House Magazine: The Brain Observatory

I went slightly off piste with this one, admittedly... but for the recent issue of Soho House's House magazine I interviewed Jacopo Annese of The Brain Observatory at the University of San Diego, California, about his team's efforts to digitally preserve donated brains in order to extend the realms of knowledge and research into how our old grey matter works. It's still largely a mystery, so the work The Brain Observatory is doing has potential for some groundbreaking discoveries in future. I've always found anatomy absolutely fascinating, so it was a real pleasure to branch out into a bit of (very basic) science writing. Don't be squeamish, it's very interesting...

TEXT:

The Brain Observatory

How one scientific team’s mission to photograph and analyse the human brain could unlock the secrets of our creative minds

Stop for a moment to consider the myriad of cognitive processes you’re currently deploying to read these words, all that wonderful action going on between your ears. Then, when you’re done, consider that conventionally, at the end of your life, your brain will be burned or buried along with the rest of your dead self. It does seem rather a waste – and whether you believe in an afterlife or not, you can’t take it with you.  Enter Dr Jacopo Annese, founder of The Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego, who works on the grey matter of a kind array of donors, allowing them to live on in the digital domain. In a process that takes place over eight months, Annese and his team pickle, freeze and then slice to a hairs-width each brain, before dyeing each slice and taking a 1-terabyte sized detailed digital composite image. There can be up to 2,500 slices in a brain and, Annese says, ‘once you dive into the high-resolution histological image at a cellular level, then it becomes an enormous landscape that, despite centuries of investigations, remains still largely uncharted.’

House Magazine: Tereza Zelenkova

Here's the article I wrote for House magazine on photographer Tereza Zelenkova. I posted about her previously as I also filmed an interview with her for House Seven having seen her work at the RCA 2012 show. She's definitely one to watch.

TEXT:

Invoking the occult, mortality and mysticism in her monochrome images, Tereza Zelenkova presents vistas and artifacts from nature that nonetheless shimmer with a mysterious supernatural aura. To her, death isn’t the gateway to another world but the all-pervading full stop to life, and she explores a universe where neither religion nor science can provide us with all the answers. Working with a spontaneity that belies the depth and integrity of the final body of work, she explains that it’s all about the fine balance of intuition and editing...

What made you choose photography as your medium as an artist?

When I was 16 I tried photography and I immediately fell in love with it. I guess I was seduced with the lightness with which one can create an image by using a camera.

Is your technique more impulsive or constructed?

Through the years I have learnt to work quite effortlessly. I realized that if I try too much the results are not as good as if I just get carried away by a moment or an idea. For me, photography is certainly about intuitive knowing rather than rigorous thinking.

i-D Video: Tom de Freston, On Theatre, at Breese Little

In our snap happy age it’s reassuring to know there are still people out there who’ll painstakingly mull over a single image for weeks before they’ve even got to the time-consuming stage of picking up a paintbrush to commit it to canvas. Makes you think there must be hope for us yet.

With its long and complicated history involving multiple reinventions and reincarnations, painting resonates heavily with its own meaning as a medium as well as the stories and opinions that the artist is trying to express. So working as what he provocatively calls a “contemporary history painter”, Tom de Freston plunders these narratives and melds them with scenarios from literature and his own imaginings to create paintings that startlingly depict historically grand themes from a modern perspective.

Here he talks i-D online through the process of translating ideas into brushstrokes, and gives us a sneak peek into his studio and the processes behind his work.

Tom de Freston, On Theatre runs until Saturday 15th September at Breese Little, 30d Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DU.

Text and Film: Laura Bushell

Music: bassDrumsnareDrum

FAD Video: Jacob Hashimoto, The Other Sun, at Ronchini Gallery

Here's a recent video interview with artist Jacob Hashimoto for FAD. His latest exhibition consists of hundred of handmade kites strung from the ceiling of Ronchini Gallery in Mayfair - time consuming, but worth the effort!

Jacob Hashimoto
The Other Sun
Until 28 August 2012
Ronchini Gallery, Mayfair, London

i-D Video: Jenny Saville at Modern Art Oxford & The Ashmolean

Flesh is monumental in Jenny Saville’s paintings, something you can only truly appreciate when you’re dwarfed by a two metre high canvas that’s been slathered, scraped and smeared in fleshy tones and visceral reds.

Nothing beats seeing her paintings for real, yet this is her first exhibition in a public gallery in the UK since she hatched fully formed and critically acclaimed from the YBA hype of the 90s. A studio dweller rather than a publicity magnet, Saville has developed a body of work that’s as much about the anatomy of paint itself as it is about the anatomy of the (mostly female) body, and the results are both stark and intricate.

Ask today’s upcoming painters who inspires them and many will name check Saville. Along with this solo show at Modern Art Oxford, two of her drawings sit alongside the likes of Titian and Veronese at the Ashmolean. Not many contemporary artists could hold their nerve in such company, but Saville does.

i-D online’s Laura Bushell met Saville at the gallery to talk about YBAs, bodies and babies.

Jenny Saville is at Modern Art Oxford and The Ashmolean Museum until 16th September 2012

Text and Film: Laura Bushell

Music: Peppi Knott

i-D Video: Grayson Perry on Taste, at Victoria Miro and on Channel 4

Here's a video interview I did with Grayson Perry for his new exhibition of tapestries at Victoria Miro and the accompanying documentary on Channel 4.  We talked about taste, television and tribes for i-D online.

Grayson Perry wants to talk about taste: the good, the bad and the sometimes unfathomable. It’s a treacherous terrain to negotiate, let alone find a consensus within, since one person’s expression of refinement can be another’s gaudy nightmare. Grayson Perry believes our in-built inclinations are tied up with class, so in his latest quest to chronicle contemporary life through art, he took to the roads of the UK to seek out class tribes who could best encapsulate the taste of their particular strata of British society. The result is a series of narrative tapestries charting what he labels “a contemporary Rake’s Progress”, plus a TV series documenting the empirical research that was sewn into those threads. Now whether you’ll prefer the fine art tapestries in the London gallery or the reality TV on Channel 4, comes down to your own perfectly honed taste...

 

The Vanity of Small Differences at Victoria Miro runs from 7th June until 11th August 2012. Watch the first episode of ‘In the Best Possible Taste – Grayson Perry’ on 4oD here. victoriamiro.com

FAD Video: Edward Burtnysky on Oil at The Photographers' Gallery

Here's a short film I made for FAD with the photographer Edward Burtynsky, who I was lucky to meet at the opening of his exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery.

FAD Video: Brett Rogers on reopening The Photographers' Gallery

The Photographers' Gallery is open again, hooray! I spoke to the gallery's Director, Brett Rogers, about the work behind the recent refurbishment and extension of the space. This video appears on FAD. 

FAD Interview: Jan Manski for Onania at The Rochelle School



Photo by Laura Bushell



(Originally published on FAD)

Welcome to Onania, a world unlike anything you’ve seen outside of a David Cronenberg film. Artist Jan Manski envisions the most narcissistic character traits of our society as a disfiguring force, propelling us into a self-destructive future of unattainable pleasure and perfection.

Trained at Central St Martins, the Polish born artist works in 2D, 3D and film and has been fashioning his alternative universe over roughly two and a half years with a meticulous sense of detail and feeling for the grotesque.

The launch pad for the exhibition is his film, The Onanizer: Your Ultimate Masturbation Experience, which uses a seductive voiceover and pristine visuals to sell viewers the ultimate pleasure product, with a sense of the absurd, humorous and downright disturbing running the whole way through it.

But inevitably there’s no pleasure without pain, and what follows in Manski’s fictional world is a state of gradual disfiguration and destruction brought on by this experience of ultimate bliss. Such is the price to pay for our vanity.

Manski took FAD on a tour of his solo show, which includes the whole of Onania along with documentation of its creation along with an earlier work, Posessia. Onania runs until Saturday 5 May at the Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, E2 7ES. See http://www.breeselittle.com/

Where does Onania come from?

The roots of Onania are beauty magazines and also vintage magazines, fashion and design items that I’d selected when I was trying to find a style of the project. I was trying to get inspiration from some fetishistic and narcissistic level of fashion. It all begins from The Onanizer it’s the start. It’s supposed to give us happiness but in fact it mutates us.

Little White Lies Interview: North Sea Texas

(Originally published in Little White Lies)

Bavo Defurne, Eva Van Der Gucht, Yves Verbraeken and Jelle Florizoone

The North Sea Texas crew sit down to chat about the bonding experience of making the film.

This tale of teenage first love in a sleepy Belgian seaside town marks a striking feature film debut for director Bavo Defurne, whose short films picked up plaudits around the world. North Sea Texas is a moving story, beautifully told and acted. LWLies caught up with Defurne in London recently, along with producer Yves Verbraeken, actor Jelle Florizoone, and actress Eva van der Gucht.

LWLies: Bavo, this is your first feature film after a series of successful shorts, how was it to make the leap?

BD: When I showed my short films, most of them deal with rejection or loneliness and a lot of young audiences would ask what happens next? I wouldn’t know because when you make a short film you’re happy that you finished it! I really didn’t know what would be the solution for these lonely teenagers, so all the shorts had an open ending and in that sense the feature finishes them a little bit.

What attracted you to this adaptation?

BD: I think the whole tone of the book it’s adapted from is quite optimistic and that’s something rare in gay coming-of-age films, if you want to call them that. There’s a lot of films dealing with loneliness, rejection, hate, and the struggle of coming out, but I think Pim’s struggle is more in convincing the other person that his love is valuable and important. So it’s much more a love film than a coming out film, and in that sense it’s something new and it charmed me very much. It’s still a little bit open to interpretation, but it doesn’t end with a suicide or unhappy marriage or loneliness for the rest of your life kind, thing that you would have in films like Brokeback Mountain.

You didn’t enjoy Brokeback then?

BD: I have nothing against Brokeback Mountain but the thing is that it’s so sad. Being such a sad story about negative things, it also confirms negative things. We’re not from a perfect country but in Belgium a woman can marry a woman and a man can marry a man, and as a filmmaker, as an artist, you should also reflect positive things in your society,

See Film Differently Interview: Rebecca Hall for The Awakening

I was the interviewer for this one rather than the filmmaker, but I got to meet the lovely Rebecca Hall to talk about her part in The Awakening for See Film Differently.

Saatchi Magazine Interview: Hayley Lock

Photo by Laura Bushell

 (Originally published on Saatchi Online Magazine)

Hayley Lock’s works are populated by a cast of intriguing characters whose visual form and biographical history have been absorbed, mulled over and reformulated by the artist as part of her ongoing game of truth versus illusion. Like a writer with series of novels in the pipeline,

there is a melting pot of stories, ideas, snippets of overheard conversation and a multitude of characters that bubbles away in the background, only to be drawn upon when the time is right. Unusually, the act of writing and research is key to Lock’s artistic practice, which so far has encompassed painting, drawing, collage, sound, video andsculpture as a means of articulation of its text based roots. This year, Lock’s work has been shown around the UK as part of Transition

Gallery’s The Count of Monte Cristo and she has a collaborative project, (Now that would be) Telling, creating site specific works for five National Trust stately homes together with five writers. She sat downwith Laura Bushell to begin to unravel the complex tale of her work itself…

Photo by Laura Bushell

Could you describe where you’re at with your practice now?

I’m currently exploring the idea of duality and reflection. This is
why I’m really interested in fact and fiction, so I’m exploring those
ideas of subverting truth… what’s truth and what isn’t truth? Lots of
the projects I’m working on at the moment are about me looking at and researching things on the surface and then trying to make up new histories, which may or may not be true, beneath that surface. It’s quite layered my work, quite complex.
                                                             
With (Now that would be) Telling I’m actually quite privileged to work with writers and we’re coming up with new ways of working, which is really interesting. I’m trying out new things, seeing if it’s successful or not, trying to measure that. I’m really interested in portraiture and where these people may or may not have come from, truth, rumour, playing with rumour.

Narrative plays a strong role in your work, whether its historical or fictional, or somewhere in the grey area between.

The blur of the edges is what I like. Something will for some reason scream at me and interest me and I’ll end up twisting and turning it and then putting it back into its original setting. It’s about exploring
both the visual and the written word too, I’m working with text a lot. I’m also really interested in conversation so I’ll be out and about somewhere and if I hear a particularly interesting statement or someone says something silly I tend to use that as titles for work. That gets fed back in.

What I’m doing within my work is developing what I see as a really big concept or story, a big body of work. When I’m making work for difference places or something I’ve instigated, it’s all going into the melting pot. So these portraits that I’m exploring are all part of a bigger story and as I’m making them I’m talking to them, having a conversation, and writing these things down. Then that goes back into the story again to be mixed around and explored as and when is relevant.

So you have a big cast to choose form for your work?

Yes, there is a big cast, it’s quite theatrical. I think film is where my work needs to go next, to try those ideas in some kind of moving imagery of some description.

Do you come from a theatre or writing background?

No. I’ve always made work, drawn and fiddled around since I was quite young, that classic thing. I love painting and collage but I don’t stick with them, I’m constantly trying out new working ways. It twists and turns all the time and I don’t think I’m in control of it, which I quite enjoy. I feel like I’m steering it and I don’t know what the end is going to be, I don’t know even if there is an end.

FAD Video: Pipilotti Rist, Eyeball Massage at Hayward Gallery

Here's a video that I made for FAD at the Pipilotti Rist, Eyeball Massage exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, when the artist and curator gave a tour to the press. Directed by me, music by the marvelous Jake Ridley.

FAD Video: Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács at Moving Image

A video I made for FAD when I met the makers of Mastering Bambi at the Moving Image Contemporary Video Art Fair.

FAD Video: Edward Winkleman at Moving Image

I met with Edward Winkleman, co-founder of the Moving Image Contemporary Video Art Fair, to make a video introduction to his fantastic event all the way from NYC. Originally published on FAD.

FAD Interview: Oliver Michaels at Moving Image

(Originally published on FAD)

With his work showing at Moving Image Contemporary Video Art Fair, FAD caught up with Brooklyn based artist Oliver Michaels for a quick chat about the show and the video installation he is exhibiting…

Why do you use video?
It’s the language of our times. Over the past decade film making has been liberated from it’s previous financial restraints. Advancements in consumer equipment and software has opened up an area that is really exciting to work within as it uses the same vernacular as the media encompassed society we live in today.

How do you combine video and installation?
I’m not sure where installation stops and sculpture begins but I see these pieces more as sculptures than installation. I built the structures to host the videos, to bring them off the walls so that the viewer interacts with them within the space. Each structure is stage appropriate to each video and it’s form reflects this.

What’s the background to your work showing at Moving Image?
In the Museum Postcards series I wanted to liberate these beautiful and powerful objects, to give them a rest for a while from their burden of history. I also wanted to create bastard children of the actual historical objects and pop software. I developed my understanding of the space of history from a diverse range of sources over the years; a good understanding of The Greek landscape say, was informed as much through carry on movies, hip hop videos and computer games, as it was museums, neo-classical architecture and textbooks etc. so I found this relationship to history and it’s artifacts an interesting area to work in.

Can you tell us about the specific piece you’re showing?
In ‘Lover’s’ a beautiful and authoritative black marble bust of Abraham Lincoln presents a dialogue that is a compilation of hundreds of snippets of sourced descriptive writing pasted together; a spoken word version of the juxtapositions of materials in sculpture. The piece presents three experiences of the same thing, looking at a sculpture, listening to a description of a sculpture and watching a video of one. This moves in an area that explores the discrepancies between experiences, one that is relevant to the greater theme in the work that explores the role of understanding in the phenomenological moment.

If someone liked your work how would they buy it?
Museum Postcards can be bought as an edition of the film only, this comes in a 1/4 box set that contains a Blue-ray and a flash drive with a number of different versions on it. Or the sculpture is available as a one off. Here you’d receive the sculpture  and hand drawn plans and instructions for it’s reconstruction, including a computer with the original work that plays directly from the application.

BEV Interview: Julia Leigh for Sleeping Beauty

(Originally published on the Birds Eye View blog)

The Australian novelist’s first foray into film directing is not the Sleeping Beauty we all know and love. The story of a young woman’s induction into the strange sexual practice of being drugged to sleep whilst older men pay to be alone with her, Julia Leigh’s debut is a very creepy yet visually elegant work. BEV sat down with the director to talk about her inspiration and the leap from the literary world to the cinematic.

Part of your inspiration for Sleeping Beauty came from a recurring dream you had, can you tell me about that?

After the publication of my first novel I had to do a little bit of press and I contracted this horrible nightmare of being filmed in my sleep. It was quite compelling because the dreamer dreams she’s asleep in her own bed, when in fact she is asleep in her own bed. I realised we’re all quite vulnerable in our sleep and sometimes it’s as if we wake up and edit out our nights as if they haven’t happened. So I wondered what would it be like to know that something was happening in your sleep and know it probably wasn’t good for you? How would that seep through into your waking life?

Was this always an idea for a film script or could it have been a novel?

Yes, this idea came to me as a cinematic project, I never asked myself if it should be a book or a film, that didn’t even occur to me. I wrote the script quite quickly and I wasn’t thinking any further than just finishing the draft, so I didn’t think I would necessarily direct it. Then at a certain point in time, and I honestly can’t remember the occasion, the sentiment became ‘I’ll just do it myself’.

How was the development process and finding a producer?

I tried many producers, about fourteen or so. Some said ‘No way’. Some said ‘We really love it but we want you to make changes to the script’, changes that I didn’t agree with. In the end I found a producer who recognised the script for what it was and we made a deal that this would be the script that would be shot.

How did you prepare for the transition between the literary and the cinematic?

The cinematic qualities of the film were in the script, in the conception of the project. I did an enormous amount of preparation! Some scenes we even prepared so much that we got actors that weren’t in the film just to block out the movements using a video camera and then we took that into rehearsal with the real actors. So it evolved through that process and then we took it to set on the day.

Little White Lies Interview: Paul Bettany

(Originally published on Little White Lies)

Paul Bettany must be the kind of co-star most actors dread. Not bolshy or flamboyant in a quest to get noticed, just a bona-fide scene-stealer. He’s done it to Russell Crowe. Twice. Now in the low-budget Brit drama Broken Lines Bettany gives another standout performance, this time playing an ex-boxer trying to deal with the after effects of a stroke with stunning authenticity. Bettany sat down with LWLies recently to talk about the role that brought him back to his hometown London and the challenges of getting films out there these days.

LWLies: How did you first get involved in the film?

Bettany: I got sent a script by my friend who said, ‘Would you do us a favour and read it, and if you like it there’s a part in it for you.’ And I read it and very quickly realised that it was him doing me a favour and that he’d thrown this great part my way. So I said absolutely, I’d do it. So it was a very simple process.

Were you always in mind for the part?

It was a very long process writing the script and I think it went through many different stages, so I don’t think he wrote it with me in mind. I think they came to a point where they felt they had finished this script and he sent me it with this rather lovely offer. I was so gobsmacked by how great I was, the pair of them had been beavering away for a couple of years on this thing and then suddenly it’s there and it’s beautiful.

What attracted you to the part of Chester? He’s a pretty raw, intense character.

Well, I mean… that, really. It’s nice to do things occasionally that feel they’re about stuff. They seem to be few and far between nowadays. I think that there’s a dreadful sense of shame in Chester and I found that really moving. There was something that I could comprehend in that.

And what kind of research did you do?

I did a fair amount. I did a lot of reading of different firsthand accounts from stroke survivors. I live in New York and I didn’t want to talk to stroke survivors there because there is a real stoic national characteristic that British people have, a reticence. So what I did was I got the filmmakers to interview British stroke survivors on film, hours and hours of footage of these really frank, moving interviews. I watched them, and their responses to the predicament in which they found themselves were really varied, as varied as human beings are.

But, and I speak for myself here, I thought there were some unifying things that all of these people felt which were overwhelming frustration and anger at their body; a fury at having to re-learn simple things; a terrible sense of injustice; and a shame surrounding feelings of dependency. I thought in somebody like Chester that would be so compounded because he’s lived an incredibly physical life, an almost exclusively physical life, and now he is left with an almost exclusively cerebral life and his mind is not a place where he feels comfortable.

Dazed Digital Interview: Tom de Freston, On Falling

(Originally published on Dazed Digital)

Tom de Freston uses the human figure in his paintings as a director would on film or the stage, manipulating the person into a scenario loaded with dramatic tension. Using performance and theatre (along with multiple other sources) for inspiration, de Freston plays out contemporary concerns and historical modes across his canvases, resulting in what he has described as ‘contemporary history painting’. Before his solo show in Clerkenwell this month, the artist talked to Dazed about this dichotomy and the roots of his practice as a painter.

Dazed Digital: Why did you choose to be a painter?
Tom de Freston: I don't know if I did. I certainly can't pinpoint a light bulb moment when I decided to be an artist, it was more the result of a myriad of decisions.

DD: You've described yourself as a 'contemporary History Painter’; can you explain?
Tom de Freston: I'm interested in the idea of History Painting as a bankrupt notion, and if it's possible to have such a thing as contemporary History Painting. My paintings are not historical in that they are not illustrative of a specific geographic or historic source. Instead they are an amalgamation of numerous sources, fusing timeframes in order to produce autonomous scenes which could be read metaphorically and metaphysically in relation to a contemporary or historical context.

DD: Can you tell me a bit about your literary/theatrical influences?
Tom de Freston: I have worked closely with poets, academics and theatre companies and directors. I don't see the dialogue as necessarily different to that which I have with the History of Art or painting. They are all just sources to exploit and scavenge for new end points.

DD: And the Shakespeare references in On Falling?
Tom de Freston: The painting ‘Bathroom’ shows Macbeth sat upon the loo, with a sense of Bacon's paintings of George Dyer. The figure in the bath could be one of a few characters from Macbeth, but nods to David's Marat and images of the Deposition, whilst the entire structure of the space is being threatened by a swirling, descending estuary of paint. In’ MSND’ Bottom and Titania sit apprehensively on a stage above a foresty abyss with witness figures featured crow headed women, flying pigs head, winged and masked putti and a couple both sporting halos and Marilyn Monroe masks.

FAD Video: Christian Jankowski's Casting Jesus at Lisson Gallery

A recent film interview with artist Christian Jankowski for FAD talking about his brilliant new film Casting Jesus, showing at Lisson Gallery:




If something good came out of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ it was that Christian Jankowski was inspired to make his latest film, Casting Jesus, now showing at Lisson Gallery. For it was the vision of Jim Caviezel dressed as the Big J taking acting tips from a priest that prompted the artist to stage a talent contest, much in the style of X Factor, but this time with professional actors auditioning for the role of Christ in front of a panel of judges from the Vatican. The resulting dual-screen film is often comical, but never disparaging towards its participants, pointing the finger instead at our quick-to-judge, image obsessed culture. Casting Jesus is a must-see, at the Lisson Gallery until 1 October 2011.