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![Zane Lewis photo zanecover2 Zane Lewis](http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/zanecover2.jpg)
Leave it to the Wall Street Journal to really put the heat on a guy. Zane Lewis, an emerging artist based out of Brooklyn and San Antonio, experienced it firsthand several years ago following the publication of a little article. Named one of ten “23-Year-Old-Masters” in the 2006 story, Lewis garnered some serious artistic accolades, and a hearty buzz of expectations.
Yet three years later, working under pressure and status, Lewis still appears keen to the challenge. A new solo exhibit, Watch Me Slowly Death, is scheduled to open this month at New York’s Mixed Greens Gallery, right in time to kick off the fall art season in Chelsea.
The exhibit will feature a series of mixed media paintings on Plexiglas, each piece a not-so playful juxtaposition aimed at the consumer excesses and youth-obsessed idolatry of our culture. Each untitled piece depicts luxe and glossy advertisements torn from the pages of a fashion magazine, overlain with neon, graffiti-like drippings of paint. The images are instantly recognizable (for who hasn’t seen those ads for Chanel No. 5?) yet slightly distorted, like contemporary idols warped by the sun. Religious iconography, mirrors, and collage are also used to further the themes of death, power, and decay. The show is a mature, subtle investigation of what it means to live and consume in the face of global economic crisis, inevitably raising many questions. Is it still possible to live humbly? Does recession ultimately lead to rebirth?
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![Aїda Ruilova photo aida cover Aїda Ruilova](http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/aida_cover.jpg)
Aїda Ruilova is no stranger to the voyeuristic, often macabre storytelling devices made famous by experimental film icons Sergei Eisenstein and Maya Deren. Influenced equally by structural cinema of the 1960s and vampire movies of the 1970s, the New York-based filmmaker-artist appears at home working with contrasting styles. Ruilova’s short films employ a series of B-movie horror tactics, avant-garde editing, and abstract montages of gesture and sound. The repetitive use of fragmented dialogue (“Which one is me?”) and symbolic imagery (peepholes and basements) add complicated layers of self-awareness to people caught in nightmarish situations. Despite the filmmaker’s mysterious characters and affinity for disorientation, the work is not without pathos. Viewers find themselves slyly twisted into the role of witness and accomplice, furthering the eerie spectrum of the camera’s gaze. Meet the Eye is Ruilova’s latest work, created as part of the Hammer Museum’s Artist Residency Program and appropriately shot in Los Angeles with two of the city’s cult figures. Artist Raymond Pettibon and fringe-actress Karen Black play a couple trapped in a hotel room. The film treads a thin line between mental confusion and sheer illusion. Pettibon monotones the same lines over and over, Black anguishes theatrically about the room, attempting to recall a fatal memory just beyond her grasp.
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![Antarctica photo santiago cover Antarctica](http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/santiago_cover.jpg)
It’s been seven months since I returned from Antarctica and I still can’t fathom that I was there. It’s like going to another planet. Not that I’ve been to another planet, but I can imagine that this is the closest I’ll ever get to one. Ironically, being in Antarctica has probably been the closest I’ve felt to Earth. The experience of being there has generated a series of extreme opposing images. First, there’s the scale: massive landscape, tiny human. And then there’s the sobering inverse: towering human threat to nature, delicate and vulnerable, polar (global) ecology. There was also the unforgiving Drake Passage crossing, our 240-foot ship at the mercy of thirty- to fifty-foot waves. Life, death. The list goes on. It’s humbling. People ask me, “Why go to Antarctica?” There are many reasons. Some of which I have yet to discover. I wanted to go to Antarctica because soon it will be a different place. Just in the last few years, ice shelves the size of entire countries have broken off the continent and are melting into the ocean. Antarctica is dying. I had to go, absorb, and tell a story. And then, of course, there’s the magnificence of Antarctica. Such an unlikely and complex place. I guess you could say that my reasons for going are Death and Beauty.
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Embroidery never seemed as dark and suggestive as in the art of London-based Italian artist Maurizio Anzeri. In his meticulous work, he transforms old discarded family photographs into three-dimensional objects with intense psychological evocations. “The intimate human action of embroidery is a ritual of making and reshaping stories and the history of these people,” he says. Anzeri uses synthetic hair as his thread of choice, which he stitches and sews to create a material and metaphorical medium representing bodily boundaries and biographies. The portraits he creates are both beautiful and unnerving. Masked faces of someone’s long-forgotten relatives radiate new expression, which reinvents old stories through an unexpected and new visual language. Last year, Anzeri was selected as one of thirty emerging artists to be considered for the 2008 Sovereign European Art Prize, and recently his work was added to the renowned Saatchi Online Collection, a digital platform for upcoming young talents. This fall, he‘ll be showing alongside six other artists who explore the bounderies of conventional photography, titled Starting With a Photograph, at the Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London from September 10 – October 12.
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![Jacques photo jacques cover1 Jacques](http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/jacques_cover1.jpg)
The great American pin-up is back, in a freshly minted magazine straight out of Brooklyn. Jacques, a quarterly art and “nudie” mag (in the classic retro sense of that term), is composed at least as much of nostalgia as it is of paper and ink. Founded by editor Danielle Luft, Jacques does a good job of blending mostly ’60s and ’70s aesthetics with a bygone nudie innocence that feels quaint and even incongruous to our times — in a good way. In an era when porn proliferates and has been embraced by every cultural medium from art to filmmaking to music and so on, when you can download double and triple penetrations right into the privacy of your home — or work cubicle — there’s something unexpectedly wholesome, even downright respectable about a naked girl dallying in an open field. Jacques hits on a longing, both among women and men, for sweet, charming, debonair smut. And Jacques delivers.
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![Leah Raintree photo leahraintree page1 Leah Raintree](http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/leahraintree_page1.jpg)
We first came across the art of Leah Raintree last year, when we were preparing a feature article on the artist Ernesto Caivano. At the time, Leah was working as Caivano’s studio manager – handling calls and requests, and delivering images – all the while working on her own oeuvre in the evenings and on weekends. Interestingly, in a way that seems fitting for the two of them to have crossed paths, there are a lot of aesthetic similarities between their work, something the two artists talked about openly before Caivano hired her. They both work in ink on paper and they both build elaborate constructs around their creations. But there are also distinct differences, apparently enough for the two artists to feel comfortable working together. For starters, Leah’s work doesn’t explore narratives the way Caivano’s famously does. And it’s abstract instead of figurative, rooted in deep thought around corporeal, technological, philosophical, literary, and artistic historical themes that are then explored in a process that is part deliberate, part accident and revelation. In the end, though, the work is still very much about Raintree simultaneously mapping out and discovering her own cosmology.
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/andrei_cover_1.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4164]" title="Boulevard Malecon in Havana Centro Havana, Cuba – February 2006"><img border="0"src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/andrei_cover_1.jpg" alt="Boulevard Malecon in Havana Centro Havana, Cuba – February 2006" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4450" /></a><div class="imagecaption"><em>Malecón in Havana Centro</em> Havana, Cuba – February 2006.</div></div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page_5.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4164]" title="Mifis, Morocco – October 2007."><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page_5.jpg" alt="Mifis, Morocco – October 2007" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4171" /></a><div class="imagecaption">Mifis, Morocco – October 2007.</div></div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page_21.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4164]" title="Left: Havana Centro Havana, Cuba – 2007. Right: Interior of House in Havana Centro Havana, Cuba – 2007. "><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page_21.jpg" alt="Left: Havana Centro Havana, Cuba – 2007. Right: Interior of House in Havana Centro Havana, Cuba – 2007. " width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4174" /></a><div class="imagecaption"><strong>Left</strong>: <em>Havana Centro</em>. Havana, Cuba – 2007. <strong>Right</strong>: <em>Interior of House in Havana Centro</em> Havana, Cuba- 2007. </div></div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page_3.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4164]" title="Paraportani Church Myconos, Greece, May 2007. "><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page_3.jpg" alt="Paraportani Church Myconos, Greece, May 2007. " width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4167" /></a><div class="imagecaption"><em>Paraportani Church</em> Myconos, Greece, May 2007. </div></div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page5.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4164]" title="Kathmandu, Nepal – October 2008."><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page5.jpg" alt="Nepal. Kathmandu, October 2008" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4460" /></a><div class="imagecaption">Kathmandu, Nepal – October 2008.</div></div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page_2.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4164]" title="Ganga River Varanasi, India – October 2008."><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page_2.jpg" alt="Ganga River Varanasi, India – October 2008." width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4165" /></a><div class="imagecaption"><em>Ganga River</em> Varanasi, India – October 2008., Varanasi, India – October 2008</div></div></div>
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<div class="aligncenter"><div class="imageframe centered" style="width:830px;"><a href="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page7.jpg" rel="lightbox[pics4164]" title="Morocco, October 2007"><img border="0" src="http://www.planet-mag.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/page7.jpg" alt="page7" width="830" height="405" class="attachment wp-att-4456" /></a><div class="imagecaption">Morocco, October 2007</div></div></div>
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