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.
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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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Posted in Art and Culture, Interview, Toronto | No Comments »
Thursday, December 15th, 2011
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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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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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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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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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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Friday, November 18th, 2011
Today’s modern woman is a minefield of contradictions, and we all know we’re guilty. Pretty in pink, combat boots, edgy couture – all beckon us to worship at their fashionable altars. Sydney-based designer Sara Philips is making a name for herself balancing this push-and-pull. Every season since her namesake label’s 2007 launch, she’s offered up a focused, inspired collection, and the alternately colour-blocked and lacy pieces of Spring 11/12 are no exception. Though it’s cold and snowy on our side of the world, it’s summer down under, and we’re jealously coveting these pretty yet sophisticated designs. We caught up with Sara to chat about childhood inspiration, travels in Egyptian, and her take on femininity.
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Thursday, November 10th, 2011
Big Freedia is a New Orleans rapper who uses the feminine pronoun despite the fact that she is a tall African-American man with a penchant for wearing sequined jackets and capes. At any of her notorious live gigs, the following scenario unfolds: when the beat kicks in, Freedia, like a shamanic conjurer, shouts the hypersexual lyrics to her anthem “Azz Everywhere” while scantily-clad ladies race to the front. Men are relegated to the back, and there’s an onslaught of booty shaking so intense it looks as though someone may become pregnant via immaculate conception. “There’s always a lot of energy,” she explains enthusiastically over the phone in her sweet-yet-authoritative Southern drawl. “No matter when I hit the floor, I make ‘em shake. I make ‘em work hard. When I come, the party starts.”
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Tags: Big Freedia
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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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THE BLOCK MIXTAPE
by Young Empires
Mixtape: Young Empires
Toronto's Young Empires send us straight to the dancefloor with this mixtape for The Block.
www.myspace.com/youngempires
01. Sabali (Vitalic Remix) - Amadou & Miriam
02. Lies (Herve Remix) - Fenech-Soler
03. Hour of the Wolf (Lifelike Remix) - Adam Kesher
04. Dance the Way I Feel (Armand Van Helden Remix) - Ou Est Le Swimming Pool
05. Snake Charmer - Bag Raiders
06. Wait & See - Holy Ghost!
07. All Night (Azari & III Remix) - Voltage
08. You Know I Know It - Tensnake
09. La Mezcla - Michel Cleis
10. Rain of Gold (French Horn Rebellion Remix) - Young Empires
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