cecesusie

A piece I painted on a friend's wall is featured in the latest issue of Dwell Magazine! I guess all's well that ends Dwell... 

Yes, I know how lame that sounded.

Artist David Edwards has made waves for his hyper-real depictions of nude pregnant women in the past, particularly for his 2006 piece "Monument To Pro-Life," which rendered Britney Spears mid-birth on a bearskin rug. Though a cynic might peg his work as an elegant satire on voyeuristic, celebrity-obsessed culture, we're not so sure if the L.A.-based sculptor would agree: "I was inspired by the beauty of Kim Kardashian and felt quite put-off by the media's criticism of her weight gain during pregnancy. Such criticism should be off limits," Edwards said in a recent press release. And, in the words of the artist's publicist, "We live in a media-absorbed culture where anyone can access and share a celebrity's most intimate moments. Daniel visually captures that intimacy." While we couldn't agree more that the amount of scrutiny surrounding celebrity pregnancies and their bodies is ridiculous to say the least (vulgar and degrading at its worst), we're not sure if this is really a step in the right direction. Art is art, and we're not objecting to it. But, if his goal is truly to relieve the pressure of the media on Ms. Kardashian during this sensitive time — is creating a public, nude statue of her pregnant body without her permission or involvement really the way to go? As far as we know, neither Kardashian nor Spears were involved with the creation of the two works, and while it may have greater cultural capital, if Mr. Edwards wants to invoke morals, we're not sure if he has much ground to stand on. Upon the unveiling of the sculpture at L.A.'s LAB ART Gallery on June 5, visitors will be invited to rub the statue's belly for good luck. Pause. The exhibit will also include a bronze of "Baby Kimye" itself, sleeping beside Kate Middleton's as-yet-unborn child (pictured here). Prenatal portraits of celebrity fetuses with angel wings, entitled "Womb Mates," will also be on display. The Kim Kardashian statue, titled "L.A. Fertility" is part of the artist's "Celebrity Baby Boomer" series. While it may be representative of a niche art trend that pairs high-brow intellectual work with pop culture — the intention, and the reception, remains up for debate. Photo: Courtesy of Cory Allen Contemporary Art.

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The movie makeover is such a hallowed tradition that Not Another Teen Movie appropriately skewered the trope with an incredible moment, when the removal of glasses prompts the heroine to new social heights. Second only to "the training montage," the makeover montage is the most literal way to demonstrate character evolution, but with a rock-n-roll soundtrack and a whole lotta high-fives. Gone are the glasses/hair/gender/mannerisms, and suddenly: The movie's plot is in full-swing. Of course, nine times out of 10, the makeover only obscured the real coolness of the character in question, something the audience (and sometimes, the fictional person) tends to realize in the end. Mrs. Doubtfire Forgive the crappy quality — it was the best we could find, but watching Robin Williams cycle through characters (and stereotypes) was perhaps the highest point of the '90s.

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Not to go all Carrie Bradshaw on you but we have a case of the shoe crazies, thanks to the launch of Sophia Webster's new e-shop. The British shoe designer is making it a whole lot easier for Stateside girls to get our hands (and feet, more accurately) in her glorious statement heels and we couldn't be happier about it (although, our bank account may beg to differ). Seriously, we're dreaming in shoes over here. Booties in the summer? Yes please! They are covered in flamingos after all... Click through to see the entire summer '13 collection and head over to Webster's brand new site to turn your shoe fantasies into realities.

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When it comes to rustic-modern entertaining, steamed artichokes are the ultimate appetizers. They’re interactive, super-graphic, and the perfect (no-carb) vessel for tasty dips. Somewhere along the line, these buds picked up a bad reputation for being hard to eat and even harder to make — thanks to their prickly leaves and tough stems — but it’s simply not true. Follow our simple steps for making the easiest steamed artichokes, ever. (Hint: It’s a microwave miracle!) You’ll master the party-worthy hors d'oeuvre in less than 15 minutes. Easiest Steamed Artichokes Ever Serves 4 5 or 6 baby artichokes (or 1 large artichoke) 1 lemon, halved Kosher salt Cut about one inch off of the top of each artichoke using a serrated knife; rub the cut edges with one half of the lemon. Pull off the tough outer leaves around the stem. Peel the rough skin off the stems using a pairing knife. (Snip off the spiky leaf tips using kitchen scissors, if desired.) Slice the other lemon half into rounds. Put the artichokes, 1/2-cup water, and two lemon slices in a microwave-safe baking dish. Sprinkle with 1/4 teaspoon salt and tightly cover baking dish with plastic wrap. Microwave on high until tender, about seven minutes (or about 10 minutes for large artichoke). Photographed by Erin Phraner

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Memorial Day. Your best friend's wedding. Your baby brother's college graduation — sniff, how time flies! Now that summer's officially here, there's so much to celebrate...which means, of course, that there's plenty of reasons to treat yourself to a new party frock (you knew we'd make this about clothes somehow, right?). For our money, nobody does the little summer dress better than Cynthia Rowley. From swingy, drop-waist floral dresses to confetti-print frocks shot through with metallic threads, the 10 pretty numbers ahead are the perfect little nothings to wear this summer — whether you're hitting a rooftop rager with 50 of your closest friends, or tearing up over the best man's speech. Hey, consider it your reward for sitting through the Wedding March again. Shop summer's best dresses straight ahead!

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Tatzu Nishi, who people probably know best from his Discovering Columbus project in NYC, recently had a work of his performed for 48 hours for Cultural Hijack, “a survey of provocative interventions” in London aka a bunch of street art and outdoor performances with a good budget behind them. Nishi’s Ascending Descending is a Rube Goldberg device of sorts, except nothing ever gets accomplished. Check out the video:

Tatzu Nishi, Ascending Descending from culturalhijack on Vimeo.

Photos courtesy of Cultural Hijack

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At TEDActive 2011, JD Schramm shares the story of his friend, John, who, after surviving a suicide attempt, JD Schramm: Break the silence for suicide attempt survivorsfound that there were few resources available for someone in his position to be able to communicate the hardship he experienced and the depression he continued to battle. And there are others in this position, too – as Schramm points out, 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide live but feel extreme isolation from others. This can lead to second, sometimes successful, attempt.

This week’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post emphasizes the importance of having an honest conversation about the taboo of suicide in order to help people in this at-risk situation. Below, find open and thoughtful essays on the subject.

JD Schramm: Revealing a Heartbreaking Secret on the TED Stage

My sharing of John’s story was my first attempt to spark a conversation about the taboo subject of suicide, and in particular the challenge of coming back from an attempt and choosing life. It worked well enough to bring more than a half million viewers to see it. It’s been lovingly translated into 39 languages by volunteers and shown at numerous TEDx events around the world. I said in the talk that I was trying to “start a conversation worth having about an idea worth spreading.” That idea is determining how best to support the many people who attempt suicide but fail and seek to return to life.

What I’ve learned since the privilege of delivering this talk and then having TED put it online has been profound. Read the full essay »

Lea Lane: What I’ve Learned from My Best Friend’s Suicide

Sometimes, especially when a person seems to have a satisfying life, we dismiss suicidal signals that would otherwise alert us. I know this first-hand.

Delia had a loving husband, two adorable and adoring young daughters, an 18th-century farmhouse filled with antiques. She was smart, kind, beautiful, active in the community and was revered in our Westchester County village, north of New York City.

When I moved to a nearby house with my first husband and two young sons, she came over with a bouquet of garden flowers to welcome us. I was charmed by her grace and warmth, and we soon became best friends. Read the full essay »

Mary Robin Craig: Faith-filled responses to suicide

During one of those interminable sleepless nights that followed the death of my oldest son, I crept downstairs in the dark and logged on to the computer to explore the views of the Christian Church on suicide. I was a midlife seminary student but, like most people, my knowledge of religious attitudes toward suicide was limited. I knew that suicide had been condemned by the early church and that those who died of suicide were once understood to be sinners of the worst sort, headed straight for hell. I knew that churches had at some point come to recognize that mental illness may reduce a person’s capacity to make decisions and, therefore, his or her responsibility for a self-inflicted death. My hours on the computer that terrible night revealed little beyond that basic information.

Five years have passed and I have learned a great deal more about the attitudes of both the general public and the clergy toward suicide. I now realize that our family benefited tremendously from knowledgeable attitudes toward mental illness and from the generosity of religious authorities. Read the full essay »

Oh, body hair, why do you insist on returning, summer after summer? We're busy people and our beauty routines are already elaborate enough without you showing your face. We're always searching for the fastest, cleanest, least painful way to de-fuzz once our hairier limbs make their big, warm-weather debut, and this electric waxing kit from Remington sounded like it might be the ideal solution. It's supposed to quickly heat up the wax, and then simply rolls onto the skin. That sounds like it fits our timeline perfectly, and like it'll reduce the mess that conventional at-home wax kits make. So, our assistant editor Tara took one for the team and tried it out. Watch and see as she bravely waxes on camera, and find out what her final verdict is. Will the Remington Smooth & Silky Electric Roll-On Wax Kit solve our fuzzy-limbs problem? Watch and see! Remington Smooth & Silky Electric Roll-On Wax Kit, $17.99, available at Drugstore.com. Edited by Chris Beer; Shot by Jack Pearce and Nora De Broder. Like this post? There's more. Get tons of beauty tips, tutorials, and news on the Refinery29 Beauty Facebook page!

Gisele Bündchen is a supermodel, not superhuman. But every once in a while it's nice to have a little reminder that before Gisele was Gisele, she was someone's sister — make that five someones' sisters. Just this past week, Bündchen's little sister Gabriela visited the model, as Gisele celebrated the release of her (faceless) BLK DNM campaign. As one of six Bündchen daughters, according to HuffPost, including Gisele's fraternal twin, Patrícia, the junior Bündchen caused quite a stir. Gabriela may be the lesser known of the Brazilian beauties, but there's no doubt that both ladies share some lucky genes. They've got the same high cheekbones; big, pearly white smile; and knack for landing the perfect picture. Height, on the other hand? Well, Gabriela's super-sister kind of has the lead on that one.

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If anyone cares, I should have included Skrillex’s Bangarang on my 2012 list. I’d been actively enjoying it all year, but for some reason I thought it was from 2011 — indeed, it was released online in late 2011, but the actual physical release date was January 4, 2012. Currently my list reads Ocean, Skrillex, Future, Pooja, Istanbul, Snider, Madonna, Minaj, Japandroids, and Goldfrapp’s greatest hits compilation The Singles. Fiona Apple comes in at 11. After that I don’t want to think about it anymore. Seriously, buy these albums.

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

Columbia, 2013 [BUY]

It’s nice to have these eccentric French robots back after eight years. They were the first to popularize techno in modern commercial pop, which you should be grateful for even if you don’t like techno — I mean, this is the 21st century, it makes sense that machines have taken over music. So Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, I salute you. Even so, this record isn’t up to Discovery or Human After All; it never engages with their classic-bombastic synth style.

At their best, these guys make tense, bubbly, catchy, formalistic radio-sonics, at once uncompromising and outreaching. That it also functions as workout music doesn’t matter as long as you’re doing jumping jacks, and songs like “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” have been known to tone up people’s ears and brains as surely as Kraftwerk does your comprehension of technological form. Here they’re more subdued, pleasant rather than nasty, relying heavily on the vocoders as well as the vocals, especially when they can get famous friends like Julian Casablancas or Pharrell Williams to sing for them. Their pretty keyboard jingle and antiseptic electropatterns mesh into a hypnotic whole in the manner of the most tranquil elevatortronica, trickling along in the background with its filtered tunelets and drippy android voices. Only “Lose Yourself to Dance” will teach you anything new about how to dance, let alone technology or the 21st century.

Reveling in their own minimal groove, they have officially given up their funk. I’m also starting to wonder about the sanity of two recluses who are comfortable with concert performance only when they’re wearing big shiny space helmets. It’s true that all popular music is by definition artificial, and I appreciate the robot iconography, but give yourself up to formulaicism and you become the subject you’re trying to satirize.

The Knife: Shaking the Habitual

Mute, 2013 [BUY]

I liked this album a lot more having read the Philip Sherburne rave in Spin where he calls the record “musique concrète” among other things. Even if he was talking about the one track that’s not worth your time, it’s true that this group of Swedish counterculturalists have made some of the artiest, most ambitious electronica you can buy right now. This bothered me until I accepted it for what it was, whereupon I fell in love. For all its radical politics and warped gender relations, the real revolution here is what they do with their keyboards.

The lyrics here are outright hysterical — “I got the urge for penetration,” how’s that for a pickup line — but it’s worth tuning them out and concentrating on the sonics. Creaky, top-heavy beats lurch hissing and shrieking through pink, fuzzy clouds towards a distant electronic orgasm, the promise of which makes the distorted drums and flutes just howl at the sky. Violins and vocoders squeeze through dark hallways together, grazing against each other and starting to bleed. Karin Dreijer Andersson moans over the mix, her sharp, low voice presenting itself more as sound effect than carrier of meaning. On “Raging Lung,” there’s even a synth hook. When I play this at home, I sit down, stare into space, and obsess over how sounds like this can be made in the first place. I’d like to see some naughty DJ try to play the album in a club, where everyone would start screaming, clutching their heads, and falling to the floor in sheer aesthetic overload.

Half these tracks go on for way too long, especially the 19-minute one, and the authorial intent approaches self-parodic levels. The Wikipedia article on this album alone contains references to such keynotes as “feminist porn,” “queer theory,” “commercial homogenization,” “Judith Butler,” “Foucault.” But this is a break from commercial homogeny at the very least, a worthy feminist porn soundtrack. I can only imagine.

Matuto: The Devil & the Diamond

Motema, 2013 [BUY]

The Appalachian elements come out more strongly than the Brazilian ones on this supposed fusion, which is basically a long jam session for a number of well-traveled New York musicians. Clay Ross simply happens to think bluegrass and forró have a lot in common rhythmically, and that they sound cool together. The beat, a pulsating up-and-down vibration that sneakily zigzags forward, is suited both to Ross’s strummed guitar and Rob Curto’s wailing accordion, and the band has a lot of fun romping all over the place with its skillfully hyperactive fiddle solos. It all sounds like an exotic square dance, good-humored and communal and proudly corny. Like most Southern roots music, it makes too big of a deal out of its bona fides, manifested most prominently in the routinely traditional melodies. And like most Brazilian dance music, it’s flighty, airy, easy to space out to. The combination is goofy and humane, the kind of obscurely silly gift only authenticity freaks are obsessive enough to achieve.

Positioning itself as the heir to multiple folk traditions, this is one of those records that claims to combine nearly every genre known to humankind (“swing music, bebop piano, funk, rock, and blues”) and always winds up static, only this time it’s not static at all. Anyone who either likes or doesn’t like old-timey Americana will like at least one half or the other.

Paramore: Paramore

Atlantic, 2013 [BUY]

The members of Paramore grew up with punk-pop back in the golden days of Third Eye Blind and Avril Lavigne, and now that both punk and pop have moved on, they’re feeling wistful and, honestly, a little hurt. How better for this band, 2013′s answer to “We Are Young,” to lead a revival than to slip loud guitars and obnoxious whining into the adult contemporary blueprint?

Whether they’re actually having fun when they shout platitudes like “We just wanna have fun!” is questionable. With distorted guitars banging out the cheerful yet pleasureless melodies and karaoke whiz Hayley Williams throwing triumphant punch after triumphant punch, their noisy, vehement energy is certainly strong enough to reach the excited masses of youth in America. As Christian-identified adults, their harmless teen nostalgia is vivid enough to make the “mature” audience tear up a little. Their style is so generic it can bridge any two other bands, simply name them, just the thing for radio programmers with airtime to kill. In short, they’ve got all the bases covered. Or maybe none of them.

This band rocks harder than your standard instaballad machine, and they have all the joy and anger and passion needed to make compelling music. However, they’re also implausibly dull.

Sometimes, when you are down, you've got to get up (to get down). Case in point: Even though Kristen Stewart is clearly not psyched about her every move being tracked by a horde of hungry paps (who could blame her?), but this sequence of the actress giving them the bird looks an awful lot like a lil' boogie (as Reddit points out). Sure, Robsten is officially over — but that won't stop the photogs from buzzing and lurking and stalking, leading to Kristen to get a little explosive with the hand gestures. When the series is assembled together, her minor outburst looks a little bit like an interpretative dance. Or some sort of jig. Just put on the new Daft Punk album and let KStew get her groove on. Weirdly rewarding, no? (E! Online) Photo: Gregory Pace/BEImages and Imgur

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“This cartoon-y format creates a bias toward humor and lightheartedness, but I don’t feel like that at all,” Matt Freedman writes in his artist’s book, Relatively Indolent but Relentless (2013), directly beneath a drawing of a pair of scissors snipping off the tip of his tongue.

Freedman makes art that is immediate and mystifying — a baldly populist, Looney Tune aesthetic arising from the fearsome complexities of history. His 2012 installation at Valentine, The Golem of Ridgewood, with its 8,000-year timeline, faux-archival film footage and array of Plasticine figures from Diogenes to a Nuba warrior, was a mind-snapping tour-de-force encompassing Messianic longings, bawdy Mozart lyrics (via Goethe), 16th-century pogroms, 19th-century carnival games, and the failure of the Enlightenment.

Not long after The Golem of Ridgewood closed, Freedman learned that he was critically ill. As he writes in the press release for Relatively Indolent but Relentless:

This summer I was surprised to learn that my years of earaches were not caused by nighttime teeth grinding, but by cancer. Specifically I had Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma, a rare and slow growing cancer that had begun in a tiny salivary gland under my tongue and had spread over time, no one knows how much time, but years certainly, to nodes in my neck and into my lungs. After a lot of running around we determined that the best immediate treatment was to attack the tumors in my tongue and neck with proton radiation and chemotherapy.

The treatment, which took place at Massachusetts General Hospital, began in October. Over the course of seven weeks, Freedman underwent thirty-five days of radiation and weekly doses of chemotherapy.

In early October, just before I moved up to Boston a friend gave me a blank notebook and said I should fill it up. I counted the pages and saw that if I began a daily journal on October 3 and wrote or drew four pages a day, I would finish on December 1 having completed a 240 page book.

That blank notebook became Relatively Indolent but Relentless, which is the cornerstone of Freedman’s solo show at Studio 10, The Devil Tricked Me. There are two bookshelves holding advance copies — printed in stunning facsimile by Seven Stories Press, to be released in April 2014 — near the entrance of the gallery, but the show does not cover the same ground.

The book, which is excerpted in the current issue of the arts journal Esopus, is a harrowing account of Freedman’s treatment in words, pictures, charts and graphs, a detailed immersion into the medieval hell of cutting-edge medicine.

By the time he reached the midpoint of the procedures, the skin on his neck had dried and sloughed off, feeling as if “a razor has been dragged” across it, and the pain inside his mouth became intolerable. It was all but impossible to eat solid food, but if he didn’t keep his weight up he would have been faced with the insertion of a feeding tube, a prospect he desperately wanted to avoid.

Freedman may have felt neither lightheartedness nor humor, but as an artist, it seems, he just can’t help himself, filling each page with drawings and jokes that reveal the horror of his situation as well as the gimlet-eyed self-awareness that affords him the ability to cope.

The focus of the exhibition, however, is not the specifics of Freedman’s illness but the universal phenomenon of bad luck and the tiny, irrational pacts we make with fate each day to deflect it.

This is the first art show I’ve ever seen with a disclaimer. High on the wall above the gallery desk, Freedman has written in block letters:

Let me explain myself. I don’t like to be obscure. I like to make things and I wish always to work to the best of my abilities to make myself understood. So what do I do when I am forced by circumstances to appear before my friends and family when I am not at my best? That is exactly the situation here. I suspect that my intellectual and physical faculties are compromised, temporarily, I hope, by illness and medication. That being the case, I choose to work without any skill at all.

Freedman may not be at his best, but the effect on his art is debatable. While the works in The Devil Tricked Me, unlike the labor-intensive sculptures and paintings in The Golem of Ridgewood, rely primarily on found objects, most of them present beguiling visualizations of common superstitions (don’t walk under a ladder; never open an umbrella indoors; step on a crack, break your mother’s back, etc.) that telescope the triggers and consequences of bad luck.

Take the pile of umbrellas heaped against the gallery windows; they are not only open but also wrecked, with skeletal aluminum ribs poking out everywhere. They appear to have been blown in through the windows after high winds and rain ripped them from their luckless owners’ hands. The random deaths from this week’s tornado in Oklahoma come to mind.

Given the centrality of the history of Judaism in The Golem of Ridgewood, it wasn’t surprising to notice that the three hats stacked on the bed in “Hats and Broom on Bed with Drinking Glass Reflecting Full Moon” were the wide-brimmed, flat-topped, black felt variety worn by Hasidic men. The narrow cot covered by a red-spattered blanket inevitably suggests pogroms and the Holocaust, while the short, rustic broom lying between the black hats and a black cat remains enigmatic.

Associations and paradoxes abound, infusing these embodiments of bad luck with magical thinking, resignation and all the ironies and conflicted emotions in between.

There are two ladders — one short and one tall. Both reach all the way to the ceiling like Jacob’s ladder climbing to paradise, but look too fragile to hold even the weight of a child.

Hundreds of pennies (all tails, you lose) are scattered on the floor. Could they be a low-end interpretation of the gospel of Mark’s admonition, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Or are they an equally discounted version of the shower of gold that rained upon Danaë from the heavens, impregnating her with Perseus, son of Zeus and slayer of Medusa, the icon of paralyzing fear and sudden death?

“Dead Bird” lies on the floor as if heedlessly kicked to the wall. Rendered in black line, the bird is an image from Relatively Indolent but Relentless, which Freedman photocopied, enlarged and pasted on a nine-inch-long piece of jig-sawed wood, embellished with real feathers.

The feathers, sticking out here and there like the broken umbrella ribs by the windows, lend it a forsaken air; dropped from the sky, it has vanished from the realm of the living as if it had never existed. It’s a blunt, elegiac and deeply affecting piece.

In the journal entry for November 4, 2012, about halfway through the treatment, the artist writes, “This is the first day that makes it clear I may not be able to force my way through everything”:

Everything leading up to this was a joke. All the bravado was just that. I knew it, but I couldn’t feel it. Now I got it all, the pain, the fogginess, the anger, the endless stretch of time before it ends. And I have none of the resources left to combat all that. Except one thing: my stubbornness. How long will that last?

Where Freedman saw only stubbornness, others will witness honesty, courage and Promethean fire. His exhibition may be half danse macabre and half exorcism, but he’s beating the devil one artwork at a time.

Matt Freedman: The Devil Tricked Me continues at Studio 10 (56 Bogart Avenue, Bushwick, Brooklyn) through June 16.

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