Dark Night of the Soul – the first collaboration and installation between Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, and David Lynch – explores the idea of collective introspection. Now showing at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, the exhibit consists of a two-room installation streaming the album written by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, accompanied by photos taken by Lynch. Inspired by the album, Lynch’s photo sets read like mini-storyboards, and resemble a series of film stills. The album features guest vocalists The Flaming Lips, Gruff Rhys of The Super Furry Animals, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Frank Black of The Pixies, Iggy Pop, James Mercer of The Shins, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Suzanne Vega, and Vic Chesnutt. The interplay between music and visuals in Dark Night of the Soul heighten and confuse the sensory experience, creating a myriad of emotions and responses.
     Hauntingly beautiful and grotesque, poignant and sometimes comical images accompany lyrics about revenge, war, pain, loss and hallucinatory states. From the opening track, The Flaming Lips’ “Revenge”, to David Lynch’s “Dark Night of the Soul”, we are taken on a disturbing and cerebral journey, one that moves increasingly from the tangible to the surreal. Each track is accompanied by a set of three or four images, which individually and collectively tell a story.

SP2 ‘New Born’ (Viper A), 2007. Photography by Keizo Kioku. All Images Courtesy of the Artist and YAMAMOTO GENDAI

Odani Motohiko knows how to generate a reaction. In his first solo show back in 1997, the artist arranged for a nurse to come and take 1.4 liters of his own blood for an installation he was planning entitled, Fair Completion. A small fan in the corner of the room was used to float a series of soap bubbles filled with a single drop of that blood across the gallery. After a few moments the soap bubbles would burst, sending ruby splatters across the white space and a collective chill down the spines of the audience. At the Tokyo opening, a single woman was overheard saying, “Isn’t it beautiful?” Though Odani’s work seems purely confrontational, the themes he explores are as interwoven as the Tokyo streets and hold just as many questions. Time, the human body, and primitive senses such as sensuality, shame and fear are evident in everything Odani creates, including his newest installation, 9th Room, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. The piece is made up of an enclosed room of waterfalls projected onto four different screens. The ceiling and the floor are mirrored, encapsulating anyone inside with a 360-degree sensation of falling. Terrifying, yes, but extremely primordial; the title is a reference to Dante’s ninth and final circle of Hell. Installation aside, Odani is equally at home working in digital animation, photography, and sculpture. His recent return to the latter has the art world buzzing that this “dead art” may be in for a little shock treatment. Until then, trust that Odani Motohiko will keep the answers hanging in the air.

Images courtesy of Philly's ICA

George Clinton, Afrika Bambaataa and Bootsy Collins can all trace their creative lineage back to Sun Ra. His space age philosophy, flowing capes, and Egyptian headdresses paved the way for their own colorful personas decades later. More than a man before his time, Sun Ra transcended time. Nestled in between the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of his day, Sun Ra’s message was about more than race; it was about enlightenment on a cosmic scale, and he spread his message primarily through music but also through words and art. A disciplined musician since childhood, Sun Ra headed his Arkestra, an ever-changing line-up of jazz musicians, from the mid-1950s up until his death in 1993. His prolific output spanned poetry, music, and album cover art, much of which is exhibited at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968.
     Born Herman Blount in 1914, Sun Ra claimed he was abducted by aliens in the early 1950s, a story he maintained throughout his life. On this intergalactic journey, he visited Jupiter and Saturn, and upon his return to Earth he christened himself Sun Ra (Ra is the Egyptian god of the sun) and formed his Arkestra, a clever play on words.

Our latest EARTH BY (no. 23) was created especially for PLANET by artist ANDY GILMORE. Born, raised, and residing in Rochester, New York, Gilmore is widely known for his luminous, astral geometric illustrations and artwork. He’s created work for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Dazed & Confused, and many others. He says the challenge of creating a graphic, personal representation of the Earth was very exciting to him. Gilmore is also a musician, mathematician, and magician. Clearly, he’s someone who likes to speak through modes of communication other than language. His favorite quote? “I have nothing to say and I am saying it” – John Cage.

Images courtesy of Kate Robinson Art

Beauty, as it’s been told over the centuries and engraved into our skulls, is in the eye of the beholder. Yet true as this may be, some beholders have a better eye for it. Often, the beauty in question isn’t breathless landscapes or beguiling abstracts but the universal muse and eternal mother of art: the endlessly interesting female form. This is where the art of Alex Asher Daniel begins. But as we’ve also learned, beauty is only skin deep, and Daniel is especially attuned to this, connecting layers in his work that hint at something vastly more complex and powerful hidden beneath the surface, yet without negating the essential beauty of his subject. “I’m interested in the meeting point between the inner and outer world,” he says. “The female body is such an interesting vehicle to me; it’s the most divine representation we have of that intersection.”
      Working with oilstick and charcoal on paper, the works are a combination of line drawing and rich pigments applied in paint-like clusters and rougher lines that partially abstract the figurative qualities of the work. Even though there are clear figures here, the work is gestural and expressionistic. Most strikingly, there are obvious fetal gestures central to all 19 of the drawings on display, which at first seems a strange and slightly discomforting motif to invoke through grown women.

PLANET was the first magazine to publish photographer Lyle Owerko’s stunning work on the Samburu people of northern Kenya, one of Africa’s last great warrior tribes, in September of 2007. It’s nice to see these images getting the public exhibition they deserve in the large and evocative format currently on view at the Clic Gallery on Broome Street in Soho. Owerko is best known for his shots of the Twin Towers collapsing (the famous Time magazine cover is his) and of the gut-wrenching yet eerily beautiful shots of those who leapt to their deaths from the floors above the raging fires, who became known as the “Jumpers”. Perhaps as witness more than photographer, that was a morning of infamy (and destiny) that Owerko says will live with him forever. Samburu displays Owerko’s genuine interest in different types of people and his talent for getting to know his subjects (he has made several trips to Samburu tribal lands and visited them as recently as this year), cultivating intimacy, and allowing them to show their selves unguarded. The exhibition is up through June 14. It’s definitely worth a visit. Clic Gallery, 424 Broome Street, New York, NY 10013.

To view our archived coverage of Lyle’s work, click here.

Monkey Boys, China 1996. On view through May 30 at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in Chelsea, at 521 W. 26th Street

Gerald Förster’s globe-spanning work, LightYears, which began in the mid ‘90s and was completed mostly before 2001 (with a handful of exceptions), was a prescient photographic document of our global era. Like other photographers before him and since, the impulse to preserve the dignity of “others” before cultural erosion alters them, or even wipes them away completely, is very present here. But unlike other photographers inspired to this type of ethnographic portraiture, who usually tend to focus on one group of people or geographic location (Wilfred Thesiger, Irving Penn, and many others come to mind), Förster’s work is that of a lensman working at hyper-speed to capture a moment of utter stillness, perhaps even an eternal moment. While I suppose Förster chose LightYears as the title of his project to refer to something inexpressibly infinite in the human being and our collective mysterious existence on this rock we call Earth, for me the title also conjures the 747s he and his longtime friend and collaborator Anthony Smith sped around the world on between advertising jobs and editorial assignments, to photograph these people in eighteen countries. Whether that was the intention or not, LightYears is indeed a project made possible by the ease of global air travel that had its rise in the 1990s. It’s something we might easily overlook, so standard has it become to go everywhere and see everything — right from our desktops. Ultimately though, Förster’s work reminds us that we inhabit a world full of people not like us and yet composed of the same cosmic material. Like the great Polish writer Ryszard Kapusinski used to do through his travelogues, Förster is holding up the mirror to the other in us all.

Bright Eyes, 2007 by Tala Madani

No, the New Museum hasn’t found religion, unless you count the worshipful gaze an open bar can inspire or the frenetic devotion to iPhones and Blackberries practiced by many of its patrons. Younger Than Jesus, which opened officially last Wednesday, offers a glimpse of tomorrow’s art today, and on a global scale. With fifty artists from twenty-five countries, all of whom are under the age of 33, the New Museum attempts to capture the spirit of the next generation. Hailing from countries including Algeria, China, Colombia, Germany, India, Lebanon, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela, many of these young artists are showing in a museum for the first time. As you might guess, their work is as diverse as their homelands, with mediums including photography, digital media, performance, sculpture, and painting.
     For instance, there’s New York City-based Tauba Auerbach’s almost mathematical approach to art in Shatter III, Paris-based Mohammed Bourouissa’s vibrant photograph of a boxer in La fenêtre and Berlin-based AIDS 3-D with their pyrotechnic installation OMG Obelisk. There’s a little something for everybody, even if the show might feel like it’s just skimming the surface. How can it not? Just look at the numbers. This demographic — those born around 1980 — is the largest generation to emerge since the Baby Boomers in the United States, and in India half the population is less than 25 years old.