Allison Schulnik is one of my favorite artists of the moment. Over the past couple of years, we’ve covered her (here) and collaborated with her on a piece for our EARTH BY series (here). The thickly textured physicality of her paintings, combined with characters, scenes, and still-lifes that evoke equally tangible emotions, is what makes her work so unique and special to me. In a new exhibit, titled “Salty Air”, she continues to explore narrative and fable in her paintings. This body of work is inspired by old sea-faring tales, most notably the Little Mermaid as told by Hans Christian Anderson, exploring themes of freedom, solitude, and isolation. The show opened last week at the Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles and will be up through July 7. Allison was kind enough to provide PLANET with an exclusive slideshow of the work.

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Originally published in 1987 and described by David Byrne as the “flowering of our civilization,” the updated and expanded version of Lynne Cohen’s Occupied Territory offers a stark commentary on how we have—and have not—progressed in our occupation of the world. When compared with the original Occupied, the re-publication feels more representative of a de-flowering of civilization, or a glance at old magazines and newspapers that subtly hint at how we have arrived at our current social and political milieu.

The timely shift of the connotation of the word occupy—both in general terms and in relation to Occupied Territories—creates an interesting twist in the current significance of this work. In 1987, to occupy politically was an act of aggression, a means of control and domination. With the Occupy movement of 2011, the popular implication of occupation has come to be a mixture of hope, anger, and a determination to undo the management-centric, ultimately vapid cultural practices and social aesthetics Cohen captures in her work. The Occupy movement, with its fluid structure and spontaneity, seems in many ways a direct response to the hollow occupation Cohen’s photographs captured 25 years ago. The movement’s terms seem like an attempt to overcome it.

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In 1995 Larry Clark released Kids, a startling movie about the reckless lives of skateboarders and their circle of teenagers in New York City. Magdalena Wosinska, then 13, remembers being influenced and disturbed by the film as a skateboarder in Arizona. At the time, her days were spent skating in 118° weather. After meeting Harold Hunter, Anthony Korea, and Todd Jordan, who were a part of Clark’s infamous film, Wosinska picked up a camera to document her friends, and began her life as a photographer and musician. While on tour as the guitarist with Green & Wood, a band she started six years ago with renowned skateboarder Ethan Fowler, Wosinska has created an intimate body of work that has an honest attitude, much like the artist herself.

“I love what I shoot, it’s my real life, it’s my breath. I couldn’t ask for anything more” Wosinska tells PLANET. Perhaps this is what enables her to breathe life into ad campaigns for street-approved brands like Converse sneakers. Although Wosinska’s background is unusual and a bit wild, her personality is infused with professionalism. Still, she insists on using simple point-and-shoot cameras, maintaining spontaneity. “Just give me a camera and let me shoot,” she says.

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Tom Sachs first traveled to the moon in 2007, in a rocket made from plywood, foam-core, and hot glue that never actually managed to leave its launching pad, the Gagosian Gallery. For the next three weeks, Sachs brings to the Park Avenue Armory SPACE PROGRAM: MARS, a sweeping installation including life-sized spacecraft, exploratory vehicles, a Mission Control, and the surface of Mars itself, all made by hand.

Sachs and a crew of thirteen are inhabiting the Armory for the duration of the show, where they will perform the survival tasks necessary for long flights and scientific investigation using equipment created by Sachs. The crew both demonstrates and trains visitors in these techniques; the exhibit is entirely interactive and, hopefully, transporting. In Sachs’ hands, the mysterious soaring notion of space travel becomes a series of rituals and survival techniques, irrefutably grounded. The majestic craft are rendered in common found—one might say “earthy”—materials, reminding us where we come from as we aspire to greater lengths.

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Robert Delpire is an exceptional figure in the international photography, design and advertising world. As a publisher, curator, editor, art director and film producer, he has championed the cause of some of the most notable and iconic image makers of the last century. His career began in 1950’s Paris, as a young medical student he was presented with the opportunity to produce the school’s bulletin which led him into the world of image making. Early success transformed his journey and he never looked back. With an innate aesthetic sense and an incisive understanding of design and graphics, he championed the career of many of the world’s master photographers, including Joself Koudelka, William Klein, Duane Michals, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier Bresson, Guy Bourdin, Paolo Roversi and Sarah Moon.

Within a few years he established what became one of the most important graphic design and photography publishing companies of the time: ´Editions Delpire. Early on Delpire published the first monograph of Brassai, and several books with Magnum photographers including Cartier Bresson, who would remain a life long friend and collaborator. In 1958, when an American publisher proved difficult to secure, Delpire published Les Americains, Robert Frank’s radical and sometimes controversial photo essay. An honest depiction of American life, it was widely celebrated and considered one of the most important monographs of the 20th century. He also produced the ground breaking William Klein monographs of Tokyo,
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Are the Internet and social media making us more, or less social? Smarter or dumber? Are you going to make it through this review before clicking over to check your email, Twitter account, Facebook page, or blog site? How many people “liked” your status update today?

Artist Rachel Lee Hovnavian is fascinated by the social transformations wrought by the virtual world. Mud Pie, her new show at the Leila Heller Gallery, is all about how we seem increasingly happy to forgo real experience in favor of the virtual and artificial. This could be a dry, heavy-handed message, but Hovnavian delivers it with such sly humor and visual panache that even the most committed technophiles might have to admit she’s on to something.

Take the show’s centerpiece, a supposedly romantic dinner for two. A long dining table is elegantly set with all the expected signifiers: flowers, candles, wineglasses. But the couple itself is virtual, represented by two LCD screens. The man and woman on the screens don’t speak to each other. Instead, each seems perfectly satisfied to interact with a mobile device while beeps, trills and the Angry Birds soundtrack punctuate the silence. Oh, and those flowers? They’re artificial. Naturally.

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After five years in seclusion, Holton Rower is emerging with a solo show in New York City. His pour paintings, on display at The Hole through May 26th, are vibrant displays of acrylic paint left mostly to its own devices. Standing above large planks, Rower pours paint down thick wooden protrusions, allowing the paint to grow, or not, as wood blocks and other obstacles permit. Though at first the method seems simple, Rower has refined the process and his technical skills to an extent that intention and spontaneity are evident in equal measure in the work.

Upon entering The Hole, visitors are welcomed by the simplest of Rower’s works. The paintings in this room consist of fewer colors, layered in rings up to an inch wide. The paint retains its separateness from the surrounding rings, resulting in smoother lines and more definition. The works in the second room employ more colors applied in thin rings, with colors mixing and forming intricate designs, begetting a comparison to a topographical map of mountainous lands. The third room contains five titanic works, some with protrusions, cut-outs, and seemingly several points from which paint was applied, creating contiguous, vaguely defined abstract rings of color. This room feels a bit like the grand finale on the Fourth of July; the biggest, brightest and most complex work of the show is here, though these are not necessarily the most thoughtful or compelling pieces.

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Robert Presutti is one of this year’s Global Travel photo contest winners. He has been working and living in New York City for the past 18 years. A large part of his work is dedicated to travel. Assignments have taking him to countries like Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Georgia, Japan, Mexico, Colombia etc… In the past two years he has been working on two major projects, one in Colombia, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta with the Kogi and Arhuaco indians for a future exhibit at the Smithsonian and the other project in Georgia with the nuns of the Phoka monastery. Robert also contributes to the New York Times regularly.

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Andrew Geiger placed second in the portrait category of this year’s Global Travel Photo Contest with an image from his ongoing work documenting the many vanishing cultures of the world. Geiger recently returned from the Rajasthan region of India, where he witnessed the inevitable disappearance of its traditional dress and ancient customs. “I have realized from my travels that documenting these places and people will be the only way for my children to experience the native customs the younger generation from these places are shunning,” he tells PLANET. Although he travels extensively, Geiger still has yet to find a place as beautiful and special as his home state of Montana, where he lives with his family.

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Lung Liu won fourth place in the portrait category of our 4th Annual Global Travel Photo Contest. Liu is a photographer working out of Vancouver, Canada who’s produced in-depth studies of Thailand, Vietnam, and Haiti after the earthquake. He was born in Vietnam between two conflicts, and spent time in a refugee camp as a child before being sponsored by a church to live in Canada. A road trip down the majestic US west coast inspired him to travel internationally for photography.

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