PUZL Magazine - 3rd Edition

3RD EDITION | APRIL 2012

CONTRIBUTORS 3 CREDITS 4 KULTUREKICK 5 ALEXANDER ESGUERRA 9 KATE KENNARD 15 BETH FIORE 19 IAN PAWELEC 27 TIM MCCOOL 31 DERRICK “PINKY CARNAGE” BECKLES 43 CHIOMA EBINAMA 49 BIRDMAN 53 JEANETTE HAYES 61 DANGER ZONE 69

Cover Art: Blackmarket Boo & Jeanette Hayes ©2012 PUZL™ All rights reserved.

EDITOR’S LETTER April 2012 I’ve been trying to come up with an appropriate letter for this issue for a while and find myself writing it after (basically) liquid lunching with one of my favorite persons in the world in a city--town--I’m sure no one in this magazine’s audience visits too often.

What immediately came to mind was a discussion of the relationship between art and technology: Alexander Esguerra led his post-L&P interview with a synopsis of new web plans. Beth Fiore’s creating what may be defined as the first internet-based fine art gallery. Kate Kennard specifically references escaping technology. Ian Pawelec and Chioma Ebinama are kindred in creating holistic online stories through a single venue. Beckles is an influence to everyone on this list whether or not they’re aware.

Jeanette Hayes and Tim McCool find technology and mass media essential to their survival. On the other end, Diana Dalsass and Birdman are documenting the world as it exists outside of technology: one by day and the other by night. And Esguerra, actually, endeavors to visualize and market the least techonological of all things.

Maybe it seems unsurprising in 2012 that they’re all concerned with technology, but consider momentarily how often you use technology toward an end that is neither utilitarian nor procrastinatory.

So what emerged more organically from this collection is the notion that in spite of financial instability, unemployment, geography, droll day jobs, taxing commitments to boy-/girl-/friends, everyone in this issue lives, breathes, eats, and dies their art. It is essential to their senses of self. Each creator--writer, subject, or photographer--in this issue is deeply passionate about their work: confident, intriguing. So art, work, to them becomes not only essential to the self but to their perspectives on the world.

They each search for personal success, beg for scrutiny, play with interpretation.

I remember a professor musing (as we unpacked “The Most Dangerous Game,” which, um, no comment) “The task of destruction is infinitely easier than the task of creation.” In a culture of technology which drives itself toward destruction (or obsolescence) each individual in this issue chooses to eschew discouragement and disillusionment and they are heroic for it.

Sarah Whitmore Co-Editor-In-Chief @SRWCTRL

CONTRIBUTORS SOLEIL BARROS: Journalism/marketing student, hashtag overuser, blogger, & social mediac. Native to Southern California, currently enjoying the college life in Boston. Just a girl that likes boys who like the New York Times. (@SoleilBeez) SHIRIN BORTHWICK: Blackmarket Boo, a photographer-author-artist-unicorn based in Manhattan. (Blackmarket Boo, @Blackmarket_Boo) PETER D’AMATO: A writer, journalist and comedian from New York. Have you guys heard about Art? (@realpetedamato) DIANA DALSASS: Designer, photographer, vintage clothing collector, socal culture enthusiast... @kulturekick CHIOMA EBINAMA: A natural born dictator and yet all of your girly dreams come true (Virgin Dress, @chiuchio).

EXEYVIERR: I create and destroy. Actions speak louder then words. Currently unemployed. (@BluntObjective, sleepeyesopen.tumblr.com, easterncollection.tumblr. com, infektedindividuals.tumblr.com) JOE HUME: 24. Based in Brooklyn NY. Originally from London, moved to New York for BFA at School of Visual Arts. His work has been featured in UK Vogue, Brooklyn Magazine, and L Magazine. (http://www.madalena.co/member/joe-hume/) KATE KENNARD: Hailing from Dallas, she’s a Northwestern grad. living and working in LA as an artist, filmmaker, and writer (flooding @kennardk daily with artsy Instagrams)... everything else is hearsay.

ANNA J. MARTINEZ: Brooklyn based fashionista who writes, dances and tirelessly pursues the world’s best hand-mixed margarita. (http://pinterest.com/annazjay/) IAN PAWELEC: Artist, exploring the universe on canvas. Creator of the “Expression of the Abstract” (@Ian_Pawelec).

MR. PUZL: The company’s founder and driving force. He knows a little about a lot but not a lot about a little.

PUZL MAINTAINS A STRICT CONFIDENTIALITY POLICY REGARDING THE IDENTITY OF ALL CONTRIBUTORS WHO CHOOSE TO OPERATE UNDER NOMS DE PLUME.

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CREDITS Photos of Love & Paint Vernal Equinox at The Box courtesy of The Chronicles by UrbanDaddy: http://thechronicles.urbandaddy.com/ gallery/107/a_naked_painting_party_with_the_countess Pages 59-61 c/o http://www.flickr.com/photos/birdmanphotos/ Jeanette Hayes: Cover and 62-69, photographer: Shirin Borthwick a.k.a. Blackmarket Boo, lighting stylist & retoucher: Sarah Tobi http://sarahtobi.com/, wardrobe stylist: Leo Gugu https://www.facebook.com/pages/Leo-GuGu/205396906177463, hair: Julia Reinhard https://www.facebook.com/ pages/Julia-Reinhard-Hair/137233823037936?sk=wall, makeup: Christyna Kay http://christynakay.com/, digital artwork: Jeanette Hayes, studio: Roebling Studios, Brooklyn http://roeblingstudios.blogspot.com/.

Cover: dress c/o It’s Okay My Dear http://www.itsokaymydear.com/ via The Shiny Squirrel http://www.theshinysquirrel.com/, earrings c/o Muffinhead http://www.muffinheadland.com/ Page 62: jumpsuit c/o Rue 107 http://rue107.com/main/ via Patricia Field http://www.patriciafield.com/, earrings c/o Muffinhead.

Page 64: blouse c/o It’s Okay My Dear via Patricia Field, earrings c/o Muffinhead.

Page 66: earrings c/o Muffinhead.

Page 69: earrings c/o Muffinhead.

Rings & shoes: subject’s own.

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kulturekick.tumblr.com Diana Dalsass

kulturekick.tumblr.com Diana Dalsass

kulturekick.tumblr.com Diana Dalsass

ALEXANDER ESGUERRA

by Sexy Sadie

The plan, the plot, is sensationalist at a glance: Alexander Esguerra curates an experience of light, music, color, and aphrodisiacs all, for his clients. He gives them the advice of an experienced professional. He then leaves them to paint one another and fuck on a canvas laid out to capture the patterns and motions of passion. Impressions that fly by in less than a moment are left immortalized—a woman’s hands clutching at the floor as she’s dragged backward by her lover—rather than to the realm of the future’s fantasies.

The private being made public, the arousal of the public imagination, the imaginary projection of one’s own sexploits by this exhibitionist—not quite—activity are the elements that draw glamorous crowds of nobility, celebrities, and intrepid socialites to Esguerra’s Love & Paint exhibitions. No, bacchanals. Because presumably the sumptuous women wearing nothing but paint, the dominatrix wandering on the hunt for a soul who’d like to submit, the sexily clad models dragging gentlemen (or alas more models) through a throng inebriated and enhanced are somewhat accountable for (or at least envied by) the crowds waiting outside, glimpsing through the doors, begging their cases, alive with the prospect of being allowed into The (Pandora’s?) Box on New York’s Lower East Side on a (very) balmy vernal equinox.

Five hours prior to the curtain’s rise, Esguerra’s in another world. He’s texting furiously.

He’s elated and worried that there are nine hundred on a guest list for a space that will hold less than a third of that. He’s finalizing press details with Javier Vivas, general manager at The Box, while a Sotheby’s handler has expatriated downtown to hang the recently epoxied works in The Box’s burlesque banquettes. He remains grounded, momentarily pausing at his soccer ball to play, and with a simultaneously vulnerable and seductive stare, express genuine gratitude. “There are all these little concerns, but it’s so joyous,” partly because he remains conscious of these last few years’ circumstances and the drain of injurious, broke, hustling that’s just barely been stoppered by Love & Paint, “now it’s not if, but when.” Indeed by this time—before the event has begun—his publicity team has confirmed over two hundred million unique media impressions across print, web, and television during the preceding week. He’s equally genuine regarding his personal thrill to be exhibiting at The Box tonight. Though he tends bar at two of Manhattan’s hottest spots and hardest doors, he hasn’t patronized any club in the last three years, favoring “the experience” of The Box, which he insists “can’t be called a club.” That’s certainly the reputation of the iconic burlesque spot, where even at 5 p.m. the atmosphere is dreamlike and a tranny with awe-inspiring tits sings on stage as a

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glitter rock Puck on cello is birthed from a lace teepee, a spectacle which Vivas is glad to elucidate is a tryout, sort of, “to see if they fit.” Esguerra buzzes around in all of this, handing over his phone, and stringing himself through the experience with aplomb in spite of the nervous energy, the scattered tension, of hanging a show hours before it opens. Along with the constant stream of requests for a plus one, subtractions from the list, additional celebrity confirmations, he marvels at “all the details of money and numbers forgotten until this moment.”

And it isn’t as though Esguerra’s path to tonight was paved with gold: “I’ve gone to the hospital for this. My bank account has been in the red for three years, for this. I’ve been bartending every night for this,” neglecting even to mention that he’s exhibited the show six times already (always with new couples, new canvases) or that he won’t be drinking: “I’m clean, I have a piss test at noon tomorrow.” His case is falling on empathetic ears: he’s possibly gone to jail for this. It’s a little less harrowing when he describes being on the roof of his apartment building with another dashing and well-cut gentleman that morning, shirtless, applying epoxy to canvases. Still, it was 7 a.m.

It’s tempting to stay through the setup. Really tempting.

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It’s better to arrive to a writhing crowd outside, to the flashing lights of society photographers, to a closed door, after imbibing a little SoHo with a gorgeous accomplice. Bypassing it isn’t easy. This augurs very well.

Two days later, at lunch al fresco at Café Select, Esguerra will describe the attraction. “We’re all obsessed with sex. We’re all in love with love.” He’s glowing, admitting that all of his past girlfriends and hookups were in attendance, and he’s transcendant but brief in saying they were all so beautiful as he glanced around that evening that it invoked the feeling that inspired Love & Paint’s concept. “We are all lonely, and we want a companion. Whether it’s for a night or real love, people are intimidated by love.” And what’s most intriguing about Esguerra’s concept is that there is a way to exhibit love in a completely anonymous way: the race, gender, sexuality, and number of the persons involved is undetectable… unless of course you encounter one of them and hear their story (likely). “It opens people up to who they really are, and to who they want to be with the other person.” Accessing who one wants to be with another person is a provocative matter. “The individuality is as important as being anonymous. I want to globalize and diversify the stories, and do that show in a gallery.” He’s looking to explore the loss of ego.

Such a sensational business model—thanks also to Frankie Grima, Esguerra’s business partner—infrequently has the chutzpah and straight up heart to make it’s bombast communicative of something relevant. Grima is thrilled to play the background role to Esguerra’s experiential performance pieces. He’s wisely assembled a team from multiple industries where he recognizes the potential for growth. Being somewhere between concierge, performance, art, and erotic services, there’s no precedent in business for how Grima builds this entity with Esguerra--but he’s passionate about the potential. Grima’s motivation now is to facilitate and manage the development of Love & Paint as it travels to new cities and countries. And he’s thrilled.

Esguerra speaks his piece regarding the universal human condition with an interactive process that’s enjoyable at every stage for the others involved. He’s a really gracious sort of a performer and it’s refreshing. And when he brings up the idea of a celebratory yacht vacation en masse, you trust him to do it proper.

Succulent Garden Kate Kennard

Tree of Hope Kate Kennard

Untitled

Kate Kennard

add pages for Kennard gallery

The fetus and other organic forms depicted represent life and endless possibility. My work is not about a traumatic event but rather it is a celebration. It’s also a call to return to a more natural state, one separate from the interferences of modernity. It’s terribly ironic considering I’m obsessed with my iPhone and I’m a filmmaker who’s made largely science fiction films. For me painting is a way to get away from all the crap.

To do something purely organic and natural. That’s why I use paper and watercolors. Just water and dye.

Cactus Flower Kate Kennard

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BETH FIORE

by Peter D’Amato

photos Joe Hume

I got a chain of emails from Beth Fiore late one night after an interview under the subject line “some points in case u missed them.”

They went into detail about her past and the career trajectory that led her to where she is now. Along with the timeline of Art Station’s upcoming events, she offered up a short biography of herself. But it wasn’t just the details of her background that offered a clarifying look at who Fiore was, it was an attitude towards the art world that she previously had not explicitly expressed. Coming from a family with two bluecollar parents, Fiore found herself as a person without “any sort of pedigree,” wasn’t even pushed to go to college. And while she finds herself working in a gallery selling works for millions or in a “crowd of socialites,” she insists she still holds on to her virtue as an artist.

What her mission boils down to is one part entrepreneurship, one part class warfare, though probably in the most gracious way possible.

The idea for Art Station, the organization Fiore launched, came from the notion that vast audiences weren’t being served by the current gallery model. From the spaces deemed acceptable to house art to the prices that determined who could consume it, from the technology used to produce fine art to the education that determined how capable you were to make and critique it, everything that seemed wrong stemmed from who was in control. In Fiore’s view the fact that people like her didn’t come from the right type of ‘pedigree’ worked to shut them out from the art world.

Art Station bills itself on its website as an “ongoing conceptual pop-up that aims to change the way we look at art galleries and experience art by putting on exhibitions in everyday places and offering affordable art.” But Fiore is willing to be more direct about the art world. “Technology, visibility is really where art is going.” Art Station is the logical extension of museums digitizing their holdings or galleries aggressively moving their pieces through art fairs around the world – Art Station will simply stay on the move, never settling within the “same four walls” while still keeping a virtual presence. “This is our gallery, it doesn’t have a permanent address.”

The first space invaded by Art Station–the pop-up which lent the name to the company–was a gallery that Fiore and an erstwhile Art Station curator, Rachel Stekson, opened in the Lukoil gas station in Chelsea. Lined up on 10th Avenue, the station is “an anomaly within an anomaly” among the elite West Chelsea galleries. Down the street from where some of the most expensive contemporary art pieces were changing hands at places including Gagosian, cab drivers broke on their ten-hour shifts with a cheap cup of coffee, a smoke and a run to the bathroom. The divide couldn’t be clearer.

The exhibition was executed in a restrained way, making clear that this was not an

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art gallery taking over a non-art space, but showing that art could adapt to the nontraditional space. Photographer Joe Hume’s works, which blend slick magazine photography with a hostage video, hung over a fridge stocked with Gatorade. Two portraits by M. Henry Jones, who is currently pioneering 3D photography, pushing so quickly past the borders of the medium he has to mold and grind his own lenses, stood above racks of motor oil. And perfumer Shannon Campbell, who works in the very unexplored world of scents and perfumes, installed on top of the microwave.

Crowds packed the gas station convenience store and the gallery-goers snatched up multiples on sale--Fiore had insisted that each artist provide pieces for less

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than $500. The response legitimized Fiore’s ambitions to democratize the art world and make it accessible to everyone. Audiences were eager for art to be pulled out of museums and galleries to be passed into the more common spaces spaces of public life. Or maybe they just enjoyed the clever irreverence of it all.

From the launchpad of the Lukoil success came more opportunities for the company. First, the Art Station website became more substantial. Fiore and her lieutenants Getty Estrella, Art Station’s editor-at-large, and Jillian Brodie, who contributes the bulk of the articles, continue to develop the site, which gathered contributors from Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Paris (though to date, the site has no contributed writing from these authors).

Art Station has also beefed up its exhibition roster in 2012, adding sound artist Laura O’ and video artist TV Carnage. Fiore and Campbell, along with multimedia artist Britney Janaszak, became part of a collaboration for two shows, BLK XMAS and WHT XMAS, in October. Then in January Art Station threw a pop-up art gallery and party, where guests could buy multiples with a beer for $20.

But the ambitious nature of Art Station brought an inevitable failure or two. An early plan to bring an Art Station-backed event to Art Basel Miami Beach fell through. To have crashed the fair-proper would have been a great coup for the budding organization, but Fiore had anticipated that the chance for making it would be small and a push for funding for the trip came up short by more than half of the necessary capital in spite of large initial sponsorship commitments. But there were other failures that affected Fiore and the company on a more intimate level.

When you set out to remake the gallery model, there are bound be some who will never be anything more than lukewarm about it. A handful of artists have come close to joining before bowing out of the project. Fiore expends so much energy getting excited about the artists she brings into the company–she is drawn to artists that are pushing into unexplored artistic fields like Art Station does–and explains the rejections in the least cool way possible. It’s as if no one feels rejection as viscerally as she does. She pines over them like a lost flame. “I had an artist that I really wanted to work with drop out [a recent event] and it’s like a breakup. It hurt really badly. It’s just so deflating. Unrequited love, it sucks. And that’s what it feels like.”

With all the heartbreak that Art Station brings, Fiore needs loyalty and stability, provided by Getty and Brodie who act as her emotional armor. “Beth’s project in Art Station is fearless,” Brodie explains excitedly. “It thrives off of being into experience and into other artists and just being positive about what other people are doing and creating.” And the two feed off of Fiore’s nervous momentum and passion. “When I started working in the art world, all that fearlessness that I had as an artist and a student went away. I was terrified of everything. I couldn’t even make anything anymore because I was just like ‘It’s probably stupid and pointless and I should just go be a doctor. Why am I doing this?’” And while Brodie had lost her nerve, Getty was almost completely off the map, writing and visiting galleries, yes, but effectively no

Fiore’s Art Station lieutenants Jillian Brodie and Getty Estrella in NYC

longer an artist. Within Art Station they have both begun exhibiting again, showing pieces in the latest Art Station event for the Armory Show. It’s a testament to how Fiore rejects the notion that there are some people who shouldn’t be doing art.

Art is for everyone, but that doesn’t mean everything is art. Fiore aggressively pushes new technologies like 3D printing and social media as ways to expand the pool of who has access to art. And it’s as if those who can’t keep up are stealing from those who do. Her opinion in this regard is unsubtle: “Artists should definitely not be wasting their time on oil and canvas. In this point and time, we’re kind of in a new Renaissance where there’ve been so many discoveries in technology and communications that you would be ignorant if you weren’t working in this direction. For example Ai Weiwei, who just had an opening at Mary Boone. I’m not impressed that in 2006 he learned how to type so he could have a blog. If he was truly an artist, he would know how to type. Look at David Hockney. How old is that man? He’s painting on the iPad, he hasn’t resisted change.”

The Lukoil pop-up was publicized with a mobile app developed by Collectrium, a company Fiore previously worked for. And Fiore works with 3D modeling programs and 3D printing to give guests at her pop-ups affordable art to bring home. But Fiore wants to radicalize the art world further. “I hate going to gallery shows and museums. I feel like I’ve literally experienced the Uffizi, the Italian museum you can see through Google Art. And I was blown away! I wouldn’t go there now, I wouldn’t make that trip just to do that. I feel good on that front.”

And while Google’s tour of the Uffizi does not begin to get at the awe-inspiring experience of going to Florence and walking up to the Birth of Venus–the Google image is grainy and catches a glare from the overhead lights that obscures two of the angels--the sacred cows of the art world (museums, celebrity artists, famous works) must be torn from the walls in order to stay relevant.

Thanks in part to Fiore’s commitment to art in the digital sphere, the eclectic collage of a home that John Ashbery’s built around himself over the last four decades is being exhibited--in conjunction with a study by the New School--in multiple media for the first time. “I don’t think anyone’s vivified a living artist through digital media the way we are.” But surely you can’t expect this work to attain any type of permanence when in a year digital and social media will be presenting data in a completely different way. Aren’t you worried that you’re not spearheading a new direction for art but merely chasing fads? Brodie jumps in to counter: “If we were chasing the fads then Beth wouldn’t be afraid about being embarrassed about talking about Art Station. There’s something really scary about the whole thing.”

What gives Fiore the audacity to try and wrest control out from the power brokers of the art world and gently pry a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s fingers off of his private collection? “I am not a woman who came from any sort of pedigree.” Her parents both worked the types of jobs that politicians bicker about bringing back to America--her mother works in a factory, on the floor bagging buttons, while her father is a retired truck driver. Fiore put herself through Pratt Institute then transitioned to working in galleries, where pieces are traded by the millions, so nonchalantly that owners can’t be bothered to track wire fees.

But that work alone didn’t give Fiore the financial stability she needed. She often took work bartending to supplement her income, work she was proud to do but was depressing nonetheless. When the time came to launch Art Station, she claims she blew all her savings and was jumping turnstiles just to scrape together the funds for the Lukoil pop-up. Just enough to start picking battles with the art establishment. Politely enough to allow her to collaborate with galleries but demanding that a space in the art world be opened up so people growing up in her circumstances have the chance to find their ground as artists.

Like with the artists that drop out of Art Station, establishing Art Station is a very personal endeavor. “It’s not like everyone I meet I want to tell them about Art Station. It makes you feel really vulnerable. It’s embarrassing.” Her working-class background feeds into this twinge of shame, a feeling like you don’t belong in a field you’ve worked hard to enter. But Fiore isn’t going to apologize--that would be too petit bourgeois--instead she is focused on achieving the same self-sufficiency for Art Station that she has in her professional career. “We’re not a non-profit, we’re not going to be going back year after year begging for money.” The Art Station Kickstarter--still delayed--is an investment structure which will be used for resources to make Art Station a sustainable business, aiding and abetting the death (or at least restructuring) of the gallery world.

As much as she might relish her outsider status, things will change to bring Fiore

into the fold. She’s already behind enemy lines, working for Loretta Howard Gallery.

And while the first Art Station event may not have crashed the Times’s Arts section, it did draw established names Sarah Campbell and her beau David Byrne. And as Fiore continues her series of artistic hit-and-runs on galleries and basements throughout Manhattan and beyond she’s been welcomed. Art Station recently wrapped up a mock Armory fair at The Hole, the company is collaborating with Amanda Browder of Bad At Sports for a pop-up on Randall’s Island in May and is talking about upcoming shows in the Black and White gallery, as well as galleries in the East Village and Los Angeles.

Does Art Station work once its artists nestle into more traditional artistic spaces?

When the revolution becomes the establishment, you can’t define yourself by what you aren’t,and you’ll have to continue pushing the art space into new, positive directions.

L A

M P

Love for Christie Ian Pawelec, 2011

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Opening

Ian Pawelec, 2011

Untitled II

Ian Pawelec, 2011

Untitled III

Ian Pawelec, 2011

TIM MCCOOL

by Soleil Barros

photos Tim McCool/Exeyvierr

Entering Boston’s small, tight knit art community, SMFA graduate student Tim McCool approaches the scene with a unique style of expression and play on what contemporary society represents.

Who is Mr. McCool?

Tim McCool, 24, a Pittsburgh native, attended undergraduate school at Chestnut Hill’s famed university, Boston College, double majoring in studio art and art history, which familiarized him with the city and allowed him to gain a greater insight as far as what the school had to offer. Prior to graduating, McCool searched for many types of universities to apply his graduate education toward. As an undergraduate student he found a bit more of a lax avenue due to his already apparent passion for art.

“I was considering places all over the country really, so it’s funny that I ended up here in Boston again,” said McCool. “I looked at schools in California and New York obviously, I got into the School of Visual Arts but I chose to come to the city [of Boston] for a bunch of different reasons.”

While completing his undergraduate studies in Boston, McCool spent a few summers in the city enjoying positions as an artist assistant. “Historical, nerdy stuff. It was cool in that sense. One summer I helped work on a museum show for Boston College which was really fun.”

Earlier in life, he found himself consistently drawing but didn’t accept it as a serious talent until taking art classes in his later high school years, claiming “once I got going, it just really took off.”

What does Mr. McCool do?

Drawing inspiration from items found via the World Wide Web alongside things as simple as a dear friend who is missed, he enjoys making spin on modern day concerns and poking fun at all the deep root of their meaning, taking nothing too seriously.

www.facebook.com/twoheadsphoto

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McCool draws detailed images ruminating the meaning behind popular images that he discovers online using a pencil and graph paper. More recently he’s starting to move towards sculpture, exploring different ways to manipulate media. He retrieves most of his drawings from Internet memes. McCool’s drawings are often based on those images, which of course usually have a been along a winding path through the ether.

“There is just a super long lineage behind all of the images that I pick,” says McCool.

‘A Response to Criticism’ is the largest drawing that McCool has completed to date in pencil on graph paper. The drawing is 12.5” X 13”.

“It is not like too huge obviously but it took me a long time to do,” said McCool “I spent maybe like 25 to 30 hours on that, that’s about the average amount of time I use when I work on one of those [large drawings on graph paper].”

He measures the height & width of his work by the square boxes that he shades in to generate a memorable image in his mind. Hardly being able to remember anything about the dimensions of his work, he is able to calculate quickly, in a sense channelling the split-second recognition of the machines his images come from.

“My art is also reflective of my personality which is tight and controlling which I also like to be at times, but then other times I’ll try to loosen up a little bit. But the grid like leads itself to being neat and orderly kind of things, I have been using grid paper, graph paper… whatever since the start of last semester, since September.

Before I was doing a lot of drawing and painting, I was also collaging a lot over the summer and doing animation a bit too. Then I got into this style, but once I got into working that I stayed really into it.”

His most recent project includes a piece displaying a series of tiny identical ghosts all in a row. “Its memorial to some of the people I have killed in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, most people think its really funny, some people think its really creepy,” said McCool. “There are 1500 tombstones displaying ‘RIP,’ it’s an ongoing piece.”

When does Mr. McCool find the time?

In a busy schedule, managing school and his passion for art, he works hard scouring the Internet keeping an eye out for inspirational pieces. He cares deeply about the background information and history of each image. By the end of the line the meaning has been adapted to his own form: “I can’t even remember where I found these for the first time, I grab these and put them in a folder and I’ll look back at the them, they also have some sort of relevance to me, they are sort of biographical in a sense, I always pick ones that have different layers of meaning behind them.”

This past month McCool was involved in an art show hosted at the SMFA studios.

“It was nice to see everything come together and to see other people come in, but also to go around and see everyone’s work. It was nice to refresh the memory, it was like I haven’t seen that before and that was cool,” said McCool, “the girl who organized it, Jess Anderson, she did a really great job, she got a little blurb in the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe, it was like a ton of work and she had just as much work [in the show] as everyone else plus the responsibilities of pulling together an art show on top of it.”

The event displayed work of graduate students set up in the building, “it was neat to associate the art[work] with the faces,” the event lasted Friday/Saturday, 6-9 each day, “it was a big event for us, we really put a lot effort into it, and it was kind of cool to like see people come through.”

What do you like about the city of Boston, Mr. McCool?

“There aren’t a lot of galleries in the city of Boston, which means you get to know the people really well, and there is a smaller community and its really tight knit.

Some people grow out of it and might feel stifled by that,” explains McCool. “I haven’t felt that yet because I’m just getting into it and I feel like I could kind of enjoy that environment--that sort of tight knit kind of thing--as opposed to New York there are obviously millions of people there, with thousands in the art scene.”

Paul

Tim McCool, 2012

Helena

Tim McCool, 2012

Ashley

Tim McCool, 2012

McCool’s favorite galleries in this compact city are Samson Projects and Anthony Greaney, both located in Boston’s South End. Both galleries seemingly feature someone out of the odds, experimenting with different local talents.

What has been McCool’s favorite piece of work to date?

“I did this little college thing, it was in a really long line of collages that I did based on, like, I kind of just cut out a lot of cigarettes, cars, and booze advertisements from vintage Playboy magazines and made a collage out of them.” McCool admits to carrying it around with him, even having it handy within his studio with the collage displaying at 10” X 12”. “Eventually I decided that they looked like cities due to the idea that the cigarettes poke out and resemble smoke stacks, the bottles did too,” said McCool. “It was three-dimensional in the sense that it was mounted on a piece of cardboard so it came out of the wall a little bit, so it gave it kind of a nice heft kind of. But it was also kind of flat against the cardboard.”

Excuse Me

Tim McCool, 2011

What is Mr. McCool’s workspace like?

An intimate studio displaying his original drawing with all the fine detailing was to be expected. It was apparent upon entering his studio that World Wide Web, with venues like Tumblr and highly recognizable computer icons, is a constant source of inspiration.

Why does Mr. McCool enjoy what he does?

“I try to work really hard, I think I make the work evidence too, how it comes across.

I also think its relevant to today’s society where we spend a lot of our time on the computer now,” said McCool. “We are obsessed with Facebook and Twitter--well that goes for me anyway--and there is like a larger audience for that too.”

Inspired by a variety of different artists, McCool enjoys the work of Austrians Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and mentions his tastes are a bit “nostalgic” and “old fashioned.” Being influenced by visits to museums at a young age is reflected in the works that McCool generates. Camille Pissarro shining a light on French Impressionism lent him a bit of influence. “I guess you could say that impressionism is like early pixelation, the eye does the work to bring it together to make an image,” says McCool “that’s kind of cool, I never thought about that before.”

In a visual comparison of the ways in which people of Pissarro’s time viewed the world around them to the similarities in how our current world presents, McCool perceives the world around us and transcribes it into his own pieces of artwork.

“There was a class that I took senior year, it was with my favorite professor, and he was really supportive and challenged us. It was just a great way to get thinking about a lot of different things. There was the philosophical side and the theory behind it, but I also got to write about Jeff Koons and I really had to research him and, like, get into it.”

Living in the city of Boston alone has been an inspiration to the young artist, allowing him to appreciate and visualize what the small surroundings have to offer.

“I was actually just talking about--it is something that we talk about all the time because we almost have to--well sometimes it feels like you have to justify being here [in Boston] as opposed to New York, which I don’t necessarily like that much. I

Foley

Tim McCool, 2011

like being here, I don’t feel like being in New York because its so overwhelming in a lot of ways. It is not because like I don’t want to compete or deal with the struggle, I could probably deal with that but its just like a lot of concrete, super tall buildings and like a lot of grey, grey, grey,” explains McCool, “I like being in Boston because it’s a bunch of neighborhoods that are cool and small. There are tons of schools so the city is really young, there’s always something going on, if you wanted to you could never be bored here.”

What inspires Mr. McCool?

“I could watch a an old French film from the 60s, but I like Michel Gondry a lot. He’s given me future ideas. Even if its not directly inspiring, its always in the back of my head and I’m always thinking about that kind of stuff.

“I also listen to music a lot when I work, I listen to some rock, I listen to We Have Band, sometimes I listen to electronic, but more like minimal ambient electronic because it sets the mood kind of. I can listen to music when I work because when I plan it out ahead of time I know what its going to look like so I’m not really making decisions while I’m working on it; I just have my idea, do it on the paper and that’s that.”

Amy

Tim McCool, 2011

DERRICK BECKLES

by Sarah Whitmore

“Oh yeah, that’s real. CNN sent a letter that said ‘We could not review this properly, it was basically unwatchable.’”

I read this tweet that’s like “I’m done with the journalistic trope ‘I’m in a fancy place waiting for an incredibly important person’” about four hours before I’m supposed to meet Derrick “Pinky Carnage” Beckles, alias TV Carnage, for an interview. His publicist’s arranged for 5 at an über-savvy Manhattan gallery which, upon arrival, happens to be totally out of commission. It’s under construction on a new installation.

The publicist arrives, entourage in tow, no Carnage. He’s in Williamsburg drinking a margarita. I receive a text involving the word “swayzak.” Two hours later he apologizes for the mixup while we’re standing in the back of a gay bar (he’s straight, the collective need for liquor trumped details even though the gay who brought us here claims the gays in Chelsea hate him). Aside to fag hag a cigarette from the patio; two vodkas and several personal revelations later, plus blah, blah, blah, Carnage (who may also be referred to hereinafter as Beckles alternately), his publicist, a fashion Name, and I are slunk in the back of a taxi bound for the Chinatown-SoHo border. The experience is not—in fact—unlike New York’s Tijuana.

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I have barely recovered from this event (and several subsequent, most decidedly not parties) when I arrive for the interview-proper at its new time, two days later. Beckles is in his office writing. He’s Beckles now, in the office. The conversation begins with vodka. I’m not really wearing an entire shirt, I had “two glasses” of champagne: it was a Sunday, and then cloudy on top of that, and there were really only two of them. It may just be more appropriate to describe them as mugs, rather than glasses. But it’s been a few hours, a little conversation & wandering later. We sink into a subject analogous to his in process. It’s a vodka company for whom he made a commercial which makes, if you will, “extra virgin” vodka and uses that grain which would usually be appropriated to a series of decreasingly virginal presses of vodka instead to convert into biofuel. We discuss a number of unconventional things these entities—the vodka company and TV Carnage—have in common. “I try not to go in the front door,” which is kind of an amazing thing for him to say in an interview because if you watch a bunch of his work in a row and then that’s said, you vividly imagine it being cut into a future version of a TV Carnage feature, or “season.” He’s really brilliant. There’s a video playing in the background, something that will “hopefully become” source material and will be replaced shortly by something barely believable even by TV Carnage standards.

He says that he likes to remain a little naïve to the political aspects of most things, going back to the front door thing, that generally he prefers to be blissfully ignorant to that all. Exceptions have been made, when he’s been really willing to beat down the door for something (like the eerie-sounding “cradle to grave” culture surrounding Canadian television) but that usually “regardless of knowledge… the nuanced version of worlds is not usually that different from any of the other worlds,” whether music, film, art, etc. Explaining himself further with an analogy to math—which from what I can gather he really hates and also feels very drawn to—he ruminates, sincerely: most people are barely willing to do the simple “add & subtract” version of life, so if you’re in tune to the trigonometry of these interactions, the day-to-day addition and subtraction becomes a hindrance. Not that he’s a recluse. Lately, I feel, I understand what he’s talking about.

While we’re on the topic of people who may likely believe they’re in tune with a trigonometry of life, we turn to the neighborhood of Williamsburg, which has come up a few times over the course of our conversations. I think it’s prudent to note, somewhere in here, that this is the first day I’ve encountered Beckles when the weather hasn’t been unseasonably warm and cooperative. About Williamsburg he says a couple of succinct, accurate, witty things: that it’s an “entitlement amusement park” in a “pop-up neighborhood.” These terms are logical and ambivalent, kind of. He’s unabashed discussing the fact that unlike other city neighborhoods no one cares about Williamsburg’s history. It’s very different from how he sees New York on the whole: as a knife sharpener. Other places can turn a person into a butterknife & you can’t play that in New York. We discuss the necessity of leaving New York frequently if you’re going to try to make it here.

He shows me this Gary Panter 3D drawing from the ‘70’s which has 7 layers, maybe more, it’s very intricate and a little poppy and it’s fabulous. I overestimate what he paid for it by approximately 1,176%. He’s one-upped me before I even make my 3D presentation.

So these last few paragraphs go to say that the moment of realizing he really is this maelstrom of creativity: it’s constant. I change the topic drastically. I become intrigued, attracted, and unnerved—or a little worried possibly—upon encountering someone who seems to be as gruesome as I am. Also I’m curious, as I find myself in a similar circumstance, how he deals with traveling so frequently and whether he feels held back from having a certain kind of predictable committed relationship by it. He acknowledges he’s a pervert and earnestly adds that he tries to be a “good old fashioned lady.” I ask whether he feels pressured because women know who he is, want him, chase him. He’s clear on the fact that he’s over the quick fix and that capitalizing on all the hype is something he’s long past, “It’s a person who you hear a big ‘click’ with who you want to pay attention to. The rest of it--” The tape that’s been running stops, and the white noise/TVC-worthy backdrop has been making me comfortable, which is when I ask for another tape and he releases the pharaoh’s curse of all bad television, Corey Haim’s masturbatory post-rehab attempt at image salvation: Me, Myself & I. Haim is obviously slammed out of his

tree whilst discussing his new leaf, as it were. He talks about moving from being the “younger brother, you know, to being the older brother or the only brother,” and a lot of other unintelligible things, Beckles loving that Haim’s-ahem-friends are obviously paid and staged or inflatable. He has a unique proclivity toward abhorrent spectacle.

While Carnage is the forerunner (and likely the source of dissemination) for a lot of the hilariously shitty videos your friends forward to you via YouTube, his perspective is weighted. The preponderance of news clips in the features emboldens this point. He studied filmmaking along with art and sociology at university in Canada, whence he hails. He has an incisive commentary to accompany the Haim caper onscreen: “He’s just put out the equivalent of Hollywood’s toilet paper roll. Hollywood helps make the modern connection to what monarchies used to be,” the super rich using their super richness to be publicly super weird until the money ran out, “and he was in that cocaine fishbowl that’s like ‘Ooh an underwater diver, ooh another diver,’ until Hollywood had a new cock in town.” That sort of replacement contributed to Beckles’ choice to forego Hollywood management and agency until recently, especially because he finds it difficult to communicate the “how” of his work to those types. He’s a cultural pundit, really. His work is exceedingly humorous but it’s beyond genre. He’s insistent that the “applause” route could have been his path, but if he were killing it that way “I’d be killing myself, too,” that he prefers to play to his metaphorical room of ten or so trusted souls and that he hasn’t balked at sometimes being the victim of that room.

He makes something he’d want to see.

The byproduct: everything God-awful and/or that you crave is in the features. Well, everything is either God-awful or you crave it or both: Dennis Rodman, children getting injured, weird porn and/or funny porn and/or sexy porn, Afrika Bambaataa, exercise videos, Gary Coleman, infomercials, cash, McDonald’s, people who’ve compromised their dignity for little to no money, Ditka, tits, OJ Simpson, Canadian strip clubs, drugs, racism, bush, Bush, uncanny news features, sunglasses indoors (a lot), low refresh rates, video game music, pregnant women imitating homoerotic NFL stunts, the list goes on. The breadth of cultural perspective and his brilliance make me wonder if he has some master graph quantifying the concepts of Great and Terrible and their logical counterparts, maybe Awful and Polite. Nearly every inanimate object that speaks has been dubbed over. Diegetic sounds have been altered. Remaster is about the only dirty word left untouched. It’s from a love of the genesis of things (one of the reasons he worked with Teenwolf on a collaborative mixtape) that he does this work. Everyone to follow in video compilations--he has indeed been ripping and cutting the videos since he was doing it from VHS in the early ‘90’s--is reflexive to Carnage. He’s self-referential subtly (on a commentary ridiculing the emphatic “hard k” phoneme and using it to great effect himself two scenes later) and ridicules self-reference, becoming an interactive, visible agent of the clips he strings together... it’s less cheeky than lending cadence. In the sense that he creates moving assemblage, the amount of research Carnage does makes him uniquely encyclopedic vis-à-vis screen culture. He’s no longer the only maker of these dreams: his style’s been ripped off by a motley crew, from Andre Balazs’ Standard Hotel to Chicago collective Everything Is Terrible. Most mashup artists, regardless of medium, owe a debt to Carnage for his

exploration of the limits of tolerance with a modicum of attention span and an emphasis on unconventional beauty. (Some things aren’t so unconventionally beautiful.

I think that one of the seasons’ introductory segment--a promotional campaign for milk via milkshakes by the Village People left largely intact--has a great and glamorous Busby Berkeley thing going.)

He’s about to funnel that power into a second attempt at a show on Adult Swim in September, Hot Package. Carnage’s last dive into the Adult Swim lineup, Totally For Teens, wasn’t picked up in 2009 but it has been slated on a couple of AS compilation DVDs and seems unanimously listed as “not yet” picked up, or equivalent, even by AS. There’s power in an unspoken ability to meter how others reject something, and to date the buzz following TFT hasn’t left the cultural consciousness. Hot Package is both similar and dissimilar to TFT but I’ve been firmly directed not to discuss content.

A familiar thing about Hot Package, though, was the manipulation of a thing so quotidian it’s fertile ground for the superimposition of an entire fantasy realm. In the after school special spirit of TFT, here’s a taste of a (legible, fantastic, brief) 1964 essay by Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp.” Actually before that, it’s important to note that I don’t believe Carnage’s oeuvre can be labelled, in genre or critically, but this is something I see (with admiring doe eyes). In the interest purely of defining terms: “Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.” That sort of camp, magniloquent by design, of appeal to a small subset of the population, is championed by TV Carnage. There’s the potential, because of a cultural shift toward aggrandizing the horrifying, for Carnage to go a lot bigger. Carrying the sort of comprehensive fantasy--it really is trancelike--forward into

other media is Beckles’ brand of development. His artistic progression is an enjoyable journey to watch and is largely dependent on the medium. He hasn’t said this explicitly but it’s evident he’s somehow conscious of it when (back as we were speaking about matters of lust and love and whatnot) he describes his life on the daily: “I really mostly take these different lovers of Write, Edit, Produce, Direct, or Act.” His style in one or the other is always recognizable somehow, but doesn’t ever get to the point of pandering, nor stale. He maintains the qualities of Camp, too, in hitting his refresh button again and again and again. Sontag says (you have to imagine that as you’re reading like someone saying “Survey says!” because that’s a very Carnage way to imagine it): There is Camp in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy - and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.

There aren’t that many moments when porn could be called touching... one hopes...

Carnage manages that charm and intrigue. The stories about our culture that he weaves into his work inspire emotions to accompany the states of dumbstruck and hysterical with laughter. It’s like the seductive side of the freakish. It is indeed vulgar, and loud, but not garish. It’s just enough. A final thought on Camp, and Carnage, borrowed from Sontag: “We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.”

Thundertyts

Chioma Ebinama, 2012

Pepper Sauce

Chioma Ebinama, 2012

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Mercies

Chioma Ebinama, 2011

Take Me Like A Thief Chioma Ebinama, 2011

BIRDMAN

by Mr. PUZL

photos Diana Dalsass

I first came across the guy with the mustache when I was wandering around Lab Art LA’s Gregory Siff and Louis XXX show “WANTED: For Xterior Motives” last year. We exchanged brief pleasantries and went about the rest of our evenings. I ventured home reflecting upon the day’s events and brainstorming my next design concepts for PUZL; unbeknownst to me, my recent acquaintance was just getting his evening started. We ran into each other again a couple of months later at the same venue. A roaming photographer captured a candid moment between us, my expression that of a captivated admirer in awe of his idol. Coincidentally, I was actually in the midst of a self-promoting effort to garner interest in this very magazine, attempting to enlist the efforts of my counterpart in contributing a few photos to an interview with Lab Art’s directors Rachel and Iskander. I must begrudgingly admit that I thought I was engaging the services of an event photographer. How pleasantly surprised I was to find the contrary...

From stop signs and electrical transformers, to buildings’ facades and parking garages, at some point you’ve probably encountered it at least once. It is a polarizing topic often referencing political, cultural, and religious ideologies in a variety of mediums. Traditionalists in the art world try to argue its legitimacy as an art form and, backed by poorly informed government officials and law enforcement, it is deemed no more than blatant vandalism. Street art, as it is more commonly known today, is derived from its predecessor graffiti art which borrows its naming convention from the Italian archaeological term graffito, a mark made by scratching or engraving on a surface. This art form dates back to Ancient Egypt and possibly farther. With such a storied history and continual growing popularity, it is vital that this movement be properly documented. This is evident as more street art finds its way into private galleries and museums. Out of context the integrity and origins of the work can be lost, but with photography as a compliment it provides context and authenticity.

Peruse through his Flickr stream; if you can’t stop after the first hour, don’t worry, that’s normal. You’ll see heavy hitters like Shepard Fairey, Mr. Cartoon, SABER, RISK, How and Nosm as well as the likes of Craola, DABS MYLA, David Young V, Os Gemeos, Septer Hed, and even the legendary MEAR ONE…I digress. In the last couple of years Birdman has seen an accelerated transformation of his craft. Trips to San Francisco to hang out with Ron English and documenting Cryptik tackling a 20-foot paste in Santa Fe are now a staple of Birdman’s life.

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley in a predominantly Hispanic part of town, graffiti marked his visual landscape. However, it wouldn’t be until a random encounter during a study abroad in Tuscany that the first seeds of his current passion would be sown. Surprisingly, his curriculum was of a musical nature, “I was studying

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classical guitar in Florence at the time. Me and a couple friends decided to take a train down to Rome. We were at the station and that’s when I saw this [train] car pull up covered in graffiti. I was mesmerized.” As fortune had it, his friend had a brought a camera along for their journey, “It was my first photo.” Little did he know that a slumbering creature would eventually awaken and propel him into a life of sleepless nights on the streets chronicling the escapades of his contemporaries, many of whom he now counts among his closest friends.

A couple of years later he asked his mother for a camera for Christmas, proclaiming he wanted to try something new. His passion for music had not faltered but his job left him uninspired, lacking the creativity he craved. “My first real street photo was a Dog Byte piece…”, recounting his inaugural nocturnal adventure, “and then I just started taking pictures of everything. We we’re out there for probably like 3 hours.

My friends were passing out, and I was just having this adrenaline rush…I didn’t know what the fuck I was looking for. I just knew I wanted to find art.” Soon he was frequenting spots such has The Spaghetti Factory, The Rotting Wall, and the Bates Motel; running loose with likes of Zombie, 2wenty, Stu Rad, Killed, and Koffinz. He became mesmerized by the process, likening it to musical compositions. “The wall is a jam session”, he proclaims. His 9-5 centers around music copyright research, and he’s quick to point out that music is still very much a part of his life. “Fuck yeah I still play. I teach heavy metal on the weekends. I play classical for enjoyment, and Flamenco...love Flamenco music. I play a lot of Argentinian folk music too, like tango. I love music that gets down to the roots of people, which is why I love street

art. It’s the art of the people.” With relentless drive Birdman would go on to score his first published piece in The Site Unscene followed by a permanent gig with The Warholian, and eventually a full spread in Juxtapoz (October 2011). These successes have not gone to his head, and he makes sure to give credit to those who helped him along his journey so far: “…Lab Art for giving me my first gig, Keisha, Brooke, my two amazing helpers, and Lydia who’s been like a mother to me. Without them I wouldn’t be where I was today.” While maintaining a steady stream of work for multiple media outlets he is committed to staying true to his origins and always returns to the street in search of new artists.

Scaling building and rooftops, using any natural light available, contorting his body while trying to find a steady place to rest his camera, are just some of the ingredients to Birdman’s painstaking process. Affirming his dedication to the craft, he notes: “I want to make sure I get the true shot. The art, in its natural environment...”

The results are very raw. “I don’t do much editing. I don’t use Photoshop, and don’t even have Lightroom.” Much like his subject matter, Birdman’s approach is aggressive and unabashed. At times the lens seems so carefully positioned it feels as though you are being transported to the instant the shutter opened, revealing the masterpiece in front of it. What’s not apparent is how difficult those shots often are. “I’ve always loved the hard angles. I don’t carry a tripod. I’ll use objects around me like a [parking] meter or ledge to steady my camera”. While open to discussing some of his techniques he is quick to remind me that this is his trade, and that he carefully protects it and the creative process of the artists he documents.

Although there are others, very few capture street art in this essence and with as much passion as Birdman does. Through his lens we are offered a rare look into a scene where artists’ identities are closely guarded and their processes even more so. Birdman has clearly earned the trust of his contemporaries and has been given a unique opportunity to reveal their world to us. While many of us are counting sheep and dreaming of winning the lottery, there are those who are just beginning to stir. They venture out into the night armed with buckets, spray cans, paper stacks, and brushes attacking their rigid canvases with fervor. Not far behind, a silhouetted figure floats through the shadows quietly observing the scene, recording the events unfolding around him.

Alec Monopoly Birdman, 2011

Dog Byte (above) Shepard Fairey (below) Birdman, 2011

How & Nosm Birdman, 2012

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JEANETTE HAYES

by Anna J. Martinez

art Blackmarket Boo/Jeanette Hayes

I have set up my iPad to the right of this computer screen--thesartorialist.com features a cheetah print capote and an oversized cerulean clutch worn on Rue de Varenne, Paris. Net-a-porter.com monopolizes the side-panel flashing Spring Fever and imploring me to Shop Now. M.I.A ‘s “Ten Dollar” plays, quietly, over all of this. I’m exposing myself—albeit half assed--to this media monster, declaring “bring it on” to the World Wide Web. I am channeling Jeanette Hayes.

A week ago at this time I was en route to meet Jeanette. A crowded F train at Delancey/Essex brought me nose to nose with a guy wearing a black trilby similar to mine. “You have a good look,” he said and we chatted about our respective plans for the day. He, an artist, was off to meet friends and tour the galleries. I, of course, was on my way to interview the up-and-coming artista. As I prepared to exit the train at Broadway-Lafayette, he asked, “If I tell you my name, will you remember it?” He proceeded to spell it out and added, “Google me.”

Service was restored to my phone as I emerged at street level and, typing his name into the Google search bar, I considered whether his brash request wasn’t simply a spin on exchanging business cards. Thus, I sought to consult the socialmedia-siren, Jeanette Hayes, for her take on the exchange. “Your online persona is an extension of you,” she rapped expertly. “In fact, I don’t trust anyone, or any company, without an internet identity.” We’re sitting at The Smile on Bond Street in Jeanette’s SoHo neighborhood, the décor of which reminds me of a general store on the American frontier.

Hayes walked through the door outfitted in a knee-length camel coat with fur lapels, statement shades and a glazed-leather doctor’s bag. I had been curious to see how she navigated the vapid trends that mainstream media promotes as “fashionable.” Given she’s a self-admitted pop-culture junkie, Jeanette’s personal take on street wear is refreshing: a touch of timelessness to a girl who in all other ways illustrates the phrase “of the moment.”

“Want to see a funny picture?” Jeanette holds out her phone to show me a bizarre still life. The photo is of a porcelain cat arranged on an unmade bed, the keyboard of some unseen desktop computer lies next to it. “My mom is so funny.

She sends me these pictures all the time.” Moments later, her mom sends another: the picture is exactly the same except for (this time) the keyboard is positioned a few inches closer to the cat. I like that her mom has perfected the composition and I ask Jeanette if her mom, too, is an artist. “Well, no. She is very artistic though.

She also designs interiors of dollhouses,” (she’s done this all of Jeanette’s life) “I think she does it more now that I’ve moved away.”

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And what has Jeanette Hayes been up to since leaving hometown Chicago?

Why, forging herself as social-media darling and a New York City art-scene-staple simultaneously, of course.

Her sprawling web presence, rife with kitschy self-portraits and mashed celebrity photos--veritable glitter bombs of her own design--establishes an exciting contrast when you consider her art-world come-uppings. A graduate of Pratt Institute with a BFA in painting, Hayes received a traditional arts education heavy on classic technique with reverence for the old ways. She has come out the other side with her sights firmly set on the digital age and an unorthodox creative approach.

She describes her daily painting routine as a media circus: “When I work I have two computers and a big screen TV playing all around me. Maybe one with sound and the others muted.” And what is she watching? “I love Mob Wives.”

Type “Jeanette Hayes” into a basic Google Image search and you’ll discover an enviable five-plus pages saturated with her signature pout and platinum tresses.

But examples of her current body of work you’ll be hard-pressed to find. So why all the mystery?

“If I post something insignificant on the internet—like a funny picture—it will circulate so much faster than if I post something I truly care about. It’s a blessing and a curse, really, keeping my work off of the internet. Also, when you put anything online it belongs to the whole world, I have found my work reposted on [other peoples’] sites. Now I give teasers--little details of what I am working on--but I have stopped uploading the full pieces.”

Hayes’ work has morphed since her Pratt days in Brooklyn. Her (then) expansive studio space could accommodate such grand canvases on which she dabbled in mixed media and featured pop idolatry. Now, working comfortably in her SoHo apartment, Jeanette focuses on smaller, sometimes handheld canvases. It is the detail and skill of these oil paintings that sets her work apart from others who, despite a desire to marry classic mediums with modern imagery, fall short in execution. Hayes pays homage to the expertly designed media iconography that most of us disregard entirely in our day-to-day existence. In her work, tiny images that are simply a means to an end for you or I (mere icons on your computer desktop, a Firefox symbol for example) are transformed into expertly crafted studies on color and shape. Washed in visionary landscapes, one of which references a legendary Botticelli piece, these canvases re-appropriate the utilitarian of the digital age and raise it toward the divine.

Yet even now, while creating such relevant and exceptional work, Jeanette is looking forward. “I don’t want to be pigeonholed into a particular style before I’ve had a chance to explore everything.”

Moreover, she makes a point of distinguishing her true art from the dazzlingly campy pieces she puts online. “Even though I use modern imagery I always mean to be thoughtful, not funny. I don’t want to be funny.”

We’ve migrated to the New Museum, just another essential art outpost that shares a zip code with Hayes. Before this, we stopped by a little gallery with a lot to say, The Hole, where she’s become a fixture at the sensationalist openings and events. I’m buzzing on this guided art tour she’s taking me for (and perhaps the “seasonal” cocktail we had at The Smile) and I want to know how accurately today

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mirrors her everyday life. I ask if she is making this trip especially for me, or if these are her regular haunts? “Daily,” she replies, without missing a beat. “It was harder to do so when I was in Brooklyn. But now that I live [in SoHo] I can visit these spaces regularly.”

While we stand in line for tickets, the available clerk beckons for us to advance. But Jeanette doesn’t approach him. She waits for his coworker to finish with visitors and before we have even made it to the counter, he has two tickets ready for us. “Thanks!” she says, genuinely. They are friendly. “Hey, who is the most famous artist who has come in today?” She prompts him cheekily. “Well, no one has really been in yet. But now… Jeanette Hayes!”

I inquire as to how they know each other. “I know him from the internet. [We] have a solid community of artists that take care of one another,” she explains as we walk through the galleries. Later, as we’re sitting in the museum café, she waves to another patron: “He’s a really brilliant artist. He went to The Cooper [Union].”

I ask her to make a statement about what is happening in the art world.

Jeanette admits that it is hard to understand what is occurring when you are living in it—that you need to be removed from it to truly assess the movement. She further explains that it is difficult to identify a trend in this age because, with access to so much information via the web, “everyone is doing everything.” Art today isn’t necessarily reflective of one’s personal experience.

And what about the adage of not being famous in this culture until you’re dead? Does that theory still hold water?

In a word, “No.” “Artists can foster an audience—and I believe the internet can take us to even greater heights than we’ve yet seen. None of the established ‘greats’ of this time are on Twitter (for example). Sure, they have people working for them who Tweet, but they aren’t doing it themselves. That is going to change. The new generation of artists will manage their own fame during their lifetime.”

Though Jeanette certainly has what it takes to maintain an image that will bring her to unforeseen heights, she graciously acknowledges the support that she’s had from others. “I’ve had a lot of help from people, like you, who take notice of me and promote my work. That is invaluable. I have a good product and good promotion—you definitely have to have both to be successful. Really, the only thing that can stop me now would be a Lohan-esque meltdown.”

I laugh at this. The image of Jeanette in some grainy mug shot is hard to muster. Getting caught up in the party scene just isn’t her style. She has a steadfastness and unique elegance about her that is impressive. Beyond that, Jeanette reveals that she couldn’t imagine taking a path other than the pursuit of her art.

I ask Hayes to describe the next steps of her career to me. She explains that representation by a gallery will come to follow, but only when she is ready to make that move. She remains open to the possibility that her style may change and welcomes new inspirations. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if she were to discover an entirely new approach to the traditional gallery opening by the time she is ready to show her work. To this, Hayes smiles knowingly and adds, “I want to completely find my voice before I start screaming.”

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DANGER ZONE

Inspired in the late ‘00s by Girl Talk, Diplo, and Hood Internet, Danger Boy’s roots were in creating ADD-fueled mix-mashes of anything and everything. Now he’s cutting together lesserknown electrohouse and dubstep artists with Dirty South boom-bap and homegrown beats on the OP-1 and the occasional injections of soul and pop-rap.

Rumors are also going around about his side project as a sex slave, but then again, those are just rumors. You’ll have to get your hands on one of his many passports to learn the truth, but if you’re on the Riviera and hear Lord Pompadero’s arriving, run.

LA neighborhood: Culver Restaurant: Chili’s Hotel: Trump International (Vegas) Coffee shop: The Bulldog (Amsterdam) Escape: ninja vanish smoke bomb Gallery: Bows & Arrows (Dallas) Museum: Nasher (Dallas) Bar: The Central SAPC Destination: Death Star Center of debauchery: Dionysus, God of Wine US city: Boston International city: Vancouver

Beer: Jack Daniels Cocktail: Jack Daniels Munchie: Jack Daniels Meal: Jack Daniels on ice Liquor: KITTENS! Caffeine: Epi-Pen Phone: Going to have to try harder than that.

Camera: Olympus TOUGH Line Watch: Breitling Shades: Blu Blockers Cologne: Armani Emporio Suits: J. Crew Tee: black v Kicks: Star Wars x adidas Originals - Galactic Scoundrel Forum Mid iGadget: iPad Non-iGadget: Teenage Engineering OP-1 Car: Land Speeder Skateboard: No, not really.

Song: REO Speedwagon “Keep on Loving You” DJ: Diplo Producer: J Dilla Album: Daft Punk Homework Rapper: Childish Gambino Band: Ratatat Comedian: Louis C.K. Dance music: Zed’s Dead Smoke music: Zed’s Dead Movie: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Superhero: Iron Man 007: Pierce Brosnan TV show: Jackass Author: Vonnegut NFL draft pick: Andrew Luck NBA player: RONDO Sport to watch: Professional Staring Color: black Photographer: Terry Richardson Contemporary artist: Willie Binnie Porn star: Stoya Procrastination: Internet Hangover cure: pickle juice, bacon Workout: push ups, sit ups Holiday: MLK Sport to play: Ultimate Time to be irresponsible: NO PARENTS Discovery: the Earth rotates around the Sun Invention: Internet Charity: You mean that stripper in Vegas?

Inspiration: drugs Sex position: The XXX-Wing

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