+ SIMON STRONG

+ MARNIE WEBBER

+ WENDY&JIM

+ MICHAEL SANS

+ FIONA JACK

+ RE:RE:RE:MOJOJO

+ ROMULUS MY FATHER

+ THE SHOUT OUT LOUDS

IMAGES courtesy and © Simon Strong
Represented by John Buckley Gallery

“My still images tell a story or portray an event, often suggesting things that have occurred or will occur, or events that take place outside of the field of view.”

INTERVIEW by Owen Leong

Simon Strong is an artist based in Melbourne, whose work plays with dark visions of the future. His images are hallucinogenic, slick and dreamlike. Post-human bodies wander urban dystopias, animals appear like lost spirits, and nature creeps back with a vengeance.

1. Your images are highly cinematic. Can you describe some of the ideas behind your work?
Because of my graphic design background, and I suppose, my wild imagination, I've always wanted my images to tell a story, portray certain ideas or create a strong visual experience. More recently in my solo work, I've become interested in darkness and the way artificial light can reveal a scene, as well as the figure in the landscape and the way they interact with the surroundings.

The cinematic feel to my work is also deliberate - I think, that in the same way a motion picture frames action and storyline, my still images tell a story or portray an event, often suggesting things that have occurred or will occur, or events that take place outside of the field of view.

2. What is your attraction to darkness and light?
I've become interested in the way you can suggest darkness and night time, using different lighting techniques and colour schemes. I also look at the way night is shot in films - whether it be with 'day for night' or other lighting techniques. I think that the average viewer of film, tv and images has the ability to suspend disbelief and accept that a particular scene, while obviously lit with artificial light, but presented as darkness or night, is real enough to engage with. I try to play with the way people read imagery.
3. How important is the human body, the animals, and the brooding natural environment in your work?
Life, in the form of humans, animals, plants, or even the suggestion of life is important in my work. Because I've become interested in the concept of Nature vs Humankind, it's important for me to offset the environments in my pictures with a human figure or even animal. In my work, I've also developed the concept of strange light sources as being a sign of life or natural life-force.

4. You also work collaboratively as Hardy & Strong. How does your collaborative work unfold, and how is it different from your solo practice?
Collaborative work can be described as different and the same. Different in that you have two artists making decisions on subject matter, style and direction. With Charmaine Hardy, we worked together on all aspects of the work - creative and technical, so it was matter of negotiating the direction and resolution of ideas. Sometimes one would have a stronger idea of how the work should take shape. Solo practice is less restrictive in that you only have yourself to answer to. I think though, that working solo, my particular style and sensibilities have developed much faster than when I was working collaboratively.

5. What does the future hold for you?
The future is just about further developing my style and the direction I'm moving in - especially the themes and issues that are most important to me in my work. As well as still images, I'm going to take the step into motion imagery. I've had a few ideas and some extensions of recent works which I think would work really well as short clips or films. I've always thought of doing it, but I've waiting for the time when it felt natural to take the step, and I think in the next year I will.

click images to enlarge
IMAGES courtesy and © the artist

“The darkness is the dangerous side one has to explore and express, as it is part of the subconscious that balances the lightness and humor.”

WORDS by Lulu Chang

1. Where are you from?
Los Angeles

2. Where do you get ideas from?
I get my inspiration from music and stories and quite often things my seven-year-old daughter says. I try to live in the world of imagination and think about things that aren't really here in everyday life. Then if I come up with an idea and it doesn't go away I feel I have to do it or I am not being honest with myself. The recent series "The Spirit Girls" started from an idea I had about a group of girls who had a band but all died tragically and came back to life as spirits to play music to people who didn't know they were there. That idea came from going to a lot of concerts as a teenager in the 70's and not seeing any women on stage in theatrical rock shows. I wanted to place the Spirit Girls’ music from that period. It evolved into a large conceptual art project with film, music and collage. All the different mediums are linked together by the overall narrative.

3. Why do you work in multi-media?
I work this way because one form of art couldn't possibly cover the depth of the characters. They need the emotion of the music and the landscape of
films and collage to help freeze their world in time.

4. Your work has a sense of twisted imagination and devine wisdom. Where do you draw this from?
The imagination is really powerfully tied to the subconscious. In fact they work together. The darkness is the dangerous side one has to explore and express, as it is part of the subconscious that balances the lightness and humor. I think wisdom is innate and can be expressed when people aren't afraid to explore their deeper selves.

5. What are your current or upcoming projects?
I have three art shows up currently. Patrick Painter Gallery in Santa Monica, Fredericks and Freiser in New York and Emily Tsingou in London. Each show has the new 16mm Spirit Girls film as well as sculpture and collage. I am doing a Spirit Girls musical performance at the Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles. The musical performance is the girls in costume with video projections singing songs and playing music from their recent CD, Forever Free. We will also play a live score to the new film. After that I will work on some more shows I have planned and then shoot the final Spirit Girls film, as it is a trilogy.

IMAGES courtesy and © Wendy&Jim

“Vienna is quite strange, during the day it seems quite boring, very slow, no sex on the street visible. But when the sun goes down, the real life starts, the strange one.”

INTERVIEW by René Kininmonth + Fiona Lau

With cities like Paris, London and Antwerp sucking up the fashion limelight, one has to turn to the smaller European cities in search of that hidden fashion gem– and such a gem can be found in Vienna, home of revolutionaries such as Sigmund Freud, Amadeus Mozart, the curtain-wearing Von Trapp family, California’s very own Governator– and of course the fashion genius of Wendy&Jim.

We caught up with Wendy&Jim designer Hermann Fankhauser (co-designer with Helga Schania) for a quick chat... in slightly broken English, and with a reference to "bummlessness", but a fun chat nonetheless.

1. In a few words, what is the Wendy & Jim “look”?
Wendy&Jim look is hard, dry and slow, but does not exclude sex. In our show the models look pride and dangerous.

2. You have worked with a lot of creative people like Peaches, Patrick Pulsinger, Cosmic Wonder, to name a few. How is collaboration important to your work?
The reason to do a collaboration is to channel the best from each other, to make a good product even stronger. We love to do collaborations, but we are not looking for it, people get in contact with us. Our next collaboration is with DJ HELL, a famous Tekkno DJ, who worked before with Versace and Hugh Hefner. We doing together an underwear line, and also we doing a camera for the LOMO, it’s a Russian Camera with special objectives.

3: Your work has a very industrial feel, without the need to make models look beautiful and sexy in a conventional way. How does Vienna influence this look?
Living in Vienna is quite strange, during the day it seems quite boring, very slow, no sex on the street visible. But when the sun goes down, the real life starts, the strange one. So at night it's a little more hardcore, the sound is fast in clubs, the boys and girls don’t speak so much, just watching each other and are very direct. The language of the cloth is quite simple, not very decorative, and we like this a looot. so, Vienna is a good inspiration, if you want to clean up your mind.

4. Your recent Menswear collections seem to focus more on sharp tailoring, what can we look forward to in the next collection?
hahaha, That’s a secret! But still sharp tailoring, It’s part of the Viennese culture, the tailoring.

5. If Wendy&Jim could be remembered for one thing, what would that one thing be?
Bummless and no decoration, just hard clothes for straight forwarded people!

IMAGES courtesy and © Michael Sans

“Once in a while I love to do something completely new. To use a material or a process that I've never worked with.”

1. Where are you from?
Born in Boppard/Rhine, living in Berlin, both Germany
 
2. How did you get into product design?
My granddad was a carpenter and owned a little sawmill with woodworking shops. I grew up with all sorts of wood, interesting tools and woodworking machines. I had always been interested in designing, constructing and building things. Being a product designer I can do exactly that.

3. Your work blurs the line between design and art. Is there a difference?
I have been trained as a product designer and do design (and very often build) things. None of those things I ever did I would dare to call “Art”. Artists wear orange pants, green shoes and a funny hat. They are crazy and extremely spontaneous. They talk about their work. Most of them have lots of women, the rest are gay (or female). The really good ones get caught by the police: In bed, together with 11 whores and tons of cocaine.

I am a just a regular, beer-drinking guy.

4. Your more commercial projects focus on the sale of a product, how do you find this process differs from a personal project?
Of course, there are differences. For the commercial projects you’ll get a briefing, you’ll get a dead-line and you’ll get paid at the end.

Working for a commercial client, certain ideas will not be accepted, usually you need to stay “politically correct”. But this does not neccessarily mean that you feel restricted. When I worked for Hugo Boss, for example - it was a lot of fun. They not only had a great team and a positive attitute, but were also very open and flexible.

One might think that the personal projects - compared to the commercial ones - will give you maximum freedom... this might be true for graphic design or painting, but not neccessarily for product design or installation. The realisation of an idea, and getting it from paper into a 3-dimensional reality, is often very difficult and expensive when you're funding the project yourself.

5. What do you love the most about what you do?
Variety and surprise. I love to work on different things at the same time. I also - once in a while - love to do something completely new. To use a material or a process that I've never worked with.

It is extremely interesting to see things become something that I didn't think they'd become. In their development phase objects or installations often seem to have a certain “free will”. I love to be surprised by my own designs.
 
I also feel priveliged to be able to switch between office and workshop. Between theory and practice. One day I think, read and discuss an idea, the next day I'm actually building it, and on the next I may be teaching one of my classes at the university. It's fairly difficult to get bored.

6. What now / next for Michael Sans?
I'm working on different projects. One is a collection of leather bags that is just about to be finished. It will be sold under my own label. There is also a project in porcelain that I've just started. It'd also be nice to get the chance to do some furniture.

“For me this work has a much less clear political voice than a lot of my other work. Often there is a conceptual preciseness to my political comment, but I also enjoy this more ambiguous voice...”

WORDS + INTERVIEW by Anna Jackson

Fiona Jack is a New Zealand artist based in California. Her recent installation After The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy is an abstract psychogeographic map of the city of Watts in south Los Angeles. The installation, while largely drawn from the theories of Situationists working in Los Angeles in the 1960s, also maps Jack's personal encounters in the Watts district.

1. Why did you choose the Watts district as the subject of your work?
My interest in Watts came from two places initially - I work sometimes as a volunteer for "Clean Needles Now" - a needle exchange that works across LA. They are looking to start a new exchange program down in Watts, and so I went with the director of the program on a few of her research/planning visits. I was really fascinated by this area that is next-door to my neighborhood, but totally different, isolated and a million miles away from the LA most of the people I know inhabit.

Then I came across the Situationist text The Decline and Fall of The Spectacle-Commodity Economy, written in 1965 about the riots in the Watts district. It is one of the very few texts the Situationists wrote about the USA, and perhaps the only enthusiastic one.

Then a third factor popped up - which is that I have been preparing to be a volunteer art teacher in juvenile prison here (going through security clearances, training etc.), and I found out that my placement may be to be in a community neighboring Watts.
It is necessary for me to have a reason to focus on a place, or a mode of interaction that somehow sidesteps the gallery system. For example in Chile I made a psychogeographic map of the city of Santiago because it was a public mural on the streets of a working class neighborhood making it a two way conversation rather than me alone mapping a place I didn't know. The constant interaction with locals in the making of this mural made this mural make more sense to me. People scrawled graffiti over it in the nighttime and I incorporated their texts into the mural in the daytime, and likewise the things people said to me as I was painting were often written directly on the wall. In the case of Watts - I made this "map" in order to learn more about a city that I am going to be working in, so there is an exchange in place.

2. The philosophy of the Situationists is, clearly, complex but can you firstly outline the defining principles?
F.J: The Situationists, at a very basic level, were interested in challenging conventional modes of studying and experiencing urban environments. They proposed that sticking to familiar pathways and areas of cities created a numbness and dehumanisation in society and in response invented the concept of the dérive (or drift) which used various techniques to send the wanderer on a tangential and subverted journey through their own environment.

Their technique of psychogeography involved the accumulation and rendering of the collected experience and ephemera gathered while drifting. It might generally be an impractical and abstract personal map, but it may also invent a new way of exploring a city.

3. Your installation fills the gallery – floor to ceiling. Can you talk a little about your approach to space and your creative process?
I have been interested in huge paintings ever since I went to the Louvre and saw Jacques-Louis David's painting of the Coronation of Empress Josephine (and previously through my interest in graffiti erasure paintings) which is such a large painting that you can't really see it all at once. If you stand back far enough to see the whole image, it no longer looks like a painting, and if you stand close enough to get a sense of the painterly gesture, then it becomes somewhat cinematic as you walk along it. In essence, I felt like I couldn't really see it all at once, which was a thrilling idea to me. Its grandeur and scale introduced a kind of temporality and flux, which I became obsessed with. At a formal experiential level I felt like I was inside the painting, and I wanted to find another way create that sensation, whilst adhering to something of a conceptual "formula".

I became interested in Situationism when I was living with writer and UCLA professor Peter Wollen in LA in my last year of art school in LA. He is one of the foremost scholars on the Situationists and so the impact of that time and his bookshelves on me was significant. The Situationists' interest in re-considering urban mapping and the functions of urban space was interesting to me. Problematic in part, but nonetheless worthwhile and interesting. I started to think about mapping as an abstract and temporal form. In acknowledging the subjectivity and politics of mapping I became interested in the idea of combining the ultimate subjective expression of abstract painting, with a self-conscious mapping project (via the processes of the situationists), and the immersive temporal painting idea that grew out of my encounter with David.

So the painting rooms have grown out of all of that. I make a small-scale model of the gallery and figure out custom canvas sizes and sometimes a box to sit on, and then set it all up in the space. It is all white to begin with - none of the canvases are pre-painted. In this particular installation I mapped out the area quite literally and then over ten days moved back and forth around the room adding and subtracting elements using the notes and references collected in my notebooks and albums and resources. But in Santiago I walked the city streets every morning and then spent the afternoon mapping what I had just seen/learnt, so the map formed according to my the chronology off my walks rather than the geography of the city.

4. Your work has a clear political voice; can we expect to see more of this sort of thing in the future?
For me this work has a much less clear political voice than a lot of my other work. Often there is a conceptual preciseness to my political comment, but I also enjoy this more ambiguous voice because it explores another way of thinking through the collision of art and politics. As Karen Kurczynski says of ex-situationist Asger Jorn - It is about a "belief in the potential of art as a sensory experience that facilitates a political consciousness basic to all social activism."

IMAGES courtesy and © the artist

“As a little girl, I used to play with toys I made myself, and I would spend hours in front of my desk drawing. In a sense I feel I am still doing the same thing.”

INTERVIEW by Marcus Cowan

1. Where are you from?
I live in Tokyo, Japan.

2. How would you describe your artwork?
I consider my work to be a kind of "reconstruction" of fashion media, meaning that I break and twist existing images, and create my own art from them.

5. Why do you make collages?
I have so many reasons, I don’t know where to start. I guess what drives me mostly with my collage making is the contradictory feelings I have towards beauty and fashion. For instance, I love and adore beautiful catwalk models. I am very much into fashion, and am always concerned with how I dress. At the same time I always have this kind of hatred of "fashion addicts", and especially loath people's addiction to big brand names.

More importantly, it is my constant desire to create something. As a little girl, I used to play with toys I made myself, and I would spend hours in front of my desk drawing. In a sense I feel I am still doing the same thing.

6. What artists inspire you?
I love all sorts of art. As for artists I admire, many of them are based in London such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

I am interested in the work of other collage artists and graffiti artists who were “born” on the streets. I also love young Australian artists. At the moment my favorite artist is P.A.M from Melbourne.

7. What do you plan to do in the future?
I definitely want to create something dynamic and huge! …like a 2 metre-long collage. I also have a dream of making short movies and to distribute them periodically on the internet.

As I work as a VJ (visual jockey) for clubs and events, I would love to organize an event with music, and would create collages improvising as images appear on a screen. That would be exciting.

REVIEW by Jessica O'Brien

ROMULUS, MY FATHER (2007)
Director: Richard Roxburgh
Starring: Eric Bana, Franka Potente, Kodi Smit-McPhee

Romulus, My Father is a visually stunning and emotionally complex film based on the memoirs of author and philosopher Raimond Gaita. Set in rural Australia during the 1960s, the film is a portrait of a child’s enduring relationship with his father, despite the inexorable disintegration of his family unit. The confusing and at times frightening world of his parents, Romulus (Eric Bana) and Christina (Franka Potente) is observed through the eyes of a nine year old boy, who ultimately survives the neglect of his depressed and often absent mother and at the films bleakest, the emotional breakdown of the central figure in his life; his father Romulus.

Developed with director Richard Roxburgh over seven years and adapted for screen by poet and playwright, Nick Drake, this film manages to capture the emotional intensity of Gaita’s story with a minimum of dialogue, a reflection of the predominantly male characters; reserved, silent, yet strong. The film is interspersed with stunning scenes that act like real life memory bringing a richness and immediacy to the story. The parched, open space of the Australia landscape allows the film to breath, preventing the film from becoming claustrophobic in its emotional intensity.

Romulus, My Father is undeniably depressing in its subject matter, yet the lyrical cinematography, jewel-like memories of childhood, and the tenacious survival of the child Raimond, successfully navigates its weighty subject matter and manages to capture the deep bond between father and son.

INTERVIEW by Karlee Slater

They were featured in the arts section of The New York Times in November 2005. They have toured with bands such as The Strokes, Kings of Leon, Secret Machines, The Dears, The Magic Numbers, The Rosebuds and The Essex Green. Bass player Ted Malmros won a Grammi (the Swedish version of the Grammy Awards) for directing the Peter Bjorn and John video Young Folks. All members have been friends since they were young. Their second album, Our Ill Wills, has been released in Sweden and is set to debut in on our shores later this year. We spoke to vocalist Adam Olenius about his band, The Shout Out Louds.

1. Where did the name come from?
From a drawing we made of two wolfs. They were shouting and looked quite handsome. And also from some of the lyrics.

2. Were there any other eligible band names at the time?
“Alaska” and “Oh Mickey you_re so fine you blow our mind, hey Mickey”

3. What did you grow up listening to?
My dad played me a lot early Chicago and Queen. He also played me a lot of Opera that made me listen to Heavy Metal instead (like the rebel I was.)

4. Do you feel this has influenced your music? How?
Sure. Just growing up in a house where music was very important.
I love to get influenced by music that I different than what we play.
Heavy Metal drums and Chet Bakers lovely trumpet.

5. If you could play with any musician/s live or dead, who would they be and why?
Nina Simone on vocals. Me on drums ( my favourite instrument), Dave Brubeck on the piano and Peter Hook on bass.
Just the perfect four. We would get along just great.

6. When/where was your best show? What happened there?
One show in Portugal was really great. It was a really big stage and it was poring down. We were under s roof of course but it looked so beautiful playing in front of this “wall” of rain…and people stayed.

7. How do you feel about your latest release?
Like a hundred dollars. We are very proud and happy about the music landscape we created.