland’s acting chops, the actress also trained extensively at Cambridge University’s St. Catharine’s College, on the same stage where her parents first connected. She initially thought to be a director, but had a change of heart once she realized she wanted to act in a play she was working on. After graduating in 1997, Yelland threw herself into theatre, with lead roles in Daisy Pulls It Off, Mrs. Warren’s Profession and French Without Tears. She even appeared opposite her father, when the two toured Britain in a 2007/08 revival of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, playing Kate Nickleby to her father’s wicked Uncle Ralph Nickleby.

Having dedicated two years and over 300 performances to her critically acclaimed, career-changing performance in Brief Encounter, Yelland understands and acknowledges the perseverance and often-nomadic life demanded of a stage actor. “You get a role and it takes you to a certain place, or it finishes after three months or it carries on for two years or it runs for ten — it’s unforeseen most of the time, but really exciting… sometimes frustrating, but really exciting.”

Although she’s dabbled in film, it hasn’t provided as intense a challenge as the stage. “That’s something I’d really like to do: tackle a very challenging part in film,” Yelland explains. “I feel that I still have a lot to learn in that respect.” As for the father/daughter reunion, she reveals, “I’d love to do something again with my father, whether it’s on Broadway or back in England.”

Writer Anya Georgijevic Photographer Tetsuharu Kubota

A longer version of this story appears in Issue 25 of The Block, available on newsstands, via subscription, or from Zinio.

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.

Craig on Abbey: “Now at shows, Abbey has a tendency to slow down for me. The best was at Miu Miu in March, after I took her shot, she stopped me and said, ‘By the way, I love your blog.’”

Craig on Liu: “The cool thing about shooting Liu is that she has a graduated sense of personal style. She’s not in high school anymore, so she’s had more time to test and develop different outfits to suit her mood for the day, yet conform to her inner core.”

Photographer Craig Arend Illustrator Caroline So

A longer version of this story appears in Issue 25 of The Block, available on newsstands, via subscription, or from Zinio.