Riot Material

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Archives for July 2019

Presenting The Sexual Essence Of Morris Graves

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at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC (through August 2)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Morris Graves is an eloquently quiet artist. And yet the subtle chords he strikes in his delicate, musical compositions have a remarkably powerful resonance, a feeling of total “rightness” that certain artists can achieve, often with the least apparent drama.

Graves, a mostly self-taught, transcendental painter, created works that stand as painted haikus. An avid gardener, many of his paintings are of birds and flowers. His 2001 obituary recalled the artist, in his youth, “rushing here or there with flowers or canvas in hand.” “There is,” as he once put it, “no statement or message other than the presence of flowers and light.” [Read more…]

An Interview With Artist and Critic Rose Vickers

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By Sam Trioli

With the recent group exhibition Future Starts Slow at LAUNCH F18, participating artist Rose Vickers and I took the occasion to discuss her artmaking and extensive writing practices. Rose grew up in Australia and has spent time living and traveling throughout many regions of the world. Rose and I both discovered each other’s work through Instagram and followed one another for many years before finally meeting in 2018.

While many know Rose for her writing, which has been published in Mousse Magazine, Oyster, and Artist Profile among others, she in her own right is an incredibly talented visual artist. The way in which she views her subject matter has always stood out to me as an incredibly unique perspective. We began our conversation about her work and duality of her combined artistic practices and where throughout her process they converge. [Read more…]

Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness

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at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (through October 6)
by John Haber

Saint Jerome took to extremes. As theologian and scholar, he traveled to the Holy Land to master Hebrew, translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin, churned out commentary after commentary, and defended church doctrine with warnings of hell. And then there was the sinner, shamed by his conduct among women, converted to Christianity after a vision, and living alone in the desert but for a lion and for a stone to beat his breast. [Read more…]

Bursts Of Wild Yet Middling Cinema In Villains

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

We’ve met lovers like Jules and Mickey before in movies like Badlands, Natural Born Killers and, of course, Bonnie and Clyde. They are partners in crime, metaphorically and literally, kicking off Villains with a smash-and-grab robbery that’s given a bit of flare by the animal masks they choose to wear. As they dash off in their getaway car, Jules (Maika Monroe) excitement translates into titillation, and she’s all over an elated Mickey (Bill Skarsgård) as he drives. But their plan to hightail to a beach and easy living hits a snag when they run out of gas. [Read more…]

8.14

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That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

Suitcase Joe. "That Evening Sun," a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row, is at Riot Material Magazine.

Jonathan Michael Fitzgerald is an ex marine who prefers to sleep out in the open as opposed to a tent. He feels much safer being able to see what’s going on around him. He lost his left eye while being robbed when a man stabbed him with a screwdriver. He said he tried to pick up what was left of it off the ground before heading to the hospital, but no luck. He did open up his eye and let me peer into the empty socket. I tried to get a few photos, but they didn’t do it justice. [Read more…]

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood Is A Messy And Wild Love Letter To…Hollywood

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

For his ninth (and possibly penultimate) film, Quentin Tarantino takes audiences back to the summer of 1969, where Hollywood was swinging and hippies seemed a harmless subculture. That is until the Manson Family murdered Sharon Tate and her friends in her mansion on Cielo Drive. Blending fact with lots of fiction, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood re-imagines this time as the fairytale its title suggests. But instead of white knights and princes, Tarantino offers stuntmen and TV cowboys. Instead of castles and lavish balls, he presents a celebrity-stuffed party at the Playboy mansion. Instead of an evil sorcerer or monster horde, there’s Charles Manson and his minions. And instead of a princess as a damsel in distress, Tarantino presents an enchanting ingénue who was killed in her prime. [Read more…]

David Crosby and Cameron Crowe on Capturing a Legendary Life in Remember My Name

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By Alci Rengifo

At 77, the youthful fire inside David Crosby refuses to flicker out. The music legend makes this more than evident in the new, reflective documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name. A chronicle of his highs and lows, Crosby impressively allows this to be a work of complete, sometimes stinging honesty. Directed by A.J. Eaton with renowned director and journalist Cameron Crowe producing, Remember My Name leaves few stones unturned in Crosby’s life. In a sense he is a survivor from that last generation of creative minds who were heirs to the Romantic tradition. Born in the shadow of World War II, finding a voice in the tumultuous 60s, there’s more to a personality like Crosby than the mere tag of “old hippie.” From his drug abuse to writing iconic music and touring as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young before the group implodes amid intense squabbles, it’s all laid bare in this film. And that’s exactly how he wanted it. [Read more…]

Interview with Painter and Printmaker Austin Stiegemeier

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By Donald Lindeman

Recently we interviewed the painter and printmaker Austin Stiegemeier, who is teaching fine art at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Stiegemeier grew up in the small town of Rathdrum in northern Idaho. He began studying art while still in elementary school, and eventually pursued his art education at two universities in Washington State, completing his MFA at Washington State University. Since then, Stiegemeier has taught at several U.S. colleges, including Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA. Our conversation concentrated on his pursuit of representational art, including narrative art and portraiture. [Read more…]

An Eye Through The Knotted Peephole In Junichiro Tanizaki’s Devils in Daylight

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Devils in Daylight
by Junichiro Tanizaki
New Directions Publishing, 96pp., $9.95

“I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the thing that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.”– Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

Early 20thcentury, Japan. You, caped in shadows, find yourself watching two men who are watching, through a grainy peephole, two other people, a man and a woman, who are seemingly killing another man. The entire thing is busy, complex, furtive; erotic in its staggered geometry. Outside, where you are and where you aren’t, the rain-slicked street holds tiny concentric halos of light projected out from the window of an Inn that dizzies its patrons with licentious allure, while Rockwell’s paranoia blares from a jukebox — It always feels like somebody’s watching me, tell me is it just a dream — and you can’t help but look over your shoulder as you see a lantern-eyed black cat, smiling. Mind you, the song and the jukebox haven’t been invented yet, and Rockwell lingers as a figment awaiting popstar iteration, but still, they are there, this is happening, a confluence of elements, which includes you and five other people (one of them now very much dead), and the whole thing gets you thinking about the dreamlike immediacy of voyeurism, or the pyramidic folds of role-playing. You have entered that place between realms, where the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki so comfortably dwells. [Read more…]

An Army Of Women Warriors In Ann Shostrom’s The Rising

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at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Ann Shostrom’s army of women warriors fills the front room of the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, a ghostly troop draped in shades of white: the traditional color of virgins, brides and suffragettes. Tall and graceful, evoking Corinthian columns, these seventeen fabric figures are both timeless and completely of the moment. Elegantly pieced together from sinuous scraps of material foraged from salvage sales, thrift stores, friends’ childhood wardrobes and Shostrom’s own closet, they simultaneously suggest Miss Havisham’s endless jilted vigil, the courageous members of the #Metoo Movement, and the chorus of 100-something congresswomen who earlier this year proudly wore ivory, ecru and alabaster to President Trump’s second State of the Union address. While explicitly feminine, they are also plainly phallic, iron fists within velvet — or in this case lace, linen and silk — gloves. [Read more…]

Benjamin Naishtat’s Rojo And A Region’s Cinematic Reckoning

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

The cinema of the Andes is a haunted art form. Rojo is set in the Argentina of the 1970s, plotted and shot like a classic noir, with a dark political subtext. Like many of the best recent films from this particular South American country and its neighbor Chile, the crime genre is used to tackle the legacy of the neo-fascist military regimes that governed these countries during the Cold War. This adds a layer of richness to the storytelling you don’t find in most U.S. movies or shows about detectives and murder. Noir has of course always been a vehicle to express the deepest recesses of any society, going back to films made by German expatriates in the U.S. during and after World War II. Fleeing the Nazis, directors like Fritz Lang framed the American underbelly with titles like The Big Heat and Scarlet Street. Now it is Latin American directors coming of age in the lingering aftermath of political terror who are refurnishing the genre in new ways. [Read more…]

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Phenomenal Nature

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at The Met Breuer
Reviewed by John Haber

Mrinalini Mukherjee had a dual fascination, with Modernism and the myths of her native India. If they seem impossible to reconcile, they both drew her to local materials to make the myths her own. Mukherjee worked in fiber for more than forty years, so it seems only natural that her retrospective at the Met Breuer opens not with a wall but a curtain. The entry holds barely a clue to what comes next beyond the artist’s name and a title, Phenomenal Nature — not even wall text at the side by the stairs. Penetrate within, and the curtains multiply, almost sheer but thoroughly opaque. One can still marvel at the former Whitney Museum, but its movable partitions have fallen completely away. They leave a space no less divided and mysterious for that. One might have stepped behind a stage curtain, only to find that the performance is just underway. [Read more…]

Firecrackers Is A Raw Nerve Of A Film And An Explosive Debut

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

“Why are you so angry all the time?” The heroines of writer/director Jasmin Mozaffari’s debut feature Firecrackers have plenty of reasons to rage. Living in poverty in a suffocatingly small Ontario town, recent high school graduates Lou (Michaela Kurimsky) and Chantal (Karena Evans) have little hope for their futures. All they see around them is squalor, crappy jobs, abusive boys, addiction, intolerance, and violence. This is why these battle-hardened besties, who throw punches as easily as f-bombs, have plotted a way out. For a year, they’ve scraped together the wages earned cleaning scuzzy motel rooms so they can runoff to New York. They’ve slung they’re possessions into a pair of garbage bags, compiled one thousand dollars into a tattered envelope, and arranged a ride with a pick-up truck-owning pal. But a horrid incident derails the pair’s plan, pitching them down a path littered with stinging tears, shattered glass, and wretched compromises. [Read more…]

The Deeper You Dig Makes Horror A Twisted Family Affair

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

It was an accident. A dark night. A remote road. A girl sledding alone. A man driving home. And just like that, 14-year-old Echo Allen is dead. A tragedy to be sure. But what happens next is true horror. By following her killer and the mother Echo has left behind, The Deeper You Dig explores grief and guilt while traveling down a twisted road into the supernatural.  [Read more…]

6.5

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That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

Suitcase Joe. "That Evening Sun," a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row, is at Riot Material Magazine.

It’s always good to catch up with Jerry. He heard there’s a picture of him hanging in a museum and he has been recognized on the street because of it. He seemed very excited about that. Despite his physical appearance, Jerry is very approachable and likes to talk. If you ever come across him, don’t be shy to say hello. Like many people living on the street they become easily overlooked and starved for genuine human interaction. A little can go along way. [Read more…]