Fashion photographer Billy Kidd’s newest work explores his partner and muse, Heather Huey, a milliner whose pieces have caught the attention of stylists such as Karl Templer and Nicola Formichetti. Huey and Kidd have been working together as artists and lovers with Billy behind the lens and Heather as inspiration for almost two years, using Huey’s body cages and sinuous cocoons to help create poetic images that retain intimacy and anonymity. The result is an erotic ballad that is contemporary yet classic. Their work will be on view from September 6th at Clic Gallery.

Both of your work have an aesthetic that is undeniably grounded in classical aesthetics–Billy your work recalls Lee Miller and Man Ray, Heather you create headpieces, which are historically significant. Yet both of your work is undeniably contemporary. Has this brought you together?
Billy: I feel that’s why Heather and I get along so well. We have such similar tastes that we often respond to the same things.

How did this body of work begin?
Billy: We started shooting almost 2 years ago as a photographer often does with his lover/muse. Heather being the shy one, took some time to open up in front of the camera. Our love and comfort with each other was the catalyst for where it went. It was a goal of mine to, without retouching, to alter her body into different shapes.

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ICP’s latest tour-de-force historical exhibition is Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, opening September 14th. The exhibit attempts to include all the important forms of visual documentation that bore witness to South Africa’s sixty years of apartheid: films, books, and photographs in all forms, from newspaper-commissioned to social documentary to photo essay.

The exhibition is of course powerful for its subject matter, and the show digs deep in its illustration of how apartheid touched every aspect of life, large and small. You see the South African Communist Party demonstrating in a large group, with arms raised defiantly and film cameras swarming the scene. Contrast this with the lone woman on a streetcorner, protesting against hangings to passing traffic. Contrast this with a pro- segregation demonstration backed with Biblical quotes. Throughout, Rise and Fall of Apartheid is valuable for the way it showcases South African photographers working in incredible times, and under incredible pressures.

The show’s deep reach is thanks to its curators, the Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor with Johannesburg-based Rory Bester, two specialists of modern and recent-era South Africa. Rise and Fall of Apartheid runs September 14 – January 6.

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One summer morning when I was about eight years old, my grandmother told me she was going to teach me how to make diples, a deep fried Greek pastry topped with honey and powdered sugar. In her cramped, Formica-filled kitchen, we also made koulourakia – plump hand-shaped twists she simply referred to as Greek Cookies. Together, we rolled up our sleeves, rolled out the dough, plastered our hands and forearms in flour, and went to work. We made tray after tray, more cookies than anyone could eat. But the eating wasn’t the important part; it was the making – the passing on of food, culture, history, tradition.

As I type this memory into existence, I’m suddenly left with another thought: nobody does that anymore. Or do they?According to an article in the April issue of Esquire, the only thing grandparents (aka Baby Boomers) are doing now is systematically disenfranchising the youth of America via decades of self-serving economic and social policy. But Grandmother Power: A Global Phenomenon (powerHouse books) may just prove all the cynics wrong. Paola Gianturco, author and documentary photographer of the new book talks to PLANET about grandmother activism, survival, and the global movement going on right now in kitchens, villages and courtrooms across the world.

John Cage has been an important figure on the landscape of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago since literally the beginning: he performed at the opening of the institution’s first-ever exhibition in 1967. In the decades that followed, Cage and the MCA enjoyed a fruitful working relationship, with the artist creating and performing scores on-site and the museum hosting performances of his works over the decades, continuing after his death in 1992 and into the present day.

If only just for those performances, MCA would be a precious keeper of Cage’s legacy. But the museum has more: the material results of its long association with the artist can be seen in MCA DNA: John Cage, a multimedia exhibition opening September 1st of photographs, letters, performance, video, and Cage’s idiosyncratic scores, the most famous of which is created on a large map of Chicago. The exhibit seeks to make Cage’s scores come alive again, with displays and materials that demonstrate how to interpret them. Elsewhere the artist’s influences, such as books he kept, sit next to notes he wrote and archival papers documenting his time at MCA. The exhibit mixes art with archive and creative with strictly professional, and keeps the close link to the MCA as a central element throughout. As site-specific as a Cage performance and equally unpredictable, MCA DNA: John Cage is a snapshot of an extraordinary artist’s process.

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In May PLANET introduced photographer Magdalena Wosinska and her soon-to-be-released book, This Grass is Electric. At the time she had just returned from a road trip with friends that involved shotguns, cliff-jumping in the nude, and exploring natural psychedelic substances as they rode motorcycles from Los Angeles to Laughlin, Nevada for a Harley Davidson convention. PLANET is pleased to present images from this “typical weekend with these kids,” as Wosinska describes it.

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In 1999 Mikael Kennedy, then a 20-year-old college student, took his first cross-country trip with his thrift store-bought Polaroid camera in tow. This “exhilarating and at times terrifying” experience of living out of his car and “documenting anything and everything” via Polaroid would become both his way of life for the next 12 years and the subject of his epic series Passport to Trespass. In Kennedy’s Polaroids you see a young nomad exploring lush evergreen forests, dirt roads, cityscapes under the murky moonlight, deserts, and oceans. You also see his friends: bright-eyed and bold 20 somethings, living rough yet seemingly immersed in their present. In 2005, having accrued more than 1000 images, Kennedy created the acclaimed website to which he uploaded groups of photos arranged in chronological order. Their laconic titles and lack of description leaves context and meaning up to the viewer. The medium, however, of Polaroid film fosters intimacy— one sees Kennedy’s life as an open book. 
 
Kennedy’s recent show at Clic gallery in New York titled Between Dog and Wolf culminated his series with a look at the tension between two worlds he’s come to know quite well: domestic and wild. PLANET spoke to Mikael Kennedy about his current state of transition.
 
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Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. That morbid line belongs to an American poet with a last name in keeping with the latter category. And while Robert Frost wasn’t thinking about climate change when he wrote those words, the evidence provided by scientists — not to mention the disaster-filled evening news telecasts of recent weeks — suggests that he might have been on to something. We won’t get ahead of ourselves with thoughts of the end of the world, but as the planet continues to warm, it would appear that fire’s supremacy over ice is gaining momentum in much of the country.

It was in the same overarching context that a prominent exhibit in documentary photography opened in Beijing last year, titled “COAL+ICE.” Organized by the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, the installation was split between depictions of China’s coal mining industry and the melting glaciers in the country’s Tibetan Plateau with the clear implication that the two subjects share a crucial link. Now that a condensed version is being shown at the Resnick Gallery in Aspen, CO through the end of the month, it’s worth taking a look at this ambitious collection of works and at the calculus under which coal fire plus Himalayan ice equals something none of us want to see.

England is churning out the youthful soul singers like its economy depends on it. Latest in this assembly line is 22-year-old Lianne La Havas. Likened to Corrine Bailey Rae from that side and Erykah Badu from this side, La Havas is heralded by both Bon Iver and Prince. Plus, her debut, Is Your Love Big Enough? is produced by Aqualung’s master songcrafter, Matt Hales. With her voice alternating between soft and thin to throaty and husky, La Havas’ lyricism has a familiarity to it that lets you correctly guess what the next words are going to be before you hear them. The likeable youngster plays a mean guitar, which effortlessly complements her breezy soul-pop. Going from the stripped back “Lost And Found,” which counts heavily on La Havas’ delivery–that she doesn’t quite present, Big Enough moves to the light mood of “Au Cinema” and the playfulness of “Forget.” Love song and after love song, Big Enough isn’t as big as it could be—but it is growing and La Havas is going to get there in the end.

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Using repurposed and reclaimed construction materials has gone beyond ecological propriety and become high style. Just take a look at the spaces crafted by London-based designer Fiona Barratt-Campbell, who weaves reclaimed wood into contemporary interiors with striking ease. At the Lodge, a ski chalet in Switzerland, weathered wall panels give the space a cave-like warmth. At a house in Harrogate, a patio table and lounge chairs crafted from railroad ties have a cool, post-industrial sensibility. And at an indoor swimming pool in France, twisting black tree trunks have the presence of expressionist sculptures.

Just like working with other kinds of repurposed materials, working with reclaimed wood requires special flexibility. As Barratt-Campbell describes, “Reclaimed wood can often prove difficult to work with as it is not in a uniform size or thickness and is often riddled with old nails, creosote and tar, so the design has to be adapted to suit these imperfections.” And it requires creative sourcing and fabrication. Barratt-Campbell partners with “a fantastic company” in the north of England to find lots of old wood and devise finishes will enhance their natural grain and color. She says, “I usually design a piece of furniture first and then ask our furniture makers to source the right material to work with. We work very closely together on the actual making of the piece so that the finished item is as my vision.”

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Once seen as an obscure and elusive genre, performance art has been gaining public awareness over the past decade. But it still lacks a permanent presence in a museum setting, historically because of its anti-institutional nature and recently because of its time-based and spontaneous tendencies. This summer Tate Modern opens The Tanks: Art in Action, a 15-week inaugural series for its new exhibition space, the first of its kind dedicated to live and performance art. The former Bankside Power Station’s oil tanks provide the perfect setting for the multitude of media found in live art. Dance, large-scale installation, film, and soundscapes by the genre’s most cutting-edge artists fill the underground tanks, fostering a very physical interactive experience.

Performance art deals with the desire to engage with art without relying on an outside object—to use one’s body as the artistic tool. Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker exemplifies this notion with an adaptation of her seminal performance piece Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. Keersmaeker responds to Reich’s repetitive compositions with synchronized, metronomic movements, resulting in a dizzying and bemusing display. The Tate’s first commission for the Tanks is of the interdisciplinary video artist Sung Hwan Kim, who’s incorporated actors, excerpts of Rainer Maria Rilke, a girl with a beating heart at the top of her neck, paintings, and sculpture into his live work in the past.

Tate: Art in Action runs 18 July-28 October 2012

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