YAYOI KUSAMA FASHION ICON

Yayoi Kusama: Japanese polka-dot queen and trippy hippy psychedelic color master. Yayoi is one of those prolific artists that does literally everything. Painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance art, fashion… She’s a little bit surrealist, abstract expressionist, art-brut and a whole lot of avant-garde. She has exhibited all over the world alongside legends like Andy Warhol, George Segal and Claes Oldenburg and has shown in the MoMA, Whitney, Tate Modern, and broke Christie’s record for highest selling living female artist ($5.1 Million).

But she doesn’t get nearly enough attention for the living breathing work of art she has curated out of herself. Yayoi Kusama’s has turned herself, through her clothes, into one of her works of art. She’s designed product and accessory lines for Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton and founded her own line Kusama Fashion Company Ltd. This art-fashion icon Her style is the epitome of Mode meets Arte.

“I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.” Yayoi Kusama

“With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing ‘philosophy of the universe’ through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call ‘stereotypical repetition.'” Yayoi Kusama

“Since my childhood, I have always made works with polka dots. Earth, moon, sun and human beings all represent dots; a single particle among billions.” Yayoi Kusama

“If there’s a cat, I obliterate it by putting polka dot stickers on it. I obliterate a horse by putting polka dot stickers on it. And I obliterated myself by putting the same polka dot stickers on myself.” Yayoi Kusama

ARTISTS MUSE

Muse. Artists Muse. These mysterious embodiments of the feminine have inspired artists since the origin of art. We do not know the extent of the roles these women played in the creation and inspiration of the famed works of Warhol, Picasso and Brancusi, but their allure and singularity is undeniable. But what exactly did these great artists see in these women? What did their particular brand of character and beauty inspire in them? Was it a secret locked within their femininity? A secret men have timelessly searched to unlock. Was it pure love, lust, or something more? Perhaps the secret of creation that these artists–and all artists whether conscious of it or not, are perpetually searching for.

Edie Sedgwick X Andy Warhol

Lee Miller X Man Ray

Anna Karenina X Jean Luc Godard

Gala Diakonova X Salvador Dali

Dora Maar X Picasso

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Louise Bourgeois was born in France 1911 to parents who ran a tapestry restoration business. Her father’s extended infidelity, and notably his affair with her nanny/English teacher left a particular mark on Louise, an alert young child who recorded everything in her diaries… She studied mathematics, but after her mother’s early death, switched to art. She studied painting and print-making and was later told by a teacher she was not a painter, but rather a sculptor. The gaps in her artistic timeline during the 1950s and 60s are due to her immersion in psychoanalysis, leading to her debut of strange, organic plaster sculptures in 1964, a step away from her earlier, totem-like creations. When Bourgeois turned 70, her career exploded onto the art world with her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, fuelling a new confidence that led to the creation of her iconic spider sculptures and eerie hang man cells. Art for Bourgeois, continually probed questions of loneliness, jealousy, anger and fear. Art was a form of exorcism, “a guarantee of sanity”…

An now, an imagined interview with real quotes by Louise Bourgeois…

Who are you?
I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands…

I am a searcher… I always was… and I still am… searching for the missing piece. Louise Bourgeois

Where did you come from?
I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.

I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents.

“My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don’t do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other.” –Louise Bourgeois

When my mother died, I fell apart. My father wanted to control me. As a consequence, I ran away to America.

I was a ‘runaway girl’ from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I’m not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup. Louise Bourgeois

What is an artist?
An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing. – Louise Bourgeois

“To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.” – Louise Bourgeois

What is art?
Art is manipulation without intervention.

Art is a guaranty of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said. – Louise Bourgeois

Why do you make art?
I have kept a diary as long as I can remember, and drawings are really another kind of diary.

My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.

In my sculpture, it’s not an image I am seeking, it’s not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about. Louise Bourgeois

Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.

Look at it this way – a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.

Are you a feminist?
The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself. – Louise Bourgeois

What inspires you?
To express your emotions, you have to be very loose and receptive. The unconscious will come to you if you have that gift that artists have. I only know if I’m inspired by the results.

When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin. – Louise Bourgeois

Tell us about your ‘art’
A work of art does not need an explanation. The work has to speak for itself. The work may be subject to many interpretations, but only one was in the mind of the artist. Some artists say to make the work readable for the public is an artist’s responsibility, but I don’t agree with that. The only responsibility to be absolutely truthful to the self. My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing. – Louise Bourgeois

Then tell us about the spider…
The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. . . Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.

On fears…
Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning

Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented – which is what fear and anxiety do to a person – into something whole. Louise Lourgeois

Advice?
One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.

I have been to Hell and back and let me tell you it was wonderful.

Tell your own story, and you will be interesting.

Don’t get the green disease of envy. Don’t be fooled by success and money. Don’t let anything come between you and your work. – Louise Bourgeois

TOKYO WRAITH

Fashion styling meets art exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Playing spectre at the Palais de Tokyo’s labyrinthine exhibition “Inside.” The Palais de Tokyo is by far one of my favourite museums in Paris. It brings back that magical immersive element to art that is so lacking in the art curation world despite the boundary pushing time we’re in culturally. Institution-housed art is seriously lagging behind.

DIA ART FOUNDATION

Dia Art Foundation was named after “dia” the Greek word for “through,” The Dia Art Foundation serves as metamorphosing vehicle through which artists can experiment with their visions that seek to push the boundaries of art. Located in Beacon New York, the foundation, an extension of it’s New York City locations, first founded in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, Heiner Friedrich, and Helen Winkler to enable artists to achieve their visionary projects that might otherwise not have been accepted by typical museums due to their scale or scope. The foundation provides artist aiming to change our perspective on art and the world with the long-term support needed to realize their creations.

Dan Flavin

Gerhard Richter

Robert Smithson

Imi Knoebel

Imi Knoebel

Robert Irwin

Fred Sandback

Dan Flavin

Michael Heizer

LIGHT SCULPTING WITH JAMES TURRELL

“I am not an “earthwork” artist. I am totally involved in the sky. Let me make this very clear: the main thing is that I am totally interested in space and not in form. James Turrell, Arch Daily”

“My work does have a lot more to do with painting than it does with sculptural or architectural senses, because the first thing that is important is that the light is used as material, and that it has a physical presence as such, and that space is solid and filled and never empty.”

“There is no object in my work. There never was. There is not image within it. I have: no object, no image, no point of focus. My interest is in plumbing the space. James Turrell, Arch Daily”

“Art is a completed pass. You don’t just throw it out into the world—someone has to catch it. James Turrell, Harpers Bazaar”

“I always felt that art was more interested in posing the question than it was in getting the answer, but I’ve come to more recently think that art is the answer. James Turrell, PBS”

“…if you go to the Rocky Mountains, to a high altitude where it is cold, you see sky that is such a crisp blue you feel that you could cut it and put it in cubes! That is the kind of sky I want, and I have been able to get it by selecting the altitude. There are gradations near the horizon where the blue is lighter, and then gradually, toward the zenith, it gets deep. With Roden Crater I have taken out the first fifteen degrees of height by aiming the tunnel sight lines above that level. At that point you see thirty degrees less than one hundred eighty degrees. That is how you get that incredible color – by eliminating all of the white at the horizon. James Turrell, Arch Daily”

“I’m interested in having a light that inhabits space, so that you feel light to be physically present. I mean, light is a substance that is, in fact, a thing, but we don’t attribute thing-ness to it. We use light to illuminate other things, something we read, sculpture, paintings. And it gladly does this. But the most interesting thing to find is that light is aware that we are looking at it, so that it behaves differently when we are watching it and when we’re not, which imbues it with consciousness. Often people say that they want to touch some of the work I do. Well, that feeling is actually coming from the fact that the eyes are touching, the eyes are feeling. And this happens because the eyes are quite sensitive only in low light, for which we were made. We’re actually made for this light of Plato’s cave, the light of twilight. James Turrell, PBS”

EUGENIO RECUENCO X PICASSO

Inspiration Fashion meets Art with Spanish photographer Eugenio Recuenco. He’s recreating Picasso paintings with photographs and makes his 3D models look more like their 2D inspired cubist muses. He plays a trick He does with photography what was thought could only be done with painting

Art transcending its medium and being reinterpreted in other art forms. Most awesome.

Photos all Rights Reserved Eugenio Recuenco

Photos via www.EugenioRecuenco.com

Andrew Wyeth's World

Before I knew the story behind Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World painting, I always connected it to pain–the image of that women reaching up to the house, her body broken, the house appearing to disappear deeper into the landscape the longer I looked.
The pain I picked up on was real, but the real story is one of beautiful endurance and strength over physical suffering. The woman in the painting is Wyeth’s dear friend and neighbour Anna Christina Olson, who suffered from degenerative muscle disorder that prevented her from walking. Andrew would see her outside his window, dragging her limp body around the fields, picking blueberries, enjoying the light. She refused to be imprisoned by her condition, and enjoyed life immensely, her spirit untouched by the limitations of her body.

An imagined interview with Andrew Wyeth in his own words…

“The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless… limited physically but by no means spiritually.” Andrew Wyeth

What is art to you?

“Art to me, is seeing. I think you have got to use your eyes, as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn’t work. That’s my art.”

“One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.”Andrew Wyeth

Where do you work?

“I don’t really have studios. I wander around people’s attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.”

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.”

“I’m a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting… it would be like somebody watching you have sex – painting is that personal to me.” Andrew Wyeth

What inspires you?

“I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.”

“I surrendered to a world of my imagination, re-enacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.” Andrew Wyeth

“I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature – the very thought of it drives me mad.”Andrew Wyeth

What reaction do you hope your work will incite?

“To have all your life’s work and to have them along the wall, it’s like walking in with no clothes on. It’s terrible.”

“I get letters from people about my work. The thing that pleases me most is that my work touches their feelings. In fact, they don’t talk about the paintings. They end up telling me the story of their life or how their father died.” Andrew Wyeth

What do you seek through your work?

“My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work; to leave no residue of technical mannerisms to stand between my expression and the observer. To seek freedom through significant form and design rather than through the diversion of so-called free and accidental brush handling.”

“I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it… I always want to see the third dimension of something… I want to come alive with the object.”

“I can’t work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.” Andrew Wyeth

Issey Miyake

Issey Miyake was a rockstar. The Japanese fashion designer born in Hiroshima in 1938 changed the world’s perspective of fashion into a form of design expression. Miyake better fits the description avant-garde fabric sculptor than fashion designer. While a graphic design student, Miyake sent a letter to the head of the 1960 World Design Conference to be held Japan that year questioning why fashion design was not included in their program, making him a pioneer in the acceptance of fashion as a form of design, creating a subtle yet seismic shift in the merging a fashion with its sister disciplines of art and design.

FRIDA KAHLO REFLECTION

Feet? What do I need you for when I have wings to fly?

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.

They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore….I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.

Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.–Frida Kahlo

I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s – my madness would not be an escape from “reality” – Frida Kahlo

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I paint my own reality.

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.–Frida Kahlo

Frida is the only example in the history of art of an artist who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings. The only woman who has expressed in her work an art of the feelings, functions, and creative power of woman.–Diego Rivera

There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the train the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.–Frida Kahlo

I want to be inside your darkest everything.

pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.

I hope the exit is joyful; and I hope never to return.–Frida Kahlo

Sculpted Nature

Nature is the ultimate artist; sculpture her foundation. Every painter, or sculptor who has left a mark of their creativity upon the centuries is driven by some unknowable pursuit with representation as their vehicle. They seek to uncover the origin; the source of creativity that pays homage to the ultimate creator. No sculpture of Michelangelo can compare to the millenias of rock carved into the cliff faces that rise up with transcendent majesty; no pigment can match the colours born from the intricacies of the reflective oceans. The secret of this maddened pursuit of the source of artistic representation lies within the beauty of Nature as artist; the origin of art itself.

“Art takes nature as its model” Aristotle

“Great art picks up where nature ends.” Marc Shagall

“Art is a harmony parallel with nature.” Paul Cézanne

TAKASHI MURAKAMI REVEALS HIS DARK SIDE ‘IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD’

Few artists have so impressively penetrated the worlds of fashion and art with such international prestige as contemporary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. The art world may know him as the “Japanese Andy Warhol” and for his superflat, technicolor psychedelic Japanese anime collage motif paintings. The fashion world? As the anime-cherry-pop artist who collaborated with Louis Vuitton on their iconic monogram bag. With his latest exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery entitled “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tale of a Rainbow” Murakami shows us an unexpectedly dark yet enticingly playful side of his artist psyche.

And as stark as the transformation of Yve’s Saint Laurent to the rocker chic update by Hedi Slimane, Murakami reinvented himself into something dark, strange, and utterly disturbing.

The cause of such a dramatic transformation? Murakami has cited his living through the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, killing almost 16,000 people, as the moment that galvanized his darker side.  He has also described his disturbance at the religious sentiment that spread throughout Japan in reaction to the natural disaster as inspiration for the show, having had a complex relationship towards his Buddhist upbringing. The earthquake ignited his questioning of the relationship between religion and art.

“When people are confronted by the power of nature, they need a narrative to give them hope, they need to know why they survived.”–Takashi Murakami, The Wall Street Journal



Like an acid trip turned bad, Murakami’s once joyful drawings of tangerine treed and marmalade skied worlds splintered into multi-colored kaleidoscope images have been replaced by a disturbing underworld of strange, demented beings who become more and more nightmarish the longer you seem to look…

All Rights Reserved Takashi Murakami | Photo © WSJ.com

LYGIA PAPE X INFINITE LIGHT

Art Icono-Inspiration | Lygia Page

Post-Mortem Art Memoria | 1927 – 2004

Her Deal: Brazilian | Rio de Janeiro Born | Sculpture, Engraving, Filmmaking | Concrete & Neo-Concrete Art Cult | Politically Inclined | Geometry Obsessed | Light X Space X Movement X Viewer X Art X Artist |

TtEias | Her most emblematic work | Semi-transparent prisms created with golden thread and light | Illusion that pillars rise into infinity | Space  and movement created through the intersection of lines | Invisibility | Neo-Concretist relationship between art and viewer as light and space changes as the viewer moves |

Concretists | The significance of art transcends the work itself. Defends the objectivity of art. Rejection of natural forms, lyricism and sentiment in the creation of art.  

Neo Concretists | Art represents more than the materials used to create. Art not only occupies the mechanical space, but it transcends it into something new.

“My concern is always invention. I always want to invent a new language that’s different for me and for others, too. I want to discover new things. Because, to me, art is a way of knowing the world, to see how the world is, of getting to know the world”–Lygia Pape

MISHA NONOO X DUSTIN YELLEN

When fashion designer Misha Nonoo sent artist Dustin Yellin dragged out in one of her SS15 halter dresses and stilettos casually sipping on an iced latté, she did more than drive web traffic to her show–she also put her artist-designer collaborationon direct display. Designer’s have drawn inspiration from the art world long before the days of runway presentations, but the idea of an artist and a designer directly collaborating on a collection is only beginning to take hold in the fashion world.

“The universe and the mind are shadowy places seething with dark magic, seas of boundless depth and possibility, overflowing with joy and disaster.”–Dustin Yellin

The Brooklyn-based artist met the CFDA finalist three years ago when she had just launched the her eponymous label. She fell hard for Yellin’s unique creations and rightfully so. The contemporary artist makes sculptural tableaus by compressing multiple layers of intricately detailed glass plates to create stunning 3D paintings. He stumbled upon his innovative technique through the accidental death of a bumble bee.

While working with resin, a bee flew against the piece and became stuck. To end his suffering, Yellin quickly poured more resin onto the creature, sealing it within the piece, and so, his painstakingly precise and patience-testing technique was born. Using the resin-sealed atmosphere as his canvas like “holograms trapped in amber,” Yellin creates a multi-dimensional realm where painting and sculpture collide to create his impressive dystopian and nature-perverting installations that manipulate space and perception.

Yellin’s collaboration with Misha Nonoo found an adapted harmony by focusing on the constructive elements of Yellin’s work. In other words, they used a side perspective on his installations which reveals the intricate layering as inspiration for the clothing patterns. One-dimensional layers were transmuted into 3D and back to flat again in the form of wearable art. Just imagine how the creative world will progress when artists from different industries collaborate together.

Mode by Man Ray

Man Ray was a Dadaist dandy and godfather of surrealist photography and experimental art. He was one of the cool kids of Avant Garde art circles of the 1930’s. His best friend was Marcel Duchamp. His muse, Kiki de Montparnasse. He rebelled against the dogmas of the visual arts and pushed boundaries within all creative mediums. He was an innovative badass with a penchant for all things fashion.

“I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions”

– Man Ray

SALVADOR DALÍ FOR VOGUE

Fashion is Art Inspiration: Dalí + VOGUE

Before the days of endless grinning celebrity head shots, the illustrious Vogue magazine featured its more art sensitive side with a series of covers designed by Salvador Dalí.

Today, Dalí is considered the father of surrealism and god-father of one of the wonkiest mustache styles in facial hair history. In reality, Dalí held a Jeff Koons-esque status as a member of the fashion and art world’s most desired circle and the golden boy of all art-lice social climbers. Running in the ranks of Basquiat, Alice Cooper, Hitchcock and Andy Warhol, designing for the covers of Vogue (with his face even gracing the cover of its Paris edition) is a logical suite.

ESPACE CULTUREL LOUIS VUITTON: ASTRALIS

With Louis Vuitton comes images of embossed leather luggage, monogramming, a recent (successful) Jacobs to Nicholas torch passing, and its notorious status of having the world’s most copied bag in the Chinese faux-luxury goods market. Yet a remarkable few know that within the impressive Louis Vuitton headquarters perched along the Champs Elysées in Paris, is a contemporary art space featuring an ever changing flow of internationally renowned artists.

It is known as L’Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton. While Louis Vuitton holds an eminent place in the history of fashion and luxury goods, it also occupies a notable position of influence within the art world, and even more so as a patron of spoken knowledge through its fostering of the fading art of intellectual discussion.

“Je m’intéresse aux autres dimensions et aux univers parallèles”

1. “I’m preoccupied with different dimensions, a parallel universe”

1. – Borre Saethre

This month’s exhibition, Astralis: Beyond the Stars, is devoted to visions associated with the astral sphere–another term for the invisible–including concepts of the mystified Self, that is to say, one who conflates dreams with reality; existing on the border of the visible and the invisible; between the dimensions of life and death. Eleven artists bound by their shared exploration of the astral, shaman, and otherworldly are currently on display at Louis Vuitton’s contemporary art space:

David Altmejd
Børre Saethre
Chloe Piene
Jean-Luc Favéro
Charley Case
Vidya Gastaldon
Basserode
Siobhán Hapaska
Damien Deroubaix
Myriam Mechita
Rina Banerjee

“Cosmic Lodge”: Inspired by the sweat lodges of the Inipi tribe and their ritual divided into four symbolic doors. The ritual is an initial step to communicating with the spirit world. The forms on the glass are shadows of intertwined bodies.

“La vision ne vient pas du mental, elle se demande, puis se chasse”
“Vision does not come from our minds; it must be summoned then pursued”
– Charley Case

In conjunction with the ebb and flow of the exhibitions, L’Espace Culturel hosts bi-weekly “conversations” for its invited members. These conversations take place around a large oval table, and essentially occur between two individuals while the rest of the attendees listen in. It is a meeting of two brilliant minds from disparate fields. The conversation unfolds, morphs, and expands, and by the end, has fueled everyone in attendance with such an energy of reflection and questioning that the apéritif reception that follows is saturated with ripples of the discussion which preceded.

The first time I was invited to attend, the conversation took place between a hair stylist John Nollet and astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau. And what transpired was nothing short of a thought provoking philisophical discussion which cleverly wove together the mystifying beauty of the unknown with the relation to the Self as conveyed through one’s hair style.

“Avec le nuage, nous sommes le vecteur de notre propre voyage”
“The cloud allows us to become the vehicle for our own journey”
– Basserode

This week’s discussion centered on the invisible and passed between the minds of Charley Case, one of the artists on exhibition, and Stéphane Allix, founder of l’Institut de Recherche sur les Expériences Extraordinaires (INREES, a research institute devoted to the study of strange human experiences, such as near death encounters and communicating with the spirit world.

A former geo-political journalist, Stéphane’s dramatic career shift from one based in skeptic and fact to one engaged in the world of the “invisible” and extraordinary was spurred by the sudden death of his younger brother in a car accident in Afghanistan in 2001. He recounted how he became preoccupied with reassuring his brother’s dead body:

1. “Don’t worry, you’re dead, I will take care of you, your body.”

Although he understood his brother was dead, lost, Stéphane describes not being able to shake off the feeling that there was somehow still a connection, one which is invisible to the eye. He describes having visited shamanist tribes throughout the world and having experimented with peyote in ritual ceremonies. About a quarter of the way through Stéphane’s one sided conversation, Charley Case, his other half, showed up, and the discussion quickly turned to a recounting of their different, increasingly intense, drug trips that took place deep in the amazon rainforest, including Charley’s experience of having licked the back of a psychoactive toad, whose trip-inducing back secretion is considered one of the must powerful in the world.

“Je sais que la prémonition existe puisque je l’expérimente”
“I know premonition exists because it happens to me”
– Siobhán Hapaska

While such accounts of drug enlightenment and communications with the spirit world are often dismissed as residing on the side of the “flaky,” a point that Stéphane himself referred back to several times as a baseline of scientific skepticism which continually pervades his studies, the conversation that transpired was undeniably illuminating. What made the discussion so impactful was the mere fact that it begged for an open-mind, and the consideration of the possibility that there might exist a layer of our world, which although invisible to the naked eye, is filled with energies and connections the dogmas of science have yet to deem “real.”

“Les astes sont partout, sous la forme de constellations ou juste d’éclats”
“The stars are everywhere, as constellations or individual points of light”
– Myriam Mechita

“Je parle du dévoilement au sens d’apocalypse, c’est-à-dire de révélation”
“I’m talking about unveiling in the apocalyptic sense of revelation”
– Damien Deroubaix

Art Orienté Objet
– Marion Laval-Jeantet & Benoît Mangin

3D PRINTED FASHION X IRIS VAN HERPEN

One day, 3D printing will become as omnipresent in our every day material lives as Google is in our virtual ones. We have yet to realize the impact this new super technology will have across all industries. 3D printing has already changed the landscape and future of medicine with 3D printed organs, bones, casts and even beating hearts. Like the architecture, design, and NASA scenes, the fashion industry is only beginning to realize its 3D potential.

“Technology is really the only thing through which you can do new things”-Hussein Chayalan

One of the first demonstrations that technology and fashion have a beautiful future in store (pun alert) came with Hussein Chayalan’s s/s 2007 collection of LED dresses and again for s/s 2012 when the British avant garde designer presented decade morphing dresses that changed length and shape as the models walked down the runway.

“The first time I used 3D printing, it completely changed my thinking. It freed me from all physical limitations. Suddenly, every complex structure was possible and I could create more detail than I ever could by hand”-Iris van Herpen

Today, designers are adding another tool to their sewing machine clad studios. The 3D printer. And one of the designers on the forefront of this design revolution is Iris van Herpen. The Dutch “tech-couture” fashion designer who interned for Alexander McQueen dreams up some of the most mind blowing architecture-meets fashion-meets tech works of art, and the craziest part is that she actually makes them a wearable reality. The fantastical rapid prototyping 3D printed designs are created using laser pulsations that layer powdered rubbers and metals into the printed shapes from computer visuals. Her designs are the first 3D printed creations to walk the runway–they are nothing like we have ever seen before, and it’s only the beginning. With 3D printing, the realms of fashion, art, architecture and design come together through technology. Whether 3D technology will create a consumer market is still an open question, it holds the potential to transform the industry entirely from ready-to-wear 3D printed clothing to consumers being able to print out or even design their own 3D creations at home. For the time being, this powerful new technology is expanding fashion design into another realm, further assuring its place as a form of art. Imagination is limitless and technology brings designers even closer to realizing their creative potential.

Pierres Soulages Alchemist of Light

Art is Inspiration: Pierre Soulages

At 94 years old, Pierre Soulages is one of France’s most renowned painters and considered a key figure in the development of post-war abstraction (A side note: Soulages’s take on such academic pretensions: “all those terms—abstract, nonfigurative, et cetera—they’re just words, they’re labels, and labels are meant to be destroyed”). In essence, he is an alchemist of light. He paints in one color: black. His technique involves carving textured patterns from thick black paint, and in a serendipitous accident he considered a failure at the time, Soulages discovered something wondrous: la lumière vient du noir“: Light comes from the black. His paintings transform the light, modifying and throwing it into a dance as you walk around the canvas, giving the impression of movement and life. Soulage’s creations are a looking glass into a world that exists Outrenoir,the term he discovered for that which is “beyond black.”

Black is the absence of light, yet Soulages creates light from the very color which defines it’s absence.

“Painting is a play of opacities and transparencies”

“Light comes from the color that is the absence of light”

“I don’t paint with black anymore. I paint with the light reflected off the black surface”

“Black is for anarchy, for revolt, it’s for mourning, but it’s also for partying…”

“I am against limitations like perspective. Perspective is illusion, it’s the opposite of presence, and art is presence”

IS FASHION ART?

Few academic questions irritate me as much as the age old cliché: “What is art?” But what about fashion? Is fashion art? It would require answering the first to get to the bottom of the latter. Fashion’s reputability in the art world is gaining more traction internationally with fashion curator Olivier Saillard taking over as director of the Musée de la Mode in Paris and the recurring hype of New York’s Met Galas and newly named Anna Wintour Constume Center. Collaborations between art world and fashion designers are nothing new – most famously occurring between Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, which leads us to the imagined impossible conversation that was subject to Met Gala of two years past, and which deals with this very question of whether fashion holds a place in the umbrella industry that is the art world. I’m with Elsa. Whose side are you on, Prada or Schiaparelli?

Elsa Schiaparelli: You know, Miuccia, I’ve always felt, and after talking to you I’m even more sure: fashion is art. 

Prada: I always said, for me, fashion is not art.

Schiaparelli: Oh, of course it is! That’s why I collaborated with these other artists — the greatest thrill of my career, oh my God, the things I did with Dali! Lobster dresses, skeleton dresses, shoe hats, desk suits…

Prada: I was taught, and I agree, that your collaboration with Dali and other artists of your time was the only real relevant experiment that really was meaningful. It was not a joke, it was a serious moment when serious minds were collaborating.

Schiaparelli: If I don’t say so myself, it was revolutionary. You should try, Miuccia.

Prada: Today everything is so contrived and anything you do is under observation. So in a way, there is not even the same freedom to work with artists because immediately you think about what the comments will be. ‘Ah, yes, art and fashion…’ So I avoid that subject completely.

Schiaparelli: For me, if I hadn’t been a designer, I would have liked to have been a sculptor. Coco even said of me that I was that designer who wanted to be an artist…

Prada: Fashion is art, fashion is not art. But at the end, who cares? Image via Vogue.com