see
le déjeuner sur l’herbe
le déjeuner sur l’herbe
le déjeuner sur l’herbe

Avena wrote (and made my day ⨀ ⨽__⨼ ⨀ )

”
Omg, yes—I’m so sorry. I’m w/ my family—they r so insane and in my
torture, I forgot. Here r credits, I wrote them for the grid of images after the interview:

1.
Hat, BLESS
2.
hat, BLESS
Jacket, EMPORIO ARMANI
Jean shorts, PERFECT 69
3.
Mesh jacket, VPL
plastic jacket, ULINE
white top, ISSEY MIYAKE
jewelry, AMBERGRIS and BLACKHOUSE
4.
Plastic jacket, ULINE
wool cape, THOM BROWNE
sweatpants, (customised), CHAMPION
5.
dress, ANDRE WALKER
6.
(same as 4)
7.
Hat, RACHEL COMEY
8.
hat, MICH DULCE
jacket, BERNARD WILHELM
9.
hat, RACHEL COMEY
jacket, LOUISE GRAY
10.
jacket, GERLAN JEANS
jeans, CARHART
sneakers, YOHJI YAMAMOTO
11.
on him (same as #10)
on her (same as #3, + pants also by ISSEY MIYAKE
shoes, CESARE PACIOTTI

Also, I musnt forget Nick’s sweet friend who did hair,
AKIKO KAWASAKI
thanks again, there is an image in one of Gerlan’s pics, #19, in which the person on the left is wearing an ADIDAS ORIGINALS jacket and ADIDAS shoes (in case that credit is helpful to ad)

Peace love joy and prosperity in 2012!!!!!

”

Some time ago, in the scope of Frieze 2011, (Yes I am not good at posting right after something happens. I kinds hold on to the hope it’s a personal style but maybe not.) I strolled to Kensington Gardens with Carri to see a performance that our friend and flatmate stylist Nicholas Royal had been working on. It happened to be an art piece by NY artist Carissa Rodriguezm styled by NY stylist Avena Gallagher! On the spot we bumped into our friend Gerlan and what could have been a quiet inspiring art afternoon became a delirious ravy evening of food and laughs. The piece was finished when we arrived anyway. Still I am )obviously= very interested by the crossovers/collaborations between fashion and contemporary art so I decided to make an interview with Avena on the piece. Here it is!

Avena Gallagher

Can you give us a brief background on your life?

I grew up near Seattle, WA. I first came to NY while in high school to dance in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and became obsessed with returning as soon as possible to study fashion. I went to FIT but dropped out for a job in advertising that was paying well and more exciting than school at the time.

And styling career?

I quit the advertising job after a couple of years and was floating around, dancing a bit, playing keyboard in a band called The Redlights, and waitressing. I eventually got back into fashion assisting stylists. I assisted Patti Wilson, Lori Goldstein (for a short while) and Camilla Nickerson (for 3+ years) before starting on my own. I love photography, I love fashion, but I haven’t necessarily approached styling as a career… it’s more a part of a creative practice that I’m trying to figure out.

How did you meet Carissa Rodriguez?

All Filipinos know each other.
I can’t remember how we met…but our worlds have overlapped for a long time–since the mid-90′s.

How did the project come about?

Carissa and I collaborated in NY on a performance piece in NYC about a year ago. We had been wanting to collaborate on something for some time- though we didn’t know what. An impromptu invitation to participate in an group show/happening came up and we put the project together in about a day. We were wanting to reference our shared ethnicity so we ‘installed’ a Filipino girl under a chandelier made of coconuts by artist Wade Guyton. We also made a large flower arrangement to accompany her. I dressed her in a somehow very Pinoy Prada dress with a hazy photoprint of palm trees on it. The whole thing was more or less inspired by a pillow on Imelda Marcos’ couch which read “Nouveau Riche is better than no Riche at all”. We called the piece “Design within Riche”.

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/the-scene/2010-04-08/avena-gallagher-carissa-rodriguez-burning-bridges/

This time, Carissa was invited to do something at the Serpentine Gallery for an event held during Frieze called the Garden Marathon. We decided to do something similar in form to the last project. Instead of using one person as the piece, we used 12 (including ourselves).

How did the collaboration work (concept, production)?

Well, I guess the idea was precipitated by the invitation to do something for the event, which was to do with the idea of the garden. Carissa was looking at these works:Le déjeuner sur l’herbe by Edouard Manet, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by George Seurat, and “the Storyteller” by Jeff Wall and how they related to the garden concept. I had just spent time in London last summer, when the Serpentine opened the season with the pavilion by architect Peter Zumthor. We started to think about what kinds of ‘garden’ scenes are really contemporary and might mean something to us and be consistent with our work together. Although the “Garden Marathon” activities were held in a geodesic dome erected for the event, the pavilion by architect Peter Zumthor was at the Serpentine and made a perfect setting for a collision of these referenced works and our hap-hazard cultural study. We were also inspired by the impromptu picnics of guestworkers on break one sees on highway medians and corporate gardens throughout “the developing world”, or the large gatherings of domestic worker-women in public spaces on Sundays in China…Transposing/transplanting these scenes into an ‘ideal garden’ by a ‘famous architect’ at a ‘respectable gallery’ at a ‘major art-world event’ seemed interesting…

What is your relation to contemporary art (what/who do you like, how important is it to you etc??
I live in a place of concentrated “contemporary art” activity–my boyfriend is an artist, our friends are artists and/or creative people…our neighborhood is becoming a new “contemporary art” zone (Chinatown) and working in fashion is continual effort of reflecting and translating what is happening in art-imagery for more commercially-driven fashion/music imagery. Having said that, what I really like or draw inspiration from is not necessarily art, but regular-life, like the Chinese people in my hood and the way they dress, working-class street style and I also have a passionate love for ethnographic imagery and how style is dictated by culture. I also love how potent style can be when the cultural ideals are strict like with the Polygamist mormons, or the Hassidic Jews, for example….
In the Serpentine project, I was trying to create “costumes” for the participants which were parodies of different style-characteristics that come from the Philippines or as expressed by Filipino people. My style references were a mix of pre-colonial ethnographic pictures of tribal Filipinos, traditional Spanish-colonial style, domesti-helper clothing (maid clothes, nurse clothes, street cleaner and industrial clothes), as well as low-price, high-street sportswear.

Where do you feel art and fashion cross?

They are both ruled by and rule an idea of the contemporary.

Is it exciting for a stylist to work in a non-fashion context?
Yes! “fashion” styling is mostly about beauty…it’s about ideas too but the ideas are just used to express the beauty. It’s something cosmetically driven., and also commercially driven. But sometimes the most inspiring and stylish people or things are not necessarily… sexy or cute. Styling outside the context of fashion allows for more varied information, or even confusion…which I am interested in. It can be less apparent or less relevant to popular fashion or culture but super expressive.

http://www.reenaspaulings.com/

Among the thumbnails, the first are by photos by Babak Radboy and the others are by Gerlan. Then a couple of reference images.

FUZI FLASH TATTOO COLLECTION N°1
First edition 2011

Spirit duplicated in an edition of 50 copies
Numbered and signed
Silkscreen printed softcover, perfect binding
21 x 29 cm, 159 pages, 5 unpublished pages
All drawings by FUZI UV TPK
Design: David Keshavjee, Marietta Eugster, Rémi Brandon
ISBN 978-3-906011-02-8
EUR 100 | CHF 120

BUY HERE

Sang Bleu: Pouvez-vous décrire votre activité actuelle (graphisme, illustration, photographie, art, tattoo, etc.)?

David Keshavjee & Simon Haenni: Nous travaillons actuellement avec Julien Tavelli et Guy Meldem sur différents projets de design et de photographie que nous signons parfois sous le nom de Maximage. 

SB: Comment est né le projet “Ma Ligne”?

D & S: Le projet est né lorsque Fuzi nous a montré à nous et notre collègue DJ Angel un album photo-souvenir regroupant toutes ses photos d’intérieurs de la ligne St-Lazarre. Fuzi avait déjà en tête le projet de publier son contenu et nous étions tous trois intéressés par cette idée. Nous avons décidé de travailler ensemble.

SB: Les images, à leurs manière représente une dimension dure, souvent violente de notre société. L’objet résultant est pourtant soigné et s’insère sans problème.

D & S: Notre volonté commune était de mettre les images en valeur, par le design et la qualité d’impression, mais aussi de leur permettre d’exister hors du contexte limité du mouvement graffiti, permettant ainsi un regard plus riche et libre de préjugés sur leur contenu. Cette approche nous a permis de travailler avec l’éditeur Patrick Frey.

SB: Comment s’est passé la collaboration/production?

D & S: La collaboration s’est déroulée de manière étroite entre Fuzi, l’éditeur et nous. Chaque choix a été discuté ensemble. La collaboration avec Patrick Frey nous a notamment permis de porter le plus grand soin à tout ce qui concerne les matériaux et la production de l’objet final. Les décisions du design de ce livre découlent en grande partie de l’objet original, qui a été “traduit” en livre.

SB: Vous êtes probablement familiers avec la (regrettablement kitsch) esthétique généralement en cours dans les publications liées au tattoo. Pourtant placer des dessins destinés au tattoo dans une contexte graphique aussi radical et habituellement réservé à l’art contemporain procède d’une telle re-contextualisation de contenus ultra-connotés. Quels était votre stratégie?

D & S: L’objet ”FUZI UV TPK Flash Tattoo Collection No 1″ est un objet extrêmement simple. Avec Marietta Eugster et Rémi Brandon nous avons défini le concept du livre, les dessins ont ensuite été réalisés par Fuzi directement sur des papiers carbones A4, et reproduits à 50 exemplaires avec un duplicateur à alcool. Comme l’impression traversait parfois les feuilles, il était impossible d’avoir un livre recto verso. Les choix graphiques du livre ont été directement dictés par cette technique de reproduction. 
L’idée était simplement de faire un objet qui soit juste par rapport à son contenu. L’impression au carbone fait référence au transfert du croquis sur la peau avec un carbone avant la réalisation d’un tatouage. Chacune des pages du livre a un rendu légèrement différent, l’impression bouge et réagit un peu différemment à chaque copie. 
La version offset est une reproduction noir et blanc du livre original.

SB: Vous avez maintenant publié ces deux projets sous le label Maximage. Quelle est cette entité, qui la compose, quelle est sa mission?

D & S: En fait ces deux projets ne sont pas publiés sous le label Maximage. “Ma Ligne” est publié par Edition Patrick Frey et le “FUZI UV TPK Flash Tattoo Collection No 1″ est un livre autoproduit, sans étiquette. Nous avons designé ces objets. 

SB: Que peut-on attendre des prochaines publications et de l’évolution d’une structure qui malgré tout doit partiellement s’inscrire dans un système pré-existant de production, distribution avec ses règles et ses codes?

D: Nous travaillons actuellement plutôt sur la conception et le design de publications pour différents artistes ainsi que d’autres clients.

www.maximage.biz
www.fuziuvtpk.blogspot.com

The lovely people at ACNE STUDIOS are launching their second Paris store tonight, moving into the upper Marais (Paris’ garment district, if you will). The converted electrician’s studio features blood red ceilings, raw concrete beams and gold-tinted windows – along with a raw marble sculpture by the house’s artist du jour, English sculptor Daniel Silver. ACNE STUDIOS, 3 Rue Froissart Paris 75003 FRANCE www.acnestudios.com

Our friend and editor Betony Vernon just got interviewed for STYLELIKEU.COM. SICK! Next one is me ;)

view here

Betony Vernon Closet Interview for StyleLikeU.com from StyleLikeU on Vimeo.

Extracts from New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing by Gregorio Lambranzi.
Published in 1928 by The Imperial society of Teachers of Dancing.

Jeanne Salome is packing for NY. I am being inquisitive.