PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 18 Dame Cartland is the most prolific author of the 20th century, having written over 700 novels, the majority of which were pulp romance, often seemingly unedited. Estimate sales of her books range from 750K to 2 billion. A true 20th century woman, she was born 1901 and died in…

PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 18 INTERVIEW BY DREW ZEIBA Sleep, Acrylic on foamcore, mounted on aluminum. Images Courtesy of Bodega Artist, curator, and gallerist, Sam Lipp’s work floats. Despite his paintings’ use of seemingly clear language and representational images, the exact meanings behind them remain unnervingly difficult to pin down, unendingly unfixed. His paintings are suffuse…

So much of Heidler’s work feels as though it’s at its own altitude. Attention-seeking palettes are a conduit for recounting bewildering tales. Advertisements from a magazine’s back-page erotic advertisements, dried flowers, and stickers are the sorts of repurposed materials that find their way into her compositions. Engaging the pop cultural zeitgeist, farcical narratives, and divergent forms of femininity, Heidler’s work serves us a painterly mille-feuille brimming with dense, figurative layers.

“I have fallen through a window of time, captured and written down on the screen. My name appears everywhere, but I cannot go home.” Journal of Smack, Andrea Lukic Branches drag across the window pane; shifting shadows on the floor reveal secret truths in Andrea Lukic’s fifth installment of Journal of Smack. Flipping the pages…

Koak paints the modern day American Gothic, the Midwestern woman on the verge. Bold black lines and mood-colouring depict female figures writhing, gnawing, and bringing the axe down. Taking her title from Grant Wood’s 1930s mural Breaking the Prairie, Koak’s new exhibition is a reaction to a long history of men breaking nature. Wood’s Depression-era Public Works of Art projects serve as fodder for the Trump-era painter, with their focus on Midwest masculinity, agriculture, and economically-motivated American isolationism.

The first to bloom and fastest to die, Lilac is the official harbinger of Spring. With a potent scent that is at once sweet and rotten, Lilacs unleash memories of childhood and adolescence. Kristy Luck and Alan Prazniak’s duo painting show River Belly, at Projet Pangee, takes us to Lilac realms.

Shiny, colourful, and 3D, Palladino’s work is consumer-friendly. Essentially a time-traveller in his practice, Palladino enhances the ancient art of sculptural reliefs with futuristic technologies like 3D design and additive manufacturing. In Ourboros, the gods and kings typically depicted in historical reliefs are traded in for idols of the current age: tech and science.

Today singer-songwriter Antony Carle unveils But You, Everybody Is, the first single off his debut album to be released in 2019. This sensual ballad, produced by Ouri, is wrapped in oneiric synths and unusual sounds. The lyrics are as personal as they are universal, tackling the quest for identity and the realities faced by today’s queer artists.

Elysia Crampton is an experimental producer and musician making music that is both challenging and rewarding. It is best to introduce her work, in writing at least, in her own words: “My two main points are that my work be understood as a project of Aymara survival and resistance… and secondly, as an impulse to resist appeals to individualism (marked by colonial law, in relation to bodies and land ownership, as a project of genocidal regulation against Native American people in the Americas). The notion of individualism as a governmental project of extraction and control can be traced verbatim to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.” A diverse, ever-growing group of attentive fans feel forever changed by her contributions. 

Lauren Satlowski’s exhibition Gadzinas Bell, currently on view at Odd Ark LA,  features a group of psychological, future paintings. Satlowski’s lone protagonists, depicted as flimsy nebulous bodies, unlock a well of emotion typically reserved for human encounters with aliens or artificial intelligence. There’s a mix of love, empathy, and fear when we encounter these uncanny “others.”

Orion Martin’s mark-making is nearly indiscernible. The precision with which he works seems uncharacteristic of our time—in favour of digital finesse, the act of pushing the limits of the human anatomy for the sake of art seems to have grown obsolete.

Mexico City is the new Berlin. A few years ago I heard someone announce it. All the kids who show at Berlin galleries show here too. All the same techno DJs play. I’m pretty convinced the world doesn’t need any more artists.

A glossy heap of modacrylic tendrils quivers with an emphatic “Only by the grace of God…”