Sally Tran//////////////
Homopunk/////////////
Elisabeth Weissensteiner///////
Petrina Hicks/////////
Youssef Nabil////////
Cultural Urge/////////
Planningtorock////////
Shortbus///////////////

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IMAGES courtesy and © the artist

“I don’t know what the real fashion industry is like. I’ve never been fashion enough to really get it.”

INTERVIEW by Jason Lingard

1. The first thing that comes to mind to ask you is “what is it exactly that you do?” You seem to have your fingers in so many pies it’s hard to keep up.
I’m recovering from fashion / making prop art / learning about film and loads of different programmes on my computer to do digital anything.

Currently I aim to keep my attention span happy and making just enough cash to survive. Until I understand the importance of money, or until I find that thing that won’t make me stop, I will concentrate on that thing, which ever comes first.

2. Your fashion shows have a reputation for being overly extravagant and immaculately staged productions. Was the move into film a natural progression from these shows?
I’m not a good “fashion designer”. I’m also no good at predicting what people want to wear next season, or more so that I just don’t care.

The "Drag Queen" concept is an idea that inspires me: men who dress to look and be someone they are not, everything is exaggerated, their height, their breasts, the length of their nails and eyelashes, their personalties change because of their appearance. This concept inspires my designs, and my shows. Designing for the artificial, extravagant, the unrealistic- that’s why I’m not a good fashion designer and why I always put so much time and thought into my shows. The ‘fashion’ shows I put on were always a bit extravagant, sometimes cheesy and messy, other times beautiful and silent, it all depends on the theme, or the story.

So naturally, my intentions changed from telling stories through clothing and shows, to making moving pictures on video and film, where the stories can be told to a wider audience and to perhaps an audience who appreciate it more.

3. How has winning the Radio Active music video awards affected you, or your aspirations?
Winning... was odd. People text voting their favourite video to win... and just competition in general makes me feel odd. I never expected to win. I heard so many negative things about my work as the time drew near. But the video won two awards on the night. As a result of the competition, nothing much has changed, no one in film production takes me seriously. Still, the main progression would be to go ahead with my short film, and there are a small group of people who support me which is awesome.

4. What do you love the most about filmmaking?
I’m an amateur video / filmmaker. I’m still understanding the basic principals, I’m still learning the terminology, so I think learning (and learning without any pressure) is probably the thing I love about it right now.
Why I’m ultimately getting into film and the idea of moving pictures, is the ability to portray my story to an audience, to provoke thought, conflict and intrigue.

5. What do you hate the most about the fashion industry?
I don’t know what the real fashion industry is like. I’ve never been fashion enough to really get it.

6. What / who inspires you?
It used to be this guy called Jason Lingard, but he left me for another man 3 years ago, I still haven’t replaced him.

7. How do you feel about the New Zealand fashion scene at the moment?
Who cares.

8. What are you working on next?
Working on some creations for my first solo exhibition, I’m also developing an arts network / online store called ishland.com. The main project I’m working on is my short film. I’m writing the script at the moment and getting into the pre-production. Everything is going slow, but that’s what happens when you have your fingers in too many pies.

To view Sally's videos and footage of her fashion shows you can click here

Click images to enlarge

IMAGES courtesy and © Donatien Veismann

“Well I always thought that Ronald McDonald or the tiger from Frosties cereal were way more hot than Jeff Stryker...”

INTERVIEW by Nicholas Harmer

1. Where are you from?
I am french. My heritage is half russian and tunisian and i grew up in a bourgeois suburb. A very inspiring small town similar to twin peaks but with a parisian accent. The book who inspired the french revolution was written in that town. You can still feel that vibe there.

2. Homopunk has an "in between" quality that's difficult to gauge. art or pornography?: how do you describe it?
I don't wanna describe it. I don't have a concept or marketing plan. It comes from the heart and balls. it's a very organic process and you know in the end everything is in eye of the beholder. It’s up to you to judge what you see. I created the homopunk project six months ago as i was really tired of the existing stuff around. I wanted to bring a bit more fun, trash and rock into this fucking boring "gay" culture. Something more queer - closer to the queer zines i used to read in high school but also the 80's fashion mags and playboy girls are big inspiration.

3. The props and ideas you use are definitely a lot more imaginative than the average pornography we've all seen. Is it for the style / art factor, or are you bringing your own fantasies to life?
Well I always thought that Ronald Macdonald or the tiger from Frosties cereals were way more hot than Jeff Stryker. I just bring to life what i feel is missing for me - the images I would like to see.

4. A few of you models appear in homopunk more than once. How do you meet your models: are they friends? professional models? strangers?
Mmmmh... it really depends. Some punkstarz are friends from the art school, some others are friends of friends, some i met trough this website where students escort after school classes. Depends. Some also are fashion models. This guy "Joga" did the fendi and diesel advertising campaign and does the Galliano men's show every season. He's a regular stripper on the site.

5. I believe some of your tamer work was in an issue of playguy a few years ago. Do you often do work for "traditional" pornographic magazines?
Yep, I did a few "conformist" works for American porn magazines. I even had the cover of honcho mag three times which is like having the cover of the bible! But for the moment porn mags are not into nude pink boys dancing the French cancan.

6. You're also a published fashion stylist. What came first, styling or homopunk? And which have you gained more attention from?
It came exactly at the same moment. I had my first published set the same week I won this young designer contest which were both turning points for me. So this is my curse... styling and guys in transparent underwear.

7. It must be refreshing to have both outlets bringing out two different sides of your creativity. The pornographer then the fashion stylist. Is one more fun than the other? How do they relate or influence each other?
Doing several things is pretty refreshing for sure, but for me there is no real difference between the two. Both have a sexual dimension. I would even say that art, whatever medium used, has to have a sexual dimension to be good.

8. What are you working on at the moment / plans for the future?
Well certainly homopunk.com will die soon - it's something i am thinking about. But for the moment I will do more. We will do a collaboration with the fabulous fashion designer Jeremy Scott. Naked boys in his pizza-print skirts, or hairy macho guys wearing his chocolate cupcake evening dress, that kind of stuff. Also we have our first party in november in brussels with the bitchybutch guys, so eric, the DJ, will model his hairy ass for the website. What else? Yeah, also the first dvd and calendar on their way. Maybe we can become the faggoty and fucked up version of hugh heffner! Or maybe die young and stay pure and strong like Shirley Temple or Kurt Cobain. We will see, but i would like to say this last word to the fans... stop bitching, start a revolution!

1. Pin Baby, 2006
Wire mesh, paper, paste, pins
50 x 50 x 20cm
 
2. Alert, 2006
Wire mesh, glass matt, polyester resin, rust, found object
13 x 40cm

IMAGES courtesy and © the artist

“Understanding is for me a two-way process, it goes outward and then inward, and it always has to cross this body boundary.”

INTERVIEW by Ella Mudie

1. Your upcoming show is called “Intro-Spectatio”. Can you explain a little about the title?
In Latin “intro” means the movement from an outside into an inside, and “spectare” means looking at something. I put that into a word that now means moving inside and looking outside at once. Besides, I like the habit of some sciences, like medicine or biology, to attach (often invented) Latin names to the objects investigated. This has a mystifying effect on the understanding of an outsider of the field. He/she tends to attach a much higher authority to a Latin term than to an English term. So that also gives my title an ironic twist – don’t let yourself be tricked, you are responsible for what you understand.

2. You could say your work, then, challenges the conventions of inside and outside. Why is this so? Where has this fascination come from?
It comes from my interest in the process of understanding. As I mentioned, understanding is for me, a two way process, it goes outward and then inward, and it always has to cross this body boundary. Thus perception and meaning depend on each other, are continuous processes that condition each other. So what’s first: What I see or what I feel? What I sense with my eyes or what I see in my imagination? The feelings or the stories? It is quite fascinating to me that many people, also many young people, respond strongly to the works that have lots of pins pointing inwards, into the object. The ambiguity of pain seems to strike a chord in them.

3. What kind of materials do you like to work with and why?
My preferred materials are from our daily lives. I like to go to hardware stores or office supply shops or the like. Often I use wire, paper of all sorts, plastic and lately a lot of glass fibre and polyester resin. I choose these materials because I am interested in both the inside and the outside of an object. Therefore I find materials that have a certain resemblance with shell or skin and that have a certain translucency. Often they are fragile.

4. You live in Melbourne, Australia and M_dling, Austria. (The similarities between the place names are quite uncanny) How does belonging to two cultures and countries influence your art?
Yes, we have joked about the similarity of the names already before I left for Australia…First I expected the countries to be much less different as I find them now. The longer I live here – by now it has been three years – the more I find out about the subtleties. That means the better I know my second home the less familiar I feel. Looking at my first home, Austria, it probably is the other way round: the longer I stay away the better I seem to understand. This already shows the influence on my art – to question imagining and understanding currently shapes my everyday life.

5. What are you working on at the moment?
First thing is the show at Uber Gallery in Melbourne. It opens on October 24. Then there is a whole body of work in my head that deals with my experiences in China as artist in residence of the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing this year, and a plan of a series of children’s figures referring to the story by E.T.A Hoffman “The Mysterious Child” that goes about creativity and reality. But first of all I have to look for a new studio where I can do all my experiments without bothering anybody. If something comes along, please let me know.

Elisabeth’s solo show “Intro-Spectatio” is showing at Uber Gallery in St Kilda, Melbourne from 24 October – 26 November 2006

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IMAGES courtesy and © the artist

“I like photographic images that are beautiful to look at and ones that are genuine and truthful in their approach, and ones that evoke some kind of emotional response.”

INTERVIEW by Jason Lingard

1. Where are you from? Sydney.

2. How did you get into photography?
I picked it up as an elective when I was doing a Communications degree at University, then got hooked.

3. What do you feel makes a good picture?
I like photographic images that are beautiful to look at and ones that are genuine and truthful in their approach, and ones that evoke some kind of emotional response.

4. Your portraits are simple in subject matter, but you manage to draw something extra from the subject. What aspects do you consider when planning a portrait?
I take portraits of children or teenagers whom I find inspiring in some way, it's usually something about their appearance that inspires me. I try to use the medium of 'portrait photography' to explore certain ideas and feelings, so the primary goal of my portraits is not the traditional sense of portrait photography where you are trying to reveal the persons essence or identity. Sometimes the persons identity is secondary to the ideas I'm trying to explore.

5. The old saying goes "Never work with children or animals" How do you find working with both?
It's fine, I love working with children, however you do need to have patience, because it can take some time to get what you are after, and sometimes it just doesn't work. It usually works when I'm photographing a child who has an intuitive understanding of what I'm trying to achieve. As for animals... that is hard work!! They are tricky to direct.

6. A certain surreal value is added to your images through digital manipulation. Tell us about this process and how it influences and effects the way you work.
Most of my portraits are digitally manipulated in some way. I shoot on film, then end up completing the images in Photoshop. I try to create a tension between perfect and imperfect imagery, so sometimes I will photograph teenagers whom have physical flaws or disabilities of some form, yet at the same time I will use Photoshop to make the image appear 'perfect' and airbrushed similiar to what we see in fashion mags today. So there is a tension in the image between what we perceive to be 'imperfect' and 'perfect'. I also use Photoshop sometimes to add a surreal, futuristic or spooky feel to some of the portraits.

7. If you could have anyone in the world sit for a portrait who would it be? An alien.

8. With unlimited funds, what would be your dream project?
I would like to go to Russia and do a series of portraits of teenagers there.

9. What are you working on at the moment?
I'm putting together ideas for a new series of images: futuristic portraits of teenagers.

Petrina Hicks currently has a piece on display at NGV Australia in Melbourne as part of the Light Sensitive exhibition until 18 February 2007.

Click images to enlarge

IMAGES courtesy and © the artist

“All my work is first shot in black and white then hand-coloured. I use exactly the same old photography technique that I learned from the oldest colourists in Egypt.”

INTERVIEW by Jason Lingard

1) You were born in Cairo and now live in New York. Do you sometimes look back and wonder how you’ve come to where you are now in your life?
Yes all the time, ambition is a great thing to have but it is also an emotional effort. You have to make decisions like leaving your country, your family and the ones you love because of your career. Eventually you develop a different relationship with life and your existence. I talk about it in my self portraits, as I feel always like a visitor anywhere I move to live, because I know that I will have to leave again. My relationship to my life is the same, for me it’s about coming to a place which is not yours then having to go.

2) How do you feel your Egyptian heritage influences your work?
I grew up in Egypt and I think about it all the time. It’s there in the behind everything I do. I can’t say in what way it influences me, but my colours come from there- hand coloured family portraits were around me all the time in Cairo’s studios, and Egyptian cinema posters were hand painted until very recently. I had it around me so much that I decided to keep it in my work.

3) Tell us a bit about the hand-colouring process?
All my work is first shot in black & white then hand coloured. I use exactly the same old photography technique that I learned from the oldest colourists in Egypt. I use watercolour but also other mediums.

4) You’ve worked with significant photographers such as Mario Testino and David laChapelle. How did you find working with them? What did you learn?
Those were two very special periods in my life, working first with David in New York between 1992 and 1993 then Mario in Paris between 1997 and 1998. I met both in Egypt, and while working with them I felt like I was working within a family. Both knew my work, my hand-coloured portraits, and liked them and encouraged me to do my thing. David thought my work was advanced for my age at the time, I was only 19. And Mario used to tell me things like “I’m sure you will be a big celebrity”. Things like that gave me the courage to move on and go my own way.

5) Your work is mainly portraiture. What elements and considerations do you feel are most important for a successful portrait?
To feel that I want to keep part of this person with me. I like people, and I like watching them, I think I am a voyeur by nature. Something has to move me to do someone’s portrait, it could be their work, or face character, or simply because I liked them when we met.

6) You’ve photographed a variety of people, some of your favourite artists like Tracey Emin, celebrities like Sting and John Waters, and famous belly dancer Fifi Abdou. How close do you get to your subjects? What kind of impression do they have on you?
We need to meet at least one time before I photograph them. We get to know a bit of each other and how we want to do things before the day of shooting, which is a very important thing. Some of them are good friends of mine like Tracey who I met in Cairo many years ago then latter on we decided it will be great to do something together.

7) Dead or alive, who would you most love to photograph?
Frida Kahlo, Umm Kalthoum, Ana Mendieta, Georgia O Keeffe, Nefertiti.

8) Your more recent pieces are self-portraits. How do these differ from your regular portraits? What have you learnt from this project?
I learnt a lot about myself while doing self portraits, they talk about my relation with myself and life. They’re the most personal of my work. They come to me when time is right. It’s a long term project and I don’t know when it will end.

9) What do you have planned for the future?
I always thought of death and that I will die young. So I never made big plans for my future. One thing I always hoped for is that my work will live long after me.

Click images to enlarge

IMAGES courtesy and © the artist

INTERVIEW by Ella Mudie

Cultural Urge are visual art collective Sebastian Vaccaro and Marcela Vergara. They take up a mix of digital art, screen-printing, photography, street art, and illustration to realise their unruly visual dreams and graphic hallucinations. At their upcoming Above Ground show, they propose to unleash “illusions from the virtual realm that live within the depths of his psyche.” Curious to know more about this elusive and esoteric pair of artists, Nothing Magazine chats to Cultural Urge to find out more about what makes them tick…

1. What does it mean to you both to work together collectively? Why did you choose to adopt a persona to represent your artwork?
We work jointly and provide each other with different views and perspectives in how we go about approaching the project at hand.

The left and right hemisphere of the brain process information in different ways, we compliment each other, we are each one half of the same brain.

We are the perfect partnership for each other. Marcela is the outspoken mechanical side with little to fear and sometimes a bit scary. I am the creative purist dreamer who can sometimes be a little spaced out and hard to see from earth. One cannot do without the other!

2. What inspires you visually?
What inspires me visually is other artists’ work and my surroundings. The detailed complexity of organic bio-mechanical forms fused with rich colour and bold outlines really stimulates my visual senses.

What I find to be inspiring in my environment and foreign surroundings is anything that is a little left from centre, in some way awkward and confrontational to look at.

3. What is more “real” for Cultural Urge: the reality of art of that of the everyday world?
We do not all believe what we hear, but yet believe of what we see with our own eyes. The only proof of our existence, is that of our thought processes through the use of our minds. The only evidence of realism of a visual physical existence, Is that of which we have created deep within the realms of our psyche THE VIRTUAL WORLD!

4. Your upcoming show is called “Above Ground”. What does it mean to you to bring a “street art” style of work into a gallery?
Above Ground is distancing myself from mainstream commercial work and celebrating what I find to be desirable. It is about living up to my Ideals and the rebirth of my new found values, and not over exhausting my imagination like an overworked machine on the verge of breakdown.

“Enjoy your freedom of ability to create, don’t let the commercial monster grab hold of your imagination and turn it into an Imachination, keep the balance, and allow fiction to consume your reality and not reality consume your fiction.”

5. What is Cultural Urge working on at the moment?
We are working towards finalising bits and pieces for the Above Ground Exhibition. It’s the attention to detail that will keep us busy until the opening night. Building the Cultural Urge website has been a major priority due to be launched into cyber-deep world early next year for all you space cadets to enjoy!

Cultural Urge’s solo show, “Above Ground” is showing at China Heights Gallery in Sydney, on the weekend of December 9 and 10, 2006