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Culture Magazine

12 Where to be... The 5 galleries to visit in LA this Month// 16 What’s that sound?? It’s Beyonce’s Lemonade // 22 Are you looking at this? The Photography of....// 27 Step Outside DTLA graffiti// 32. At the End... Under the Shadows

Contents

THE MAY SSUE 37 TURQUOISE SUSPENSION The Swimming pool by Deanna Templeton // 42 MET GALA 2016 Fashion veers into tech on the red carpet // 46 LIKE, SHARE &FOLLOW Our social media picks // 50 THE BEST FROM 2016 Cannes Film Festival //

What’s that sound?

Beyonce’s Lemonade Beyoncé is on a roll. Her latest, another “visual album” with corresponding videos in the mold of her 2013 self-titled set, renders infidelity and reconciliation with a cinematic vividness.

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n her sixth solo album, Beyoncé Knowles Carter starts rolling mid-scene: She’s just realized that her husband is cheating on her. The surrounding context is familiar to anyone who follows popular culture. Beyoncé and Jay Z are the most famous musical couple on the planet, and Beyoncé in particular is in a great place. With 2013’s Beyoncé, MJ-level talent met pop-perfectionism in a moment that defined album-cycle disruption; moreover, it was a victory lap Bey took as pop feminism’s reigning goddess. Jay Z, on the other hand, is a rapper who used to rap brilliantly and sometimes still sounds good when he really tries, but his music

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has become secondary. Over the course of their eight-year marriage and long courtship before that, Jay Z and Beyoncé’s private relationship seemed to play out in song, in concert, and of course, in the tabloids. But Beyoncé’s “smile pretty and give no interviews” approach to public relations over the last couple of years, combined with “the elevator incident” and subsequent speculation about the state of their marriage, and followed by their public makeup (see: VMAs 2014, On the Run Tour), has suggested that something has changed, but that Beyoncé would prefer we not know the specifics.

Lemonade shatters this theory.

If the album is to be considered a document of some kind of truth, emotional or otherwise, then it seems Beyoncé was saving the juicy details for her own story. Because nothing she does is an accident, let’s assume she understands that any song she puts her name on will be perceived as being about her own very public relationship. So what we think we know about her marriage

after listening is the result of Beyoncé wanting us to think that. With its slate of accompanying videos, Lemonade is billed as Beyonce’s second “visual album.” But here that voyeuristic feeling manifests while listening rather than viewing, given the high visibility of Bey and Jay. The songwriting is littered with scenes that seem positively cinematic, so it helps that you can imagine these characters living them: Beyoncé smelling another woman’s scent on Jay Z, her pacing their penthouse in the middle of the night before leaving a note and disappearing with Blue. Lemonade is a film as well, yet the album itself feels like a movie.

It’s not until the record’s second half that you realize Lemonade has a happy ending. At first you might think that Bey is using the album to announce her divorce from Jay’s cheating ass. Because she doesn’t scold, “Don’t you ever do that to me again”—she drags her very famous, seemingly powerful husband publicly, in the process giving the world a modern-day “Respect” in “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” On the “7/11”-style banger “Sorry,” she turns his side-chicks into memes, which will inevitably become “better call Becky with the good hair” sweatshirts that Beyoncé can sell for $60 a pop. Best revenge is your paper.

If you’ve ever been cheated on by someone who thought you’d be too stupid or naive to notice, you will find the first half of Lemonade incredibly satisfying. If you have ears and love brilliant production and hooks that stick, you’ll likely arrive at the same conclusion. The run from “Hold Up” to “6 Inch” contains some of Beyoncé’s strongest work—ever, period—and a bit of that has to do with her clap-back prowess. The increasingly signature cadence, patois, and all-around attitude on Lemonade speaks to her status as the hip-hop pop star—but this being Bey, she doesn’t stop there. Via the album’s highly specific samples and features by artists like Jack White

Add some

and James Blake, Lemonade proves Beyoncé to also be a new kind of post-genre pop star. (Let us remember a time, not very long ago, when Bey and Jay attending a Grizzly Bear show with Solange made headlines.)

Both of these attributes—a methodical rapper’s flow, an open-eared listener’s frame of reference— meet on the slowed-down stunner “Hold Up,” where Beyoncé borrows an iconic Karen O turn of phrase via Ezra Koenig, a touch of Jamaican flavor via Diplo (again), and a plucky Andy Williams sample to fight for her man while chiding him for doing this to her (!), of all people. From there, Bey’s just like, “fuck it—big mistake, huge” and gets (Tidal

co-owner) Jack White to join her in dueting over a psychedelic soul jam and a Zeppelin sample as she scowls, “Watch my fat ass twist, boy, as I bounce to the next dick, boy.”

As she accuses her husband of not being man enough to handle all of her multitudes, fury frays her voice.

Even on an album stacked with some of Beyoncé’s best recorded vocal performances to date, “Don’t Hurt Yourself” has her belting to a whole other dimension—specifically, that of Janis Joplin and late-‘60s Tina Turner. This won’t be the last time Bey dips into the classic vinyl on Lemonade, either: see “Freedom,” which manages to both: a) speak poignantly to Civil Rights as much as personal plight, b) sound like an

Jay

Since the release of Lemonade—an album that sparked Jay Z-Beyoncé divorce rumors—Mr. Carter himself has been silent, showing his support through action at Beyoncé concerts and on hand-holding dinner dates here and there. He was waiting, it appears, to give his own musical response—and finally did last night.

Jay Z released a remix of “All the Way Up” on his streaming service Tidal (where else?) featuring Fat Joe and Remy Ma. In the track, he dropped this little line about Lemonade: “You know you made it when the fact / Your marriage made it is worth millions / Lemonade is a popular drink and it still is / Survival of the littlest.”

He also, E! noted, found a way to pay homage to Prince: “Prince left his masters where they safe and sound / We never gonna let the elevator take him down.”

All of this is just another reason, really, to get excited about that rumored Beyonce-Jay Z joint album on its way, since it’s clear Jay Z has much more to say.

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Are you looking at this?

Mansión Magnolia

by Carmen Argote The Los Angeles–based artist Carmen Argote has generated an immense body of work based on her return to her ancestral family mansion in Guadalajara, Mexico.

From this oeuvre, she and curator Seth Curcio selected just over a dozen photographs, currently on view at Shulamit Nazarian.

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nly one photograph depicts the exterior of the building; the rest of the images give the sense of an unending interior, like Jay Gatsby’s Long Island mansion. Room after room contain the ad hoc constructions and structural improvisations from generations of repairs and additions. Plaster walls bisect huge spaces and fit snugly against preexisting columns. Mismatched tiles bear the residue of decades of leaks. Faded shadows of bygone furniture remain next to recently installed bathroom sinks. Ancient-looking vending machines sit beside older refrigerators, in front of dumbwaiters. Argote has captured the mansion in a state of never-ending transition. Like the house in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the building seems like it’s constantly expanding and receding in a struggle against the vagaries of time.

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Several photographs contain the blurry smudge of Argote’s figure, moving too fast for the long exposure to capture. To create these phantoms, the artist descended staircases or rolled around on the floor. In Tias (2016), Argote conjures her relatives’ former presence with what seems to have been wild gesticulations in front of the camera, resulting in an eerie puff of beige smoke with a discrete shadow underneath. This apparition floats on top of an intricately tiled floor that recedes into an endless distance. Argote seems to haunt the space with an ephemerality akin to Ana Mendieta’s works.

Throughout, Argote has exhibited projects based on her ongoing interest in the architecture of home and Mansión Magnolia in particular, including hosting a sleepover at

Human Resources. Part installation, part cooperative performance, the 2014 event included storytelling and tarot-card readings while participants were surrounded by the artist’s installation of fabric structures made of manta, a textile ubiquitous in Mexico. For the current show, she replaced the sense of humor and play of previous exhibitions with a mix of Victorian gothic mystery and 19th-century spirit photography.

Many other artists—including Mendieta, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, and Bruce Nauman—have toyed with inflecting their photographs with the personal intonations of their bodies. Argote leans heavily on these practices, particularly Woodman’s. Her photographs feel most significant when they also contain the architectural

investigations exemplified by sculptors like Rachel Whiteread and Gordon Matta-Clark. For the Turner Prize–winning sculpture House (1993), Whiteread poured a concrete cast of the interior of an East London house. Like Whiteread’s House, the works in Mansión Magnolia preserve the negative imprints of spaces, like the unrequited ghosts of a familial past.

And like House, which was torn down within a year to make way for new business development, the interiors shown in Argote’s works are perpetually threatened by rampant capitalism.

It’s hard to say if Argote’s return to her family home is tragic, redemptive, or something else entirely. In her most compelling images, she cuts through a feeling of melancholia and summons the uncanny—in Sigmund Freud’s sense, a return to familiar things made strange through repression.

The remainders of a series of parties as well as years of improvised repairs obscure whatever homelike qualities the mansion may have contained, as well as access to a family history that might have survived. Instead, a hazy urgency of generic celebrations saturates the space, represented by stacks of chairs, dance-floor panels, and a bounce house. Argote’s dual gesture through photography—of resurrecting ghosts and capturing the slow-motion obliteration of a family home through merchandising—allows viewers to share the sting Argote feels from the lances of her own nostalgia.

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The swiming pool

Text by Ed Templeton Interview by. Evan Pricco

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TURQUOISE SUSPENSION The Swimming pool

by Deanna Templeton

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he Swimming Pool is a new photographic essay from California-based street photographer Deanna Templeton (born 1969) that departs from her usual style to offer an expressive, intimate view of the human form underwater.

The series was born after an impromptu nude swimming-pool shoot of husband and artist Ed Templeton, which spurred an eight-year journey in the study of light, expression and the enigma of water.

Shooting on black and white and color film, as well as polaroids, Templeton sent friends or at least friends of friends into the pool to be photographed in their truest form.

Unlike her street photography, in which subjects were often strangers, Templeton found that creating these portraits required more intimacy and connection—a feeling that is apparent throughout every image in the series, which show strong, liberated individuals, confident and at ease in their most beautiful and vulnerable of moments.

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As Ed Templeton writes in his afterword to this volume, “ the nude swimmer is floating in a void of quiet solitude, the gentle pressure of being underwater enclosing her form like a baby in a womb and nothing exists outside of this world. A lone figure amidst a sea of blues and greys and frenetic sunlight per- forming a solitary dance for the photographer above, choosing movements and directions, twisting and swooping, contorting and expelling breaths painting a picture of form and light together.” The Swimming Pool offers a deep and inspiring view of the human form.

This is what Deanna her self have to say about her book to our interviewer on this one Mr. Evan Pricco.

What attracted you to the pool?

Deanna Templeton: Seeing my husband, Ed, swim around, nude and free, my own experience of swimming, and the quietness of being underwater.

When did you realize you had a series going?

For the most part, a series is started after I review my photos and see that some have a reoccurring theme to them, but the Swimming Pool series was a little different.

I shot about four or five photos of Ed, who was taking a skinny dip in our pool one day. When I got the proof sheets back, I liked what I saw, so I decided to run with it. Then I started to ask friends, and friends of friends, if they would be down to swim for me.

In considering a book, when did you start feeling like you had something that could be turned into a complete and definable collection?

I started to accumulate and produce a lot of images. Actually, I imagine that most photographers hope, wish and dream about publishing their work. I think, when sitting around with your photos, if you like them, you start to visualize them in book form. I made earlier layouts of what this Swimming Pool book might look like, though it has changed considerably since then.

What were those changes? Did you start the book and then go back and add more?

It took me about eight years of shooting. I would only shoot in the summertime when I had more direct overhead sunlight to work with. My backyard has a patio cover, and I didn’t want its shadow to creep into the shot, so I had about a three or four-hour window every day. And then I also didn’t know how to work our pool heater! I wanted to make sure the swimmers were comfortable, so the summer heat helped out there.

I think I needed the eight years of shooting; the more I shot, the more I knew what I was and wasn’t looking for. Actually, I thought I was finished in 2014, but Thomas, who is putting out the book, suggested that I shoot one more summer. He thought the book needed maybe two or three more swimmers. At first I was a little put off, thinking I was done, but then when I knocked the chip off my shoulder, I called up some friends and they turned out to be in some of the best shots I’ve made for this book!

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“the Swimming Pool series was a little different. I shot about four or five photos of Ed, who was taking a skinny dip in our pool one day. When I got the proof sheets back, I liked what I saw, so I decided to run with it.�

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“Paterson” Director: Jim Jarmusch A bus driver who is secretly a poet is dedicated to his routine while his wife experiences constant change over the course of a week in their lives.

“Julieta” Director: Pedro Almodovar The life of the titular Julieta, told between two time periods, 2015 and 1985.

With the director looking to bounce back from a rare misfire with “I’m So Excited,” this looks like he’s back in his happy place with a female-driven melodrama tackling some of his favorite themes. Are leads Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte, who split the title role, already frontrunners for the Best Actress trophy? We wouldn’t be shocked if they were.

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Stars the increasingly indispensable Adam Driver in the title role of bus driver and aspiring poet who shares a surname with the New Jersey town where he lives, alongside Iranian/ French actress Golshifteh Farahani as his wife and Kara Hayward from “Moonrise Kingdom,” will be getting a theatrical release later in the year.

by Sarah Gibson

The Best From 2016 Cannes Film Festival “Elle” Director: Paul Verhoeven

When a seemingl y indestructible career woman is victim of a home invasion, she becomes determined to track down her assailant, and a deadly game begins.

We’re not sure what it was that Verhoeven did to be banished from the big screen for over a decade. In any case, we’re delighted that he’s back, and with a typically salacious sounding project that nonetheless has attracted the Greatest Actress Alive™ to star.

Isabelle Huppert will play the part of the menaced woman who tries to turn the tables on her attacker, and since she’d make the reading of an internet comments section seem cogent and intelligent, she’ll surely do the same for Verhoeven’s splashier tendencies.

“The Neon Demon” Director: Nicolas Winding Refn An up-and-coming model in Los Angeles becomes prey for a gang of beauty-obsessed peers who wish to drain her of her vitality and beauty.

The lukewarm reception to “Only God Forgives” might have temporarily stymied the rise of Nicolas Winding Refn, who went from relatively obscure Euro-auteur to cinephile bro favorite after his terrific neon crime pic “Drive.” But a while out of the spotlight has let the sour taste of his last movie dissipate, and now we’re anticipating “The Neon Demon” as feverishly as everyone else. Seemingly a change of pace after his two Ryan Gosling movies, this is a female driven horror movie that riffs on L.A and the beauty-industrial complex, co-written by hot playwright Polly Stenham, and with an intriguing cast including Elle Fanning, Bella Heathcote, Keanu Reeves

and Christina Hendricks. Refn’s last two movies premiered at Cannes, and given that the film wrapped last summer.

Slack Bay Director: Bruno Dumont Slack Bay features a gallery of outrageous performances from French cinema A-listers including Juliette Binoche. Of course, all of them go wayyy over the top; even when Dumont is doing “funny,” you need to be prepared for a bunch of people to be killed, chopped up into tiny pieces, and fed to kids.

This time around, it’s summer 1910 and several tourists have vanished while relaxing on the beautiful beaches of the Channel Coast. Slack Bay ruminates on class, murder and French history – and does it all in the most bizarre way possible.

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MET GALA 2016 Fashion veers into tech on the red carpet

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by Tiffani Ap

Featuring a flurry of silver, lustrous and futuristic looks, the fashion elite gathered for the Met Museum’s annual black-tie extravaganza.

his year, the Costume Institute ball was centered around the idea of “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” exploring the relationship between clothes created by hand (or “manus”) versus the machine.

As expected with a technology-tied theme, metallic accents paired with sleek, slick-backed hairstyles featured prominently on the night.

Met Gala 2016: Who the Internet says won Models Alessandra Ambrosio and Cindy Crawford, and the Kardashians’ youngest Kylie Jenner were among those who opted for sterling-hued looks.

Singer Rita Ora donned a metallic grey, feathered Hunger Games-like get up while actress Kate Hudson’s white dress was more of a sculptural and deconstructed take.

Much of what was paraded out could be described as a sort of artificial intelligence chic.

‘Homeland’ star Claire Danes was glowing, quite literally, with a dress that could light up designed for her by Zac Posen.

Even the famously stern ‘Vogue’ editor-in-chief Anna Wintour took on a futuristic vibe.

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The exhibition itself charts the evolution of fashion from the invention of the sewing machine to the onset of mass production that’s enabled fast fashion juggernauts like Zara and H&M to thrive.

In fact, H&M outfits made it onto the night’s red carpet via actresses Hailee Steinfeld and Amber Valletta.

Hallowed haute couture -- painstakingly crafted by teams of artisans -- is pitted against the “gotta-have-it” now mentality of ready-to-wear and the high street.

Apple’s chief design officer Jonathan Ive joined Wintour as co-chair of the event.

Although the company’s most fashion-oriented venture -- Apple Watch, along with other wearables like Google 43

Glass have failed to impress so far -- it was the high profile departure two years ago of Angela Ahrendts, who ditched her role as CEO at historic British fashion house Burberry for Apple that alerted the world to the increasing collaboration between the two arenas.

Driven by the advent of 3D printing, computer modeling and laser cutting techniques, fashion and technology are moving closer than ever.

Emma Watson at the Met: Changing the world one dress at a time Met Museum Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton said the exhibition will hopefully “debunk some of the mythologies of the handmade and machine.”

“Traditionally the handmade has been seen as being about luxury, about superiority and it’s also been seen as something that’s elitist,” Bolton explained. “Whereas the machine has been about progress and the future. On the other side, it’s been about mediocrity and dehumanization.”“I’m finding those values don’t really hold up,” Bolton continued. “Sometimes a garment that’s been machine-made actually has more hours spent on it, is more luxurious than doing it by hand.”

Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens May 5 and runs through August 14.

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