Stream of consciousness—Joyce’s pioneering practice of depicting an uninterrupted flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions—seems to have inspired several of Wei Wei’s works. A stream of consciousness, fervor and melancholy, dribbling and splashing onto the canvas after a thaw. Harlequin spectres in cream and muted peach, the neatly angular folds of a pansy rendered in denim blue—murky phantoms of intimacy haunt the shadows of a revery in these large-scale paintings. To immerse yourself in This Golden Yesterday’s Sleep Upon the Iris is just as Joyce put it—to think you’re escaping only to run into yourself.

Delphine Henelly’s paintings connote the Elizabethan era as much as they remind one of thumbing through the brittle, faded pages of an old comic book—misaligned, pointillated and ink splotched. Characters wander the pastoral landscapes, idle hands plucking fruit from trees or caressing the shoulder of a loved one.

Ed Emshwiller’s prolific, avant-garde, and under-recognized body of work spans hundreds of sci-fi book covers, early computer animation, and dance. His 1979 video art piece Sunstone is an example of early computer animation. The video is playful, a smiling sun loses it’s tongue only to have it return to it’s face and transform into a…

Lauren Satlowski proves again her masterly over light, casting each figure in an unearthly glow. A Hollywood home undergoing a visitation, a woman realizing something is terribly wrong – the feeling that Satlowski’s choice of subjects is random only drives harder at the mystery within them. Satlowski’s paintings feel nightmarish, like something we weren’t supposed to notice, a blip in reality.

There’s something that’s at once sterile and somadic about the concept of outer space. To be rocketed upward, isolated in a tiny vessel, piercing the belly of the sky and penetrating the atmosphere. The same such tension is present in Joan’s World, a solo exhibition from LA-based artist, Jen Shear. Steel walls and ceramic tiled floors are the foundation to Shear’s interdisciplinary works, creating an environment that synthesizes industrial aesthetics with the human hand. Shear’s collage pieces function as remembrances—including tokens, ephemera, and patterns, often repeating like morse code. A snapshot, or message, maybe meant for someone far off in the multiverse.

This is a note for Martha Nelson Thomas, RIP. Written by Claire Milbrath

One of the most important political stories in 2018, I think, was the stripper strike in New York City. By which I mean to suggest that strippers are often not legible as agents of politics.

By which I mean to suggest that when New York strippers were photographed by Jonathan Turton for Dazed Digital in March, alongside a feature, it could never be enough, however stunning. Red fishnets, immaculate weave, see-through platform heels, leather whips, acrylic middle fingers in the air, plastic cups with drinks half full—the accoutrements of performance (which index not actual lives but imagination and fantasy) carry stories uncapturable by the average camera, no matter how hard technologists try.

Melissa Juratowitch stars in Kurt Johnson’s homage to Ryuko Azuma’s Doorknob Girl—does it turn you on? But it’s only a doorknob!

Published in Issue 19 Interview by Claire Milbrath Images courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery   I asked Julie Curtiss for an explanation of the four recurring symbols that make a painting a Julie Curtiss painting: hair, cigarettes, fingernails, heels. To say her work reminds me of Rorschach inkblot tests seems a bit…

With shifts in consciousness and a warming world, we are grappling with gradually losing all we had hoped the environment could offer. The natural world becomes, increasingly, fodder for a fantasy—a refracted chimera of buds, vines, and plump fruit. Caroline David’s work reminds me of my favourite video game, Rayman 2: The Great Escape. Rayman—though a bit of a simpleton—occupies a landscape that is ethereal, mysterious, and abundant. Bouncing plums, sparkling lums, teensies and Globox, this dreamworld feels safe because it’s so far removed from reality. It subsists despite human intervention, is ever-lush and effervescent.

Jasmine Armani is a model, musician, and poet. Better known by her Instagram moniker @bbyafricka, Armani has been a muse for LA design house No Sesso, and recently posed for David LaChapelle’s Spring/Summer 2019 Kenzo campaign, just before the birth of her son, Shavo. In addition to her many talents, Armani is a new mommy! We talk to the iconic matriarch about what it’s really like to give birth.

In The Darby Bonarsky Story, Dasha Nekrasova plays a melodramatic, self-destructive actress whose commitment to her craft is only rivalled by her love of alcohol and schoolgirl skirts. It’s one of many canny, close-to-life performances over the past few years that have in many ways made Dasha the crisis actress of the moment. A Russian ex-pat raised in Las Vegas, with a degree in Lacanian Theory, she has since made a name for herself in all forms of contemporary celebrity: model, podcaster, meme icon, aspiring it-girl, and—with the release of Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Wobble Palace—movie star. Dasha reaches each triumphant milestone with her signature charisma and charm.