Artist Felipe Bracelis has many talents, whether he designs digital origami out of porn pictures, models for kinky fanzines or curates exhibitions under his YESSR label in his hometown Santiago de Chile and in other places. Just recently he exported his curator skills to Canada, where he hosted YESSR4 “Flesh Garden” in collaboration with La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa. He’s currently working on pieces for a new solo show at the Acuadrado Gallery in Santiago, which will open in November 2012. For Catch Fire, Felipe has written a little introduction to his YESSR photo magazine, of which he has already published four issues and is dedicated to the motive of nude male amateur models in nature. Alongside with the text, you’ll also have the chance to take a look at some pictures of the fifth issue, which will be released in August.
A few weeks ago, Icelandic filmmaker Björn Flóki has started a Kickstarter funding for his film project “Drag Dad”, a documentary about drag race winner Tyra Sanchez and her six-year-old son Jeremiah. Flóki has already managed to reach his $16,000 goal, but since this this budget according to the director was calculated very conservatively and there are still around 3 days to go, you’re still warmly invited to make this film a little better by donating. For more information, as well as a film teaser and photos check out the movie’s website or the Kickstarter page.
Bloomsbury USA has just released a new David Wojnarowicz biography entitled Fire in the Belly by former Village Voice columnist and arts journalist Cyntia Carr. The book traces Wojnarowicz’ live from his shattered childhood through his rise in the East Village art scene of the Seventies and Eighties to the horrors of the AIDS crisis, in which he played an important role as an activist and a bold artist, whose works were both highly intimate and challenging. ”David never saw his work as a provocation. He saw it as a way to speak his truth, a way to challenge or at least to illuminate what many accept as given”, writes Carr in the introduction to the book, in which she also mentions the removal of his “A Fire in my Belly” film from an exhibition at the the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2010. You can read the full introduction right below, I found the link on the awesome Lambda Literary blog. For more information check out the Bloomsbury website or read this review published on Friday in the New York Times.
“The Little House That Could” is a new documentary about the history of fashion designer Patricia Field’s legendary House of Field label, told by its protagonists. The film goes back to time before Field was known as the stylist and costume designer for stars and mainstream productions like “Sex and the City” or “The Devil Wears Prada”: From the early Eighties on she and her creative team, which consisted of some of the most flamboyant protagonists of the New York City nightlife, where working on bringing the spirit of the city’s club and ball scene into fashion.
The movie was shot by Mars Roberge (aka Die J! Mars), who used to work in Field’s East Village store and since 2006 has interviewed a whole bunch of legendary artists, fashion designers and performers such as Amanda Lepore, Patrick McDonald, Richard Alvarez, Raquel Reed, Lady Bunny, Giselle Xtravaganza and may more.
For more background information about the movie please check out this interview by artist and magazine maker Gazelle on her website Freakchic.com. For upcoming screenings check out this Facebook site. Film poster via Blitz Kids.
Teengirl Fantasy (actually a 20-something boy reality) are currently on tour in Europe, gearing up for the release of their new album Tracer. It follows the NYC duo’s self-titled CD-R release, 2010′s breakthrough 7AM and the recent non-album single “Motif” on their new home R&S Records, who will officially release Tracer on August 21 — although underdog True Panther will handle the limited LP edition with lenticular art, pressing just 250 copies.
Artist Mikey McParlane is based in Chicago and as far as I could find out just finished his master in film, video, new media & animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). I recently stumbled upon this YouTube documentary about him made in conjunction with a piece entitled “Apocalypse in the Pleasure”, which he showed earlier this year at the project space New Capital. In the video he names artists such as Antony, Leigh Bowery and Charles Atlas as influences for his expressive, campy and ironic videos and performances, and I guess would add Björk (fuzzy hair), Matthew Barney (gooey stuff) and Klaus Nomi (opera) to that list. The videos posted here show two different sides of his interdisciplinary work: The first one is an excerpt of a performance shown at the 5th New Blood Performance Festival from November last year (originally “Long Live the Knife” is a video installation). The second one, “Love Puddles”, was realized in collaboration with artist Michael Mallis and has just recently been featured in the book project “Strange Attractors: Investigations in Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities”.
For more information about the artist check out the already mentioned documentary, his Vimeo page or his website (a little out of date). He also has a nice tumblr.
Since Diplo has released the five-year-old song “Ima Read” on his Mad Decent label and designer Rick Owens has used the track for the runway show of his fall/winter 2012/13 collection, Zebra Katz and his collaborator Njena Reddd Foxxx are on an incredible triumphal march. A nice side effect of the massive coverage and its heavy bent on fashion magazines and blogs are the loads of beautiful pictures of the next-generation-hip-hop duo taken by great photographers and artists. Here’s my personal tribute gallery:
Song from the 2-track-7″ We Are On Fire, out via Touch And Go. The “We Are On Fire” tour, a collaborative project with the Indian band Rajasthan Roots and Tez, will be shown in European cities in the next few weeks. It has started in Berlin this weekend – if you missed it or didn’t get tickets: they’re playing an additional gig today. More tour dates here.
A collection of black and white pictures taken from Zanele Muholi‘s ongoing photo project “Faces and Phases” were one of my personal highlights of this year’s Documenta 13, a huge contemporary art exhibition, which takes place every five years in the city of Kassel, Germany. Cape Town based artist Muholi has started the series in 2006 to portrait queer women from South Africa and later decided to expand it into a project, that also expresses the loss that queer and trans* people around the world have experienced due to diseases and hate crimes. “Faces and Phases” was published as a book in 2010 and is shown next to Muholi’s documentary “Difficult Love” from 2010 at the Documenta. Sorry my picutres shown here are a little blurry, it was quite crowded at the exhibition so I had little time to shoot them. All portraits can also be found on the website of Michael Stevenson gallery.
To see the pictures especially moved me, because it reminded me of the fact that Muholi just recently was a victim of a crime: 20 external hard drives containing all the work she produced between 2008 and 2012 were stolen from her apartment in Vredehoek, Cape Town. Since only a few other things are missing it looks like the thieves have targeted the artist in her role as a queer activist. You can still support her by donating money via IndieGogo, where a project was launched to replace her photo equipment.
