Halloween Special: Somer Stampley

Stampley’s world is a celebration of the dreaded Bitch, a vixen decal slapped on the bumper of a truck speeding towards hell, a murderous nymphomaniac she-devil behind the wheel.

Halloween Special: Emily Mae Smith

A hot bullet sears through a glistening ice cube gouging out a peephole through which can be seen an alluring, anthropomorphic broom. This is the nightmare painted by Brooklyn-based artist Emily Mae Smith. Smith seems haunted by this broom, repeatedly painting it into different contemplative landscapes, as if she can’t escape it.

Halloween Special: Marijpol

Picture a world populated peacefully with monsters—trolls, goblins, people with tentacles for legs, tiny alien people, or giant people coexisting with humans on Earth. Imagine: somewhere in some nondescript home, a demon sits mostly nude on the living room floor and, their children asleep, opens their skull from the back to calmly contemplate a sheet-wrapped corpse.

Quintessa Matranga’s rhetoric

Preemptively enter the underworld through Quintessa Matranga’s rhetoric, as the artist’s latest suite of paintings have already begun their afterlife on their coffin-shaped canvases. These coffins—displaying dislocated body parts bedded in cheetah print, ghouls zipped in leather, demons, dissevered mouths screaming, and dragons descending on hearses—create a poetically macabre narrative between art and distortion, a study of the posthumous by a living artist.

Halloween Special: Kuato Ubiq

Welcome to the beautiful Xerox hellscape that is Kuato Ubiq’s work. It’s an aesthetic born from years of entanglement with the NYC punk scene, his visual work expertly shifting from show fliers to nihilistic futuristic paintings, to freaky animations.

Halloween Special: Rhys Lee

Rhys Lee’s paintings give the impression of having been kept in a basement or attic for decades, destroyed by dank conditions, dust, mold and water damage, and then discovered years later, long after the passing of the subject, their colours still eerily vivid.

Interview with a Wood Ear Mushroom

PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 18 INTERVIEW BY BROOK HSU Brook​ ​Hsu Psyche​ ​1​,​  Oil​ ​on​ ​panel, 8​ ​x​ ​6​ ​in. I took a trip to Chinatown so that I could find some dried wood ear mushrooms. They came in a funny little box, like the kind a toy prize might be stuffed into. I brought the…

Parker Ito’s P

The Mould Map gang’s all here, coming out for Parker Ito’s stunning exhibition-companion book P. This is an art-book made by many hands, and it makes sense for Ito: the LA artist is known for challenging authorship and troubling art world sticklers, like when he employed high-paid art assistants to produce his work. By commissioning portraits of himself from Mould Maps’ rat pack Leon Sadler, Jonny Negron, Maren Karlson and others, Ito obscures himself while enshrining himself.  

Brook Hsu

Brook Hsu’s art practice bears witness as well as offers invitation. Infinitely lying on forest floor in a blackout. Learning to breathe underwater. The smell of fresh soil. A wound healing slowly.

At Home with Julia Kennedy: A Recipe for Spice Rice

PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 18 WRITTEN BY JULIA KENNEDY   I rejoice in solitude when the house is quiet and no one might disturb the comings and goings of my rituals. Right now, I sit perched here in my kitchen, alone, for the moment blissful. I can hear Alice Coltrane, Roxy Music Avalon, two angelic cats…

Brian Rideout in the Garden Room

QUARRIED MARBLE, 2018, foam, plaster, acrylic, wood Images Courtesy of MKG127 Enter a gallery room containing paintings of pictures, decoratively hung, warmly lit. The first work before us is not a painting of a space or the objects within it, but is a representational painting of the 72nd page of a 20th Century interior design…

The Strange World of Ambera Wellmann

Ambera Wellmann is lamenting energy vampires—the most highly evolved stage of a failed painting. But failure in this context feels rather oxymoronic floating so near to Wellmann’s visual oeuvre. Born and raised on the East Coast of Canada, Wellmann now operates out of Berlin. Her most recent work, which explores the mythology of porcelain, features moody, amorphous globs—the jelly-like ooze of a tadpole on the precipice of hatching.

Ivy Haldeman’s Interesting Type

Images courtesy of Downs & Ross, New York “Many of you have asked why we are so confident in our ability to deliver the top line and what specifically will drive it…We see Oscar Mayer Hot Dogs increase households’ penetration and velocity, grow dollar sales and gain share.”  – The Kraft Heinz Co.  2018 Earnings Call, The Interesting…

Premiere: Native Cruise’s Orange, Feel

“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” – William Gibson, Neuromancer Native Cruise’s Sunsets & Deeper Moods marks the first release on a new tape series from London label No Bad Days. The Northern English producer made a wave with his summer hit “Calypso Spring,” returning with this moodier,…

Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes’ Prizes

Animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power.

Ben Sledsens’ Two Trees

Sledsens’ work in Two Trees, currently on view at Tim Van Laere Gallery, is strong, vivid, and humorous.

Is It Wrong to be Wrong: Kirin J Callinan

Is It Wrong to be Wrong: Kirin J Callinan shot in Australia by Mia Rankin & Kurt Johnson