Step inside the Brooklyn Co-working Space Designed Especially for Freelance Writers

First published on Collective Hub, November 2016 

The shared office space has come a long way since Google made free beer and access to ping-pong seem like the holy grail of the working world. These days, you can find a co-working space that lets you drop into branches in any city (WeWork), punctuate deadlines with breaks for green juice and yoga (Manhattan’s Primary) or talk strategy with creative icons while reclining on a lounge designed by David Rockwell (Neuehouse). But if you’re a freelance writer looking for camaraderie or, at the very least, an alternative to the yawning solitude of staring at your laptop for days on end, chances are that your pickings are a little slimmer.

It’s a sentiment that resonates with Kyle Chayka and Peter Moskowitz. In September 2015, the Brooklyn-based freelance writers started Study Hall, a co-working space committed to providing self-employed journalists with the connections and creative inspiration that’s difficult to come by in a bedroom or favourite coffee shop. It also offers the all-important sense of community that allows freelance writers to thrive.

“I had been working in a different co-working space in Bushwick,” Kyle tells me over a coffee on an unseasonably hot New York day. “It was perfectly fine but the people who were there were start-ups, graphic designers and film editors so I felt like I could never really talk about work with them. When I met Peter, I asked him if he’d want to start an office for freelance writers and he said definitely! We wrote up this description of our plans for it and published it on Medium. Because we know a lot of journalists, we ended up collecting a lot of emails! It turned out that a lot of people were into the idea.”

\Although the pair opened the first version of Study Hall in Bushwick, a grungy neighbourhood that’s becoming gentrified by a steady trickle of artists and entrepreneurs looking for respite from the pricey leases in nearby Williamsburg, they’ve since secured a 660 square-foot studio in Gowanus, a fast-changing precinct closer to the East River that’s seen their plans take shape. So far, the Gowanus space, which is dotted with communal farmhouse tables, shelves holding the latest issues of N + 1 and the New Yorker and a vintage couch, ideal for swapping story ideas or collaborating on new projects, has played host to a series of readings and writing workshops. The space, which counts around 25 members who write about everything from culture and business to politics, also recreates some of the energy of a newsroom — a rare commodity given a 2015 Niemen Lab survey found that full-time journalism jobs have dropped 10.9 percent since 2014.

“If you’re a freelancer, you’re never in the same room with other freelance writers and for us that was the most important thing,” Kyle explains. “But we also do different kinds of programming from pitch meetings, where people talk about their story ideas or how to approach a particularly problem they’re having. We also have readings — last week, we hosted a book launch for my friend Larissa Pham and we also hold a reading series called Difficult to Name, which is run by a writer Ryan Sartor. This gets more people into the space and makes it seem like a real community.”

Study Hall is one in a string of new co-working spaces that are less interested in providing a one-size-fits all approach for freelancers than they are in meeting niche industry needs. In June 2016, Fuigo, a space devoted to nurturing interior designers and providing them with access to resources, software and networks sprang up on New York’s Park Avenue, San Francisco’s La Cocina caters to low-income food entrepreneurs and EdSpace in London’s Hackney houses freelance workers working to transform the education sector.

For Kyle, who says that it’s important to keep Study Hall affordable and accessible for its target demographic, industry-specific spaces signal the ways in which self-employment has evolved over the past few years. Part of the challenge, though, is creating a collective of like-minded workers while preserving the autonomy that makes freelancing such a compelling path.

“I feel like co-working started as a tech thing but it’s increasingly become about providing civic infrastructure and helping freelancers operate their businesses well,” he laughs. “But then it becomes question of: are you an advocate or is it more about providing a service? When it comes to writers whenever you go one way, everyone tends to go the other way. It’s a little bit like herding cats.”

Step inside the Brooklyn Co-working Space Designed Especially for Freelance Writers

First published on Collective Hub, November 2016 

The shared office space has come a long way since Google made free beer and access to ping-pong seem like the holy grail of the working world. These days, you can find a co-working space that lets you drop into branches in any city (WeWork), punctuate deadlines with breaks for green juice and yoga (Manhattan’s Primary) or talk strategy with creative icons while reclining on a lounge designed by David Rockwell (Neuehouse). But if you’re a freelance writer looking for camaraderie or, at the very least, an alternative to the yawning solitude of staring at your laptop for days on end, chances are that your pickings are a little slimmer.

It’s a sentiment that resonates with Kyle Chayka and Peter Moskowitz. In September 2015, the Brooklyn-based freelance writers started Study Hall, a co-working space committed to providing self-employed journalists with the connections and creative inspiration that’s difficult to come by in a bedroom or favourite coffee shop. It also offers the all-important sense of community that allows freelance writers to thrive.

“I had been working in a different co-working space in Bushwick,” Kyle tells me over a coffee on an unseasonably hot New York day. “It was perfectly fine but the people who were there were start-ups, graphic designers and film editors so I felt like I could never really talk about work with them. When I met Peter, I asked him if he’d want to start an office for freelance writers and he said definitely! We wrote up this description of our plans for it and published it on Medium. Because we know a lot of journalists, we ended up collecting a lot of emails! It turned out that a lot of people were into the idea.”

\Although the pair opened the first version of Study Hall in Bushwick, a grungy neighbourhood that’s becoming gentrified by a steady trickle of artists and entrepreneurs looking for respite from the pricey leases in nearby Williamsburg, they’ve since secured a 660 square-foot studio in Gowanus, a fast-changing precinct closer to the East River that’s seen their plans take shape. So far, the Gowanus space, which is dotted with communal farmhouse tables, shelves holding the latest issues of N + 1 and the New Yorker and a vintage couch, ideal for swapping story ideas or collaborating on new projects, has played host to a series of readings and writing workshops. The space, which counts around 25 members who write about everything from culture and business to politics, also recreates some of the energy of a newsroom — a rare commodity given a 2015 Niemen Lab survey found that full-time journalism jobs have dropped 10.9 percent since 2014.

“If you’re a freelancer, you’re never in the same room with other freelance writers and for us that was the most important thing,” Kyle explains. “But we also do different kinds of programming from pitch meetings, where people talk about their story ideas or how to approach a particularly problem they’re having. We also have readings — last week, we hosted a book launch for my friend Larissa Pham and we also hold a reading series called Difficult to Name, which is run by a writer Ryan Sartor. This gets more people into the space and makes it seem like a real community.”

Study Hall is one in a string of new co-working spaces that are less interested in providing a one-size-fits all approach for freelancers than they are in meeting niche industry needs. In June 2016, Fuigo, a space devoted to nurturing interior designers and providing them with access to resources, software and networks sprang up on New York’s Park Avenue, San Francisco’s La Cocina caters to low-income food entrepreneurs and EdSpace in London’s Hackney houses freelance workers working to transform the education sector.

For Kyle, who says that it’s important to keep Study Hall affordable and accessible for its target demographic, industry-specific spaces signal the ways in which self-employment has evolved over the past few years. Part of the challenge, though, is creating a collective of like-minded workers while preserving the autonomy that makes freelancing such a compelling path.

“I feel like co-working started as a tech thing but it’s increasingly become about providing civic infrastructure and helping freelancers operate their businesses well,” he laughs. “But then it becomes question of: are you an advocate or is it more about providing a service? When it comes to writers whenever you go one way, everyone tends to go the other way. It’s a little bit like herding cats.”

In Praise of ’90s Mallrat Summers

First published on VICE Weekends, November 2016.

Victor Gruen was a serial optimist. Back in 1952, the Austrian architect who dreamt of bringing the cosmopolitan atmosphere of his native Vienna to the identikit streets of Middle America built the world’s first enclosed mall in Edina, Minnesota. The Southdale Centre was a split-level oasis where white, middle class shoppers could stroll through indoor boulevards and convene around indoor ponds, fringed with foliage. Best of all, they could buy whatever they wanted in air-conditioned comfort, protected from the unsavoury parts of the population that might greet them downtown.

This indoor utopia became the model for more than 1000 shopping centres that multiplied across the US in the next four decades—along with Brisbane’s Chermside and Melbourne’s Chadstone, both built in the late ’50s as part of Australia’s own mall craze. Gruen eventually became disgusted that his community hubs had morphed into sky-lit wastelands, thanks to post-war tax laws that made big developments seriously profitable.

He never could have guessed that for the generation of teenagers who grew up in ’90s suburbia, life would play out in malls called the Forum, the Palms, or the Plaza—names that were designed to evoke the town squares of Ancient Europe, but instead managed to intensify the reality of suburban existence. When you’re hours away from anything resembling an urban experience and years away from the around-the-clock thrills of the internet, there was nowhere else you could go.

It’s easy to dismiss ’90s malls as soulless shrines to consumption, home to crappy food courts, and embarrassing mid-market chain stores. But doing so ignores the ways in which these places gave teenagers a sense of connection with each other, as well as the freedom to be themselves. As a teenager, Saturdays and school holidays were spent with my friends, drifting up and down the escalators or circling the faux-Milanese atrium, the focal point of an exceedingly average Perth mall called the Galleria. We’d stop to try on Doc Martens that were out of our price range or cowl neck minidresses meant for nightclubs we were too young to go to. These unsupervised hours were our first real taste of adult freedom. The inward-facing nature of mall architecture let us indulge in our friendships and be as insular as we wanted to be—we were free to simply drift, to take up space. The things we did buy, like strawberry lip balms from The Body Shop and albums salvaged from the discount rack at Sanity, didn’t feel like consumer items, they felt like the evidence of our bonds.

And yeah, ’90s malls were home to shops like Foot Locker, Surf Dive N’ Ski and Myer (if you were lucky), but the blandness of that era’s brand worship was weirdly accommodating to difference as well. If you were into hip-hop or surfing or metal, you could, in that teenage way, find your sense of self in a pair of high-tops and display your allegiance to your subculture. If you were a nonwhite kid, those sliding glass doors were a portal to a life you didn’t often have access to and became the only time you go to be a regular Australian teenager. You could find your people at the mall whether you were Dionne from Clueless or Brodie from Mallrats. Even if consumerism was partly responsible, there was something special about that suburban sea of sameness that felt profound.

In the last decade, our tastes—thanks in part to the internet—have changed. You’ll find artisanal donut shops and Michelin-starred dumpling houses in place of anonymous carveries. Laminate food courts now have Scandinavian furniture and copper fixtures, and boutiques offer pop-up yoga classes or events promising “cocktails and conversation,” which are the antithesis of aimless roaming.

An April 2014 study by Piper Jaffrey found that teen mall traffic has declined 30% over the last decade. In January 2015, the ABC reported that half of America’s shopping malls will disappear in the next 15 years, with a similar fate predicted for Australia. According to a more recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald, shopping centres like Chadstone, Knox, and Doncaster are facing billion-dollar renovations in order to keep up with the current preference for online shopping.

When you browse the abandoned atriums and taped-up escalators of Dead Malls, it’s easy to pretend that the mall was never relevant, but it’s at least proof that the things we valued then are simply different from the things we value now. It’s not that artisanal is inherently better than generic or mainstream—the way we consume has skated towards the curated and experiential. The teenagers in the Piper Jaffrey survey don’t go to the mall to buy clothes or ride escalators; they prefer to spend their time in fancy restaurants.

As wealth has poured back into the cities, sprawling suburban shopping centres no longer symbolise affluence, but signs of decay. We need stories to exonerate ourselves from the conformity that the suburbs supposedly represent. Renouncing your mallrat past is one way to do that—even if those teenage summers spent cruising the mall with your friends were some of the most formative times of your life.

There’s nothing romantic about the myth of the dapper gentleman

First published in Daily Life/The Sydney Morning Herald, January 2017 

If there was a bible for the modern-day dapper gentleman, it would be written by Sebastian from La La Land.

In Damien Chazelle’s Oscar-tipped ode to the golden age of Hollywood musicals, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a Los Angeles pianist who dreams of saving jazz from a world whose ears have been dulled to the joys of a truly great bebop, only listens to vinyl. He collects furniture owned by dead guys with names like Hoagie Carmichael. And he whisks Emma Stone’s Mia to the movies in a red, vintage convertible and rocks a three-piece suit during the California summer without breaking a sweat.

If all this sounds pretty tedious, then you haven’t reckoned with the force of Gosling’s sweetly furtive glances and aw-shucks brand of charm. La La Land doesn’t just pine for a bygone time when men in suspenders courted wasp-waisted women and you could resolve the murky business of romance with a spontaneous dance in a jazz club. It makes us wish that time was now.

La La Land is less responsible for this newfound obsession with dapper gentlemen than it is for giving it filmic form. Open any men’s lifestyle magazine and you’re likely to find advice on the art of beard grooming (hint: a comb and pricey moustache wax), new-school dating guides that sound suspiciously old school (“every woman comes with baggage, your job is to help her unpack it”) and listicles on gentlemanly etiquette. According to my personal favourite,Country Life‘s March 2016 “The 39 Steps to Being a Gentleman”, a true gentleman always tips the gamekeeper, can undo a bra with one hand and would not go to Puerto Rico. Oh, and believes that it’s acceptable to use the word “maketh”

Visit any neighbourhood in Brooklyn, London or Melbourne and you’re bound to spot at least one whiskey bar that takes design cues from the kind of men’s club frequented by Winston Churchill, one barbershop that advertises shoe shines and hot shaves and one guy dressed like Benjamin Button, complete with newsboy cap and polished brogues.

Of course, dressing like a dapper gentleman is also a stylish way to signal to distinguish yourself from a garden-variety misogynist. A dapper gentleman would never ghost you, brag about your bedroom exploits on Reddit or ask for anything as déclassé as a golden shower. He’d just arrive, unannounced, in a vintage red convertible and sweep you away somewhere where there was lots of dancing, preferably under a full moon. What could be better than that?

I shudder every time I find myself in a colonial-themed bar because I know that the pleasure of sipping an Old Fashioned out of an antique glass would never have been extended to someone like me.

And as Katie J. M Baker argues in a 2012 article in Jezebel, chivalry — the religion of gentlemen everywhere — evolved to counter the barbarism of the Middle Ages by asking men to limit their violence to their role as protectors.

A September 2016 study by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that benevolent sexism, an attitude that champions female ambition, as long as it preserves the ideals of traditional femininity, was seriously eroding workplace equality.

And in the same month, a mens-only Sydney barbershop that specialises in Mad Men-era grooming came under fire for refusing to admit a transgender man. The trope of the dapper gentleman tells us that a great suit and good taste must be a sign of progressiveness. But anyone who recalls that Frank Sinatra once threw a champagne bottle at Ava Gardner will tell you, a sign of progressiveness can sometimes be a red flag.

In a November 2016 New York Times article, Manohal Durgis writes that La La Land has made musicals matter. “Afterward, I realised that this must have been what it was like to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers during the Great Depression,” she writes.

But maybe La La Land isn’t a fantasy for a world in which misogyny has gone mainstream. If you’ve fallen out of love with the trope of the dapper gentleman, it starts to look like a confirmation instead.

John Witzig Captured the Idealism of ’60s and ’70s Australian Surf Culture

First published in  VICE Weekends, November 2016.

Even if you’ve never seen a John Witzig photograph, chances are that you’ve entered its world in your head. The legendary photographer, who was friends with surfing icons such as Wayne Lynch, Nat Young, and Bob McTavish, is best known for spending the late ’60s and ’70s documenting the culture of coastal Australia. But his images of wild-haired boys running towards the ocean, friends in front of crumbling weatherboard beach shacks, and surfers riding glassy swells also evoke a certain fantasy about being young in Australia back then. It’s one that’s so idyllic, it’s hard to believe it really existed—even if you can practically smell the meadows of seagrass and the salty air.

“I’ve been fascinated by photographs from as early as I can remember and I’ve always been a magazine obsessive, but when I started taking surfing seriously, I was probably about 14 or 15—it was about 1959,” says Witzig, a former architecture student who went on to edit Surf International magazine and co-found cult surfing publication Tracks. “I knew Bob Evans [the publisher of Surfing World] and watched people taking surfing photographs and thought, ‘Golly, that’s not that hard!’ People like Nat and Bob just happened to be my friends; the people I surfed with. And from about 1966 on was when things really started happening in Australian surfing — before that we just copied the United States. Surfing was such a little world and it was amateurish, all based on shared enthusiasm. It’s only in the last decade or so that it’s been seen through a social documentary lens.”

Although his images capture the idealism of ’60s and ’70s Australia, a place where identity was as unchartered as the coastline, Witzig also tapped into that pre-Instagram sense of life unfolding in the moment and the private nature of the bonds between friends. A fan of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, he ranks Arcadia, a shot that shows McTavish and Lynch running across a creek in the Byron Bay hinterland, as one of his most defining.

“Arcadia shows Bob and Wayne at Possum Creek and I’ve loved it from the time I took it in 1969 until now,” says Witzig, who still lives on the NSW North Coast. “It ended up being the hero image for my 2014 show at the National Portrait Gallery. The scene wasn’t set up in any way. I was just recording what the people around me were doing. I was aware that Cartier-Bresson and other photographers like him didn’t try to intrude on the scene, that they tried to be invisible. In a way, it was good because those were my friends and they got used to me being there with a camera. It didn’t change anything.”

For Witzig, who chronicled the move away from the longboards associated with Californian surfing to the shortboards that would go on to define the sport internationally, surf culture was a metaphor for Australia’s obsession with the US. He questioned this slavishness in We’re Tops Now, a 1967 cover story for American publication Surfer written after Young won the World Surfing Championship in California in 1966. In 1970, he co-founded Tracks, along with Alby Falzon and David Elfick. Witzig says that the magazine, which became a strong voice in Australia’s counterculture and combined political satire with surfing coverage, was almost an instant success.

“In the ’60s, we just aped Californian surfing and this was during the Vietnam War where, by going into Vietnam, Australia was just aping the US foreign policy,” he tells VICE. “I was at university and we were at all the demonstrations and protests, so surfing always had broader significance for me. In 1969, I got sacked from Surfing International, Alby was working for Surfing World, and David was working for a pop newspaper called Go-Set. Collectively, we came up with Tracks. The Prime Minister at the time was William McMahon and he was just a joke so we made fun of him and we instantly found an audience who liked our adolescent, rebellious attitude. It was very much the spirit of the times. We thought we could do it and we just did.”

Although Witzig’s photography has been the subject of A Golden Age: Surfing Revolutionary 1960s and ’70s, a 2013 book by New York imprint Rizzoli, and Arcadia: A Sound of the Sea, a 2014 retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, he finds the new interest in his work unexpected.

“The idea that a major New York publisher would want to do a book of my pictures and that the National Portrait Gallery would do a show is ludicrous. I’m just astonished, to tell you the truth,” he says. “I was 70 in 2014, so that it’s happening now is hilarious. I don’t know why 30 year old kids are interested, although it’s wonderfully gratifying. There’s definitely a nostalgic element to it, but there’s something else there too.”

Another Day in Paradise

First published in Broadsheet, February 2017. 

Atong Atom: The Eye of the Beholder

First published in VAULT, Issue 17. 

Seeing can be synonymous with discovering. We often forget that the things that we look at aren’t made real by the act of looking but inhabit universes of their own. This hit me with a jolt the first time I stumbled upon an image of two women, staring defiantly at the viewer against a patterned backdrop by Atong Atem at Gertrude Contemporary earlier this year. The Melbourne artist, who moved to Australia from Bor, South Sudan as a child, draws on the legacy of African photographers such as Malick Sidibé, whose images capture the freewheeling energy of post-independence Mali and Seydou Keïta, whose studio portraits are a joyous corrective to dour, ethnographic studies. Her images use African iconography — wax print fabrics, headdresses, flowers — to offer a visual affront to a world intent on both cashing in on blackness and finding new ways to revive the old, colonial gaze. VAULT caught up with Atem, who’s shown her work at Red Hook Labs in Brooklyn and Amsterdam’s Unseen Photo Fair, to talk about the politics of looking and the power of making images that shake off historical weight.

Earlier this year, you exhibited a body of work, Studio Series, at Gertrude Contemporary and also showed as part of New African Photography at Red Hook Labs in Brooklyn. When did you first start taking photos?

When I was first studying architecture at university in 2010, I was just out of high school and didn’t have a solid understanding of race and colonialism, which are a big part of my practice now. It was so exciting when I started coming across those themes in the context of art-making and contemporary art. I started investigating the ways uni was lacking and why I wasn’t seeing reflections of myself and my way of thinking. I discovered a lot of African photographers — people like Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta — who were working in the studio photography style, which I was really familiar with. It all started with my personal curiosity.

Your series, Third Culture Kids, features your friends as subjects, adorned with fake flowers and African wax print fabrics against elaborate backdrops. Your visual language explicitly references African studio photography, a mainstay of colonial times. How did the work come about?

It all ties into the notion of investigating colonialism as a black woman living in Australia within the context of art. When I started that series, I’d just moved to Melbourne from New South Wales. I’d lived on the Central Cost, which was incredibly white and Melbourne was the opposite. I became friends with a collective of young African people here, Still Nomads, and they’ve become my closest friends. It was amazing to find people who are really similar to me and are also investigating colonialism, colourism, race and feminism — all this amazing stuff that I’d spent my whole life thinking about but didn’t know how to vocalise. That’s why I photographed them.

The people who I collaborate with have their own references for those images and what they mean to them in terms of their own family albums, which are filled with really similar photographs. Although I bring in my own options for props and set backdrops, I’m very conscious of not wanting to represent my friends in [my own] way. It’s a collaboration.

 You’ve said before that your influences include the Ghanaian photographer Philip Kwame Apagya, New York sculptor Wangechi Mutu and British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare. Why is decolonising blackness important to you and how can artists find power in resisting the gaze of white audiences?

A lot of my motivation comes from [the way African communities are] represented in the media or things that I didn’t have access to as a young person who needed to have their self-esteem reassured. Part of the reason I make art at all is because, growing up, I didn’t see myself represented in the art world or in the media or anywhere and led myself to believe that I wasn’t allowed to occupy that space. As much as someone can be incredibly self-confident, capable or talented, when you don’t see yourself represented anywhere it confirms the fact that whatever society says about you is correct. The liminal space that we live in is so limiting.

I was so excited when I saw the work that I’m constantly referencing because it subverts the idea that there are certain acceptable ways to be black or African or that my art should look a certain way or I shouldn’t be making art at all. That’s why I studied architecture initially because I thought maybe art isn’t for me. But I’m terrible at maths and my architectural drawing teachers was like, ‘go to art school, what are you doing here!’

I think about the gaze as a system of control, whether it’s the white gaze, the male gaze or the heteronormative gaze. When we subvert it, ignore it, draw attention to its negative aspects or act in ways that it doesn’t permit us to act, we take power into our own hands.

The thing I find amazing about studio photography it is that it started at the height of colonialism with photographers that were coming out of Africa. Just this idea that Africans were like, ‘okay, the British or French are taking photos of us, controlling our image and representing our cultures and personal identities the way you want — we’re going to take this camera and take photos of ourselves the way we want to.’ Even if it mimics the white gaze, if it’s coming from that culture of individuals, then it’s powerful. It’s something that applies to this day.

Who is breaking ground in this arena?

The photographers that I was in the group show with at Red Hook Labs. Delphine Diallo, who makes really surrealist collages, images and portraiture and a photographer named Lakin Ogunbanwu who showed a series on traditional Nigerian headwear. There’s also a London stylist, Ibrahim Kamara, who’s part of a collection of stylists and artists who live around the world who are challenging black masculinity. They do fashion projects and take amazing portraits of dark-skinned black men against very soft backdrops. I’ve also seen a lot of cool stuff around futuristic representations of blackness. There’s a new hyper-awareness of the way Africans have been presented in art and media. It’s an [an important] moment in African art.

atongatem.com

Lisa Yuskavage: Dancer in the dark

First published in VAULT, issue 15. 

Lisa Yuskavage isn’t afraid of being too much. The New York artist, who has spent the last quarter of a decade painting a universe peopled by feminine subjects, whose bombshell physicality – legs splayed, breasts swollen – cloak the tawdry thrill of finding an old Penthouse, tucked under your pillow, in the quasi-spiritual glow of a Renaissance fresco, tells me that a queasy response has never put her off.

“Have you ever had someone invite you over for dinner and then start opening cans of food?” she asks me, over the phone from her studio in Brooklyn. “And you’re like, holy shit, you’re inviting me for dinner and all you’re doing is opening up cans of food? What did I come here for? When someone is standing in front of one of my paintings, I don’t want it to be like that. I want them to feel as if I went all out. Maybe they can’t stomach it and prefer canned food but I’d really rather someone have a reaction. It would kill culture if artists made something for everyone. Then you’re really reducing yourself to being ordinary.”

Provocative. Epic. Cynical. Yuskavage has attracted a rollcall of adjectives since becoming famous in the mid-nineties (alongside contemporaries such as John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton) with her Bad Babies series, works in which half-naked women with woebegone expressions press through curtains of peep show red and midnight blue, like deviant escapees from some long-repressed fugue state, but ordinary has never ranked high on that particular list. Whether they’re fondling their lovers, examining their bodies or reclining post-coitus, the characters that populate her paintings are both deeply unsettling and unspeakably beautiful (it’s not for nothing that Yuskavage, who’s been compared to Vermeer, is considered one of the foremost painters of her generation), good girls who wear lace and keep flowers while doing bad girl things. If, like some of her critics, you’re rankled by her work’s smuttier elements, you might believe that morality exists outside respectability, rather than that what we often deem immoral is sometimes just not respectable enough.

“Years ago, an astrologer told me that as a provocateur, I performed an important role in society and someone has to stimulate these kinds of conversations,” laughs Yuskavage, who, a world way from the steely presence I’d been imagining, speaks like your best friend’s older sister, seesawing between fierce intelligence and real-talk candour. “If you’re just stirring the pot for the sake of stirring the pot, you can’t always predict what it’s going to do. But I think that I intend to show a much richer, layered image of an inner life and an inner life has many voices. I like to think the Pope struggles against his bad nature too.”

Yuskavage, who grew up in the sixties in Juniata Park, a working-class Philadelphia neighbourhood, never felt like she had to subscribe to an unspoken code. “Although I’m from a very specific kind of American family, where everyone around me came from parts of Europe, Italy and Lithuania and are first or second-generation European peasants who never had an education, there was always this push that we came here for better things,” says Yuskavage, who is married to the painter Matvey Levenstein, a political refugee from Russia, who she met in the eighties at the Yale School of Art. “My mother came from this very large Irish Catholic family and it was always the women who would be making food, cleaning up and talking but if you mentioned the word ‘feminist’ – and this was very typical for the ‘50s and ‘60s – they thought ‘lesbian.’ But it was clear that my sister and I were going to go to college and for anything we wanted. The questions of feminism were just a matter of commonsense. They never put limits on their girls or questioned what their girls might become.”

At school, Yuskavage, who was part of an advanced placement program, would take excursions to museums and galleries in Philadelphia and, once, found herself sitting in front of a painting by Van Gogh. Although she’d never had an aptitude for drawing, she felt a “near-psychic” connection, a voltage that galvanised her decision to attend Philadelphia’s Tyler Art School and later, apply for an MFA at Yale. Like Yuskavage, I remember how coming across Warhol stills an empty gallery as a teenager woke me up to a world beyond identikit suburbia. Electricity has a way of ricocheting through a life.

“If you expose poor kids to culture, you just don’t know what you’re going to get,” says Yuskavage, who has shown everywhere from the Royal Academy of Arts, London to the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City and whose works, which have fetched as much as $1.3 million at auction, according to an April 2015 article in The Wall Street Journal, are held in museums including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “But it took a long time to work out what kind of artist I was – did I draw? Did I dance? When I was at Yale, most of my friends had already had private tutors and when I was at art school, my mother said that she’d never seen anyone work so hard in her life. You know when Michelangelo said he’d always seen David in the marble and all he had to do was chip away at it? I really think that life is just a combination of chance and something genetic. I was always meant to be making the work that I make.”

But like most twenty-something artists whose hopes for their work eclipse the life they need to live to make it, Yuskavage struggled to find her voice. In 1990, she showed a series of masterful nudes as part of her first solo exhibition at New York’s Pamela Auchincloss Gallery but the paintings so out of sync with her vision, she barely recognised them. Then 27, she spent a year sitting in an apartment in Ludlow Street, watching movies by the directors Tarkovsky and Fassbinder but it wasn’t until she came across David Lynch’s 1986 classic Blue Velvet that Yuskavage saw the shape of things to come. Her 1991 painting The Gifts, which shows a woman, nipples erect, against a jewel-green background, embodies a mood of horror and desire so startling it seems to sit outside art-historical contexts. Like Diane Arbus, whose portrayal of freakish outsiders holds a mirror up to our best and worst instincts, Yuskavage suggests that the otherness we fear isn’t outside us but lurks within. Unsurprisingly, she is an ardent fan of the late photographer. “Lady was truly a genius,” she recently posted to Instagram.

“When I was offered that first show, Pamela kept insisting that I was a really good painter and I kept feeling that it wasn’t who I am,” recalls Yuskavage, who’s about to travel to China for a group show at the Long Museum in Shanghai. “I don’t make tasty little crumpets. I wanted to make something that is much more complicated and reflective of my nature which is full of love but also full of vinegar and is a much more layered kind of an object. I wanted to talk about vulgar, screaming, punky things alongside beauty and light but assumed that wasn’t permitted. I didn’t recognise the art that I was making. In Blue Velvet, a woman is violated by a character called Frank and he’s sucking some kind of weird gas, being really puerile with her and that was upsetting. But I was like what would it be like to make a painting in the persona of someone I really feared? After The Gifts, I felt like I was breathing actual air because I’d assumed the enemy’s voice and found the voice of complexity, my own voice. It’s this sense of internalising the enemy and understanding that the enemy is in you.”

This voice of complexity is also a portal to that uneasy place in which multiple things can be true. Brood (2006), which showed as part of Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, a 2015 survey at the Rose Art Museum near Boston, Massachusetts, sees a heavily pregnant woman in front of a fruit bowl, awash in storybook pink. Its sensuous palette winks at a tradition that turns woman into deities, monstrous curves at a culture in which female bodies are still abject, policed and controlled. Hippies (2013), features four impish figures, including the guys that have started to materialise in her pictures, protruding from either side of a colourless nude. It feels like an apparition, like something that wasn’t painted as much as it was divined into being. And when paintings have lives of their own, they can speak to those who exist outside art history. Maybe even those looking for permission to be a little too much themselves.

“After my first show, I realised the very particular voice that I could speak in has never been heard and when I get backlash I realise that it’s impossible to recognise what you’ve never experienced,” she smiles. “Recently, a young African-American kid came to photograph me for a magazine and he said, ‘Can I just say you are one of my biggest influences?’ He had walked into the Whitney Biennale and seen my work and realised that, as a young black man, something about it spoke to him. He said, ‘you’re a badass and I want to be a badass.’ Going into that museum as a kid, seeing the painting that was hanging there, changed my life and that’s why art needs to include the voices of people who they’ve never heard from before whether they’re women or those from other classes. Not just in their own community but beyond that.”

Lisa Yuskavage is represented by David Zwirner, New York.

yuskavage.com

davidzwirner.com

Zaha Hadid: Future Perfect

Zaha Hadid, the Pritzker-prize winning force who died suddenly, aged 65, earlier this year was one of architecture’s most polarising figures, her curvaceous buildings – symbolic of possibilities rather than boundaries – proof of a vernacular that exploded the Modernist obsession with hard lines and right angles and pushed the field to its very edge. As Melbourne gets a step closer to its own Zaha Hadid building (a 54-storey tower, designed to resemble a series of stacked vases), Vault asked three acclaimed voices in Australian architecture to choose their favourite Hadid project and reflect on the ways they’ve been influenced by her life and work.

Karl Fender: Vitra Fire Station, Germany

The larger-than-life, Suprematist landscapes that Zaha Hadid painted in her early career captured the architecture industry’s collective imagination, hinting at what the built world could look like in the future. But when Hadid’s iconic Vitra Fire Station was completed in Weil Am Rhein, Germany in 1993, the sense of intellectual curiosity and architectural expression that was a hallmark of her paintings were physically realised for the first time.

Although modest in scale, the building soared in spirit and presence. It harnessed the exuberance of her paintings and elevated the practical fire station paradigm into the realm of sculpture. The notion of a fire station as a box equipped with tilt-up doors and fire-fighting appliances was recast as an artful composition of dramatic planes and surfaces.

Hadid was committed to exploring and expressing the emotive qualities of her architectural language and displayed a resolute confidence in her craft. In many ways, her paintings were two-dimensional explorations, which surprised the world by transcending the boundaries and strictures of architectural thinking and documentation. This allowed her to foster a singular oeuvre and leave the world a rich legacy indeed.

Karl Fender is a founding director of Fender Katsalidis, the architecture firm behind the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Canberra’s New Acton precinct and Australia 108 in Melbourne’s Southbank.

fkaustralia.com

Catherine Lassen: The Peak, Hong Kong

In a public lecture at the Sydney Opera House in the 1980s, Hadid presented radically beautiful architectural paintings for The Peak, her winning competition entry for a private leisure club in Hong Kong. An architecture student at the time, I was struck by the precision and layered thought within her unexpected visualisations. Her planes of colour seemed to dissolve and fragment both the towered metropolis of Hong Kong and its dramatic surrounding landscape into slivers of paint and light, which floated in space to re-form as an intense, inhabited moment. Although her paint was materially emphasised, the suggested building evoked immaterial conditions.

Perspectives of this project indicated multiple dynamic viewpoints, frozen moments from a place hard to locate, perhaps from somewhere in the future. Clearly experimental in conception, the work seemed to be searching for possible new ways forward, but from within modernism, pursuing elements such as Russian Constructivism and Suprematism.

Hadid’s contribution was wide-ranging. I saw her teach at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design with a generous open-mindedness, intellectual intensity and a lack of pretention. Her installations, such as The Great Utopia exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1992 were architecturally energetic and provocative. She led knowledgably, with commitment and was never afraid to take chances.

Catherine Lassen is an architect and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sydney and recently designed site-specific furniture pieces for works by Yoko Ono as part of a major MCA retrospective on the artist’s work.

Ninotschka Tichkosky: Kartal Urban Transformation Project, Istanbul

Although Zaha Hadid’s reputation has been largely built on architecture’s object-based nature, her attempts to rethink city-making, as illustrated by her masterplan for the Kartal Urban Transformation Project, is one of her most interesting achievements. Cities are a unifying platform for architecture in urban areas and considering new possibilities for the way we shape our cities is critical to our work.

The Kartal project explores the use of computational scripting to inform urban street and block patterns, connections as well as a more fluid approach to density and height. It changes the conversation we might have about future city planning and urban renewal. Although the success of this masterplan was unproven, its relevance lies in the concepts Hadid raises. The soft grid adjusts itself to Istanbul’s future conditions while drawing on the city’s historical plan — a radical departure from more typical, static urban frameworks. When we think about innovation precincts and smart cities, it’s so important to consider new paradigms.

Zaha Hadid has often been accused of championing siteless architecture but when [BVN Architecture] collaborated with Zaha Hadid Architects over the proposed redevelopment of Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station, as part of the Flinders Street Station Design Competition in 2013, we were absolutely focused on knitting the project into the existing urban space. There was often a lack of understanding about her projects’ intentions. It’s also important to acknowledge that, despite Zaha’s strong personal brand, Zaha Hadid Architects is a large firm and many hands contribute to her portfolio of work. Despite the tension between her believers and non-believers, Hadid was a highly talented and formidable person who managed to grow her practice and continue to explore the limits of our profession. We should be grateful for this alone.

Ninotschka Tichosky is an award-winning principal of BVN Architecture and counts Sydney’s ANZ Stadium and the proposed redevelopment of Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station – a collaboration with Zaha Hadid Architects – among her projects.

bvn.com.au

Tal R: If these walls could talk

First published in VAULT, Issue 16.

Tal R believes that craft is overrated. The Tel Aviv-born, Denmark-raised painter, whose palette of dirty pinks, jewel greens and schoolbus yellows manages to endow a parade of supine women, street scenes and carnivalesque spaces with an interior life that transcends their inanimate origins, says that intent always trumps technique when it comes to making art.

“I always want my paintings to be more about expression,” laughs Tal R, who has long dropped his last name – Rosenzwieg – for a moniker that makes him seem more elusive than he actually is. “Craft simply colours in the expression. When I was teaching, I had students who were living in Russia and had a formal education in painting so could paint masterfully. They knew all the tricks. But there was nothing in their paintings. You try to teach them that the craft should follow the idea, not the other way around and it’s always the idea that drives it. And even if you lack craft, it doesn’t matter because your sense of necessity will be so strong, you will create the tools. If you get to a stage where you’re just polishing your tools, then I’d stop. Because even though in one way, the work gets better, in the important way the work gets worse. It gets sharper but the bone inside it just disappears.”

Tal R, who’s talking to me over the phone from his studio in Copenhagen, has spent the last two decades reconciling romantic ideas about artistic expression with aesthetic achievements that somehow both wink at painterly traditions and inhabit the zeitgeist before it unfolds. In 2003, Lords of Koboljnik, his first solo exhibition at London’s Victoria Miro gallery, he cast paintings and tapestries alongside 32 drawings. The sprawling show (“I wanted it to be like a group show,” he admits) which takes its name from the Hebrew word for ‘leftovers’ and riffed on cultural detritus could have bordered on schizophrenic – had the artist’s visual exuberance and knack for wry innuendo not been so acute.

The Schlomo, a 2013 show at the artist’s New York gallery Cheim and Reid – also home to the likes of William Eggleston and Jenny Holzer – a make-believe character based on his long-lost uncle wanders through stranger’s apartments, flea markets and streetside cafes. The paintings, which are rendered in crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue, channel Matisse’s candy-coloured abstractions and Chagall’s cartoonish impressions of street life. But they convey a sense of ennui that’s so contemporary that this gravitas feels like a trick.

And in 2015’s Alstadt Girl, women languorously breathe cigarette smoke out their windows, recline, naked, amid bohemian clutter and shower in rooms with pastel-pink walls. The series simultaneously references our Instagram-era obsession with the minutiae of existence and deconstructs the female nude. But These figures don’t feel like refugees from art history or figments of the artist’s imagination; they feel like girls whose surroundings – a bed post here, a closet there – are signposts for messy inner lives. They manage to be both wildly original while recalling a Picasso knockoff you might find at a flea market. Improbably enough, the effect is equal parts utter sincerity and ineffable cool.

“I don’t watch movies, I don’t read many books but for three years I had drawing appointments with people,” says Tal R, whose soft cadences are punctuated with urgent declarations and analogies that come out of nowhere before landing hard and fast. “So, when I was teaching at the academy in Dusseldorf which was near Aldstadt, I would carry around this suitcase with paper and I would meet people and draw them in hotel rooms or private houses. We would always drink tea and draw. And I would think, ‘Is it possible to make paintings out of these drawings?’ I didn’t ask why the same way that I didn’t ask why my hands had the urge to pick up certain colours – there’s certain people you want to kill, there are certain people you want to be friends with, there are certain people you want to marry and there are certain people you want to draw. As an artist, there’s no time for your own psychology. Instinct is just faster – it’s cruel, its more egoistic than intellect. That’s why it’s useful.”

***

Tal R was born in Tel Aviv to a Danish mother and Israeli father amid the Six-Day War in 1967 and his family moved to Denmark when he was one. “Every school has a class in which someone is drawing and usually kids stop around puberty and say ‘that’s enough’ but I’m just the one that kept going,” he laughs. “I was just drawing what was interesting, it was a free nameless practice but I never called it ‘art.’ I was the one in Jewish school drawing the swastika, it was very awkward.” At eighteen, he dropped out of high school to enrol at art school only to quit after two years. “After one year, I thought I didn’t want to be an artist. I thought ‘art is ridiculous, it’s not for me.’” But at 26, he applied to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and was finally accepted after submitting an upside down portrait of Adolf Hitler. At the Royal Academy, he started to suspect that his aversion to authority could galvanise his artistic ambitions. More importantly, he realised that painting – a medium that the conceptual art explosion had deemed unfashionable to the point of embarrassing – may not be the dead end that the ‘nineties would have him believe.

“My family are Jews so we are a minority in Denmark and my name ‘Tal’ is not a real name here and as a kid you hate that because you just want to be average,” says Tal R, whose work piqued the interest of Anders Kold, a curator at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen in his second year at the Royal Academy, who invited him to take part in the 1997 group show that helped his career take off. “The moment I decided that art was what I wanted to do, I remember saying to my father, ‘if I do it, I want to be the best’ because that’s is part of proving yourself but in a way that’s suicidal. And in the beginning, I was very interested in outsider art or anything that had an unschooled approach towards expression. In the nineties, if you were a painter, it was the same as saying ‘I’m stupid.’ You were only allowed to do very formal studies of brushstrokes but if you were enough of a fool to try narratives, it was a great environment to develop it because nobody cared.”

His breakthrough arrived when he realised that his impulse to destroy paintings could actually help him organise his canvases, sparking possibilities that hadn’t occured to him before. “Suddenly, I had a way to paint based on the way my ideas had failed and got destroyed that really opened the door for me,” says Tal R, who has had solo shows everywhere from London’s Camden Art Centre to Germany’s Kunsthalle Dusseldorff and who showed his latest sculptures (“they are like teenagers; they have pimples, their voice is out of tune”) at Victoria Miro in May 2015. “But I wanted to challenge myself by just putting a painting on the wall and whatever context the work was in it would be possible for it to speak. At the same time, I wanted to get much closer to simple narratives, the things in your living room, the friends who fall asleep on your sofa. Just everyday stuff.”

Tal R is currently making paintings of sex shops, those temples to human ordinariness and I can’t help but think that his painterly intentions may have found their ideal form. “You can look at a shop and find the window interesting because of the things you imagine and the things you can’t imagine,” he says, grin giving way to something uncharacteristically serious. “And it’s the same thing with painting. I’m 48 now, old enough to know that a painting should have a back room you can only reach with your imagination. A great painting has a beating heart.”

Saving New Jersey’s Lost Motels

First published in VICE Weekends, February 2017.

There’s something universal about the motels of Wildwood, New Jersey. These squat midcentury buildings might have served as seaside playgrounds for working class American families for generations but their pastel facades and neon signs, which often wink to far-flung and exotic places, will be familiar to anyone who’s spent summer road-tripping coastal Australia. And their demolition, in favour of luxury apartments, echoes a pattern we’re seeing around the country. The fight to salvage the 50s motels and fibro bungalows that were once a fixture on the Gold Coast is a case in point.

We caught up with Mark Havens, a photographer who’s spent the last decade capturing Wildwood’s disappearing motels, the results of which are published in his 2016 book Out of Season, to talk about the magic of motel vacations and why these dreamy structures deserve to be saved.

VICE: When did you first start visiting Wildwood?

Mark Havens: My grandmother began going there in the early 1940s, visiting as a family for a week during the year was tradition. At one point, we had four generations of people around the breakfast table, we even had great, great grandparents down there. It was a really cool, formative experience for me as a kid. This summer was our 45th year in a row!

How has the area changed over that period?

These motels were so prevalent, at one point there were 600 of them across the five mile-long island. They seemed as immovable as the landscape and became the backdrop to my summers. During the week we spent there, we’d drive around and look at the neon signs and the crazy architecture the same way that some people look at Christmas decorations.

When did you realise you wanted to document them?
In the early 21st century they started getting demolished at an astonishing rate. When you realise that you’ve taken something granted for so long, change comes quickly and thoroughly. It was something I wanted to capture, in some shape or form, before they disappeared.
Mid-century motel architecture was often transplanted other places—such as Surfer’s Paradise in Queensland for example. What sets Wildwood motels apart?
The density, it was block after block of these places. Each employed humble features to differentiate themselves from each other. There’s a shot in the book of a motel called Surf Haven and the owner asked me, “do you see that blue on my motel? That’s surf haven blue. It’s bluer than any motel anywhere else on that island, I got that custom-made myself.”

Architecturally, what elements drew you in?
One of the striking things was that many were flat-roofed and L-shaped, with balconies and doors that faced a central pool. They were on stilts so that you could drive straight up in a car, without a bellhop. The theming was so 1950s! They were named after popular songs and automobiles of the time. Space travel was huge—there was an Astronaut motel and the Friendship 7 motel, the name of John Lennon’s space capsule.

What role did these buildings play in the lives of working-class families who couldn’t afford to take more expensive holidays?
Will Morey, who invented the “shore kitsch” aesthetic, built the motels and owned some of the amusement piers on the boardwalk. He was such a showman and he realised that he was building destinations. The names of the motels were so nakedly aspirational—the Waikiki, the Aisle of Capri, the Monaco. These were places people who were staying there, my family included, could never afford to go but we could sure as heck spend a week on the Astroturf at the Caribbean.

In Havens’ book, Joseph Giovannini makes that case that Wildwood represented a more humanised version of modernism. Although modernism is accused of being cold and impersonal, the motels in Wildwood were built using modernistic principles but were warm and humane. Untitled (Morning Glory & Ocean), by Mark Havens
From 2003 to 2005, more than 50 were demolished to make way for luxury apartments. Why aren’t mid-century motels valued?

What’s being built down there now is at the expense of what made the place unique. Now, developers purchase the motels, they take the neon sign off, remove the railing design, add a peaked shingled roof, put frosted glass on the front and sell each motel room as a small condominium. The building will be there, but it will be unrecognisable because the detail has been removed.
What can motel vacations offer in a culture drawn to niche holidays and Airbnb?

It has to do with your opinion of community. Everything about the architecture of these motels were designed to further the togetherness of the guests. The rooms faced out to the pool and the shuffleboard courts. You could walk down the street to see what was happening. There were steps, promenades and grand entrances to the pool or to the beach. Along with all that, these places advertised programs for families to come together. Now we have a desire for privacy, but there was nothing private about any of these places. If being part of a larger whole is important to you, then this kind of motel does exactly that.

I understand you had limited photography experience when you began this project?

When I started shooting these images in 2002, I didn’t know how to take photographs. I hired a professional photographer to come with me but when I got the images back, they weren’t what I was looking for. I grudgingly bought a 35mm camera from a little shop in Philadelphia and the first batches were terrible. I started in the summertime but the motels were obscured by cars and then thought I’d shoot in winter but all the plastic palm trees were down, the water drained from the pool, the lights off. They were non-places. After a couple of years of trial and error, I realised the only time I could shoot these motels was two weeks at the end of May and two weeks at the end of September, which is why it took me ten years.
What were your hopes for Out of Season?

There are thousand of books about ruin porn, but that path would have been too easy. And there are a lot of nostalgia-laced books too, but I didn’t want that either. My shots are laid out from morning to night and I wanted it to feel like I was walking with a friend through the island. I wanted to create an ecstatic reality, a hyper-idealised version of these places, before the lights went off for good.

In the rush to gentrify our cities, who really loses out?

First published in SBS Life, November 2016.

I’ve always secretly loved Kings Cross. In the days before the yoga studios and paddock-to-plate restaurants replaced the dive bars and strip clubs that once lined Sydney’s glittering former red-light district, walking down Bayswater Road under the neon glare of the Coke sign never failed to remind me that great cities aren’t really ever just strips of land or bricks and mortar. They’re the living, breathing sum of the people that make their lives there in all their human glory — whether that’s for better or for worse.

The Cross is especially vulnerable to being reduced to its worst elements. Sure, according to a 2015 report by the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, alcohol-related violence in the area has dropped 31 percent since the much-hated lockout laws were introduced at the start of 2014 (although, as Matt Barrie pointed out in a widely-shared February 2016 Guardian article, Sydney is historically safer than Bordeaux, France or Lausanne, Switzerland).

But there’s something sinister about the way the piece of Sydney that was the first port of call for Italian and Maltese immigrants, home  to artists and writers including Patrick White, Martin Sharp and Roberta Sykes, the author and poet who spent her life campaigning for indigenous land rights and institutions like the Wayside Chapel, a refuge for the city’s homeless and marginalised since the early sixties, has been cast as a renovation project, devoid of any redeeming qualities.

Sex and drugs might exist in the Cross, a fact that, let’s face it, is hardly an anomaly in any of the world’s culturally significant centres. So does art, community, hope, kindness and countless other things.

Last month, a group of Kings Cross land owners joined forces to sell the Golden Mile, the precinct’s strip of nightclubs to property developers for at least $200 million, in the hopes of erecting a pair of luxury high-rise towers, modelled on the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. The proposal, if it goes ahead, will threaten both the Kings Cross Neighbourhood Centre and the medically-supervised injecting room, a long-time safe space for addicts.

And earlier this year, a February 2016 article in The Sydney Morning Herald announced that the “clean-up” of the Golden Mile has seen property values in Kings Cross and nearby Potts Point surge  25 percent — a shift has seen cashed-up professionals flood into the area and boutique gyms, wholefoods cafes and other bourgeois lifestyle trappings follow in its wake. “I just think that the area is changing […] “There’s going to be less riff raff,” Dean Norburn, principal of Belle Property Potts Point said in the report.

But given that 2016 ABS statistics found that Sydney is Australia’s most unequal city, with 1 percent of the population constituting 11.4 percent of its wealth, is it really the ‘riff raff’ that should concern us? Shouldn’t we worry about how to create affordable housing so that places known for nurturing those on society’s fringes don’t morph into enclaves for the privileged? I don’t care how good the tumeric lattes are!

The stories of cities are always stories of gentrification and Kings Cross is a case in point. The trouble is, though, that we’re tricked into believing that gentrification and its bywords — renewal, regeneration, transformation — are a straightforward swap of one seamy, undesirable reality for one that’s cleaner, shinier and benefits us all.

But as Jason Reynolds points out in a January 2014 Gawker article, the root word of gentrification is gentry, which, as the Merriam-Webster puts it, refers to “the qualities appropriate to a person of gentle birth.” If you think that cities belong to those who live their life there rather than those powerful enough to believe in their right to civilise everything around them, without thinking about the consequences, this should make you as uncomfortable as it makes me.

Molly Crabapple: “Art can show us what kind of world we want to live in”

First published on SBS Life, September 2016. 

“Power seeks to enclose beauty—to make it scarce, controlled. There is scant beauty in militarised zones or prisons. But beauty keeps breaking out anyway, like the roses on that Ferguson street.” A few weeks before I read those sentences, taken from an August 2014 Vice essay by the New York artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, a teenager called Tamir Rice had been murdered by police in Cleveland and, days earlier, a gunman held workers hostage in a Martin Place café. Crabapple’s words, written in the aftermath of Ferguson, reminded me that beauty can anchor us when the world spins off its axis. I didn’t realise that I needed to hear them until my eyes welled up.

Over the last decade, Crabapple has used art and, later, journalism to chronicle the moments that have defined the early 21st century but her work prompts a visceral reaction because of its willingness to stare down power before committing it to ink. Although Crabapple honed her style — a mishmash of punk-show energy and gimlet detail — at The Box, a Manhattan Burlesque club that doubled as a holding pen for high-rolling bankers, she made her name with her visual account of Occupy Wall Street and illustrated dispatches of Guantanamo Bay, migrant labour camps and life under ISIS for places like Vice and Vanity Fair.

“I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid,” grins the flesh-and-blood Crabapple, who I’m speaking to in a weirdly utilitarian chamber of the Opera House, where she’s presented as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. “My mother is an artist, my grandfather is an artist. I was just always obsessed with it – at first my obsession far outstripped my ability. I used to be one of those brats who would be pounding my fists saying that what I was drawing was ugly, his hands look like claws! But drawing had stuck its claws into me.”

Crabapple’s memoir, Drawing Blood, follows her trajectory from suburban misfit (she was born in Queens) to Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookshop known for housing vagabond writers to the hardscrabble toil of making a living in a New York where trust funds and Trump towers had all but vanquished the ghosts of artists past. For Crabapple, who supported herself as a nude model, a turning point came when Occupy Wall Street unfolded minutes from her apartment. Her surrealist paintings of the global financial meltdown lent the revolution a visual language. Two years later, Vice sent her to Camp X-Ray, a brutal Guantanamo Bay prison camp (“everyone lives in outdoor cages, with no shade, only buckets. When you’re there your skin crawls”).  She also travelled to Abu Dhabi, where she worked with a fixer to expose the plight of migrant workers who are forced to surrender their passports and can earn just $150 a month.

In December 2015, Crabapple, who’s also confronted Donald Trump about his labour abuses and documented the hearing of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, visited Domiz, a camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, which is home to 40,000 Kurdish Syrian refugees. Crabapple, whose portraits of refugee families possess an empathy that’s absent from a global conversation that reduces human life to a geopolitical chess game, says that we’re being sold convenient fictions about the power of borders and the circumstances under which people leave behind everything they know.

“The first moron fiction about refugees is that they’re all impoverished, starving people — the reason that they’re going on boats and not planes isn’t about charity it’s about oppression,” she says. “The refugees in Iraq may have escaped the physical danger of bombing but there were also in a place where there was no work and their kids couldn’t go to university. That they were making the trip to Europe because it was an unstable hopeless life with no future. Otherwise, they would run through their savings, live in a tent and get nothing.  There is no hard line between refugee and migrant. Rich people who are born in rich countries have passports that allow them to move and people who are born in poor countries don’t.”

I ask Crabapple, who’s working with collaborator Marwan Hisham to co-write and illustrate a book about the Syrian War, why we should cling to beauty when things seem so dark. “If we don’t have anything that we’re for, we don’t have any good arguments about the world we want to build,” she smiles. “Art can show us what kind of world we want to live in.”

Molly Crabapple: “Art can show us what kind of world we want to live in”

First published on SBS Life, September 2016. 

“Power seeks to enclose beauty—to make it scarce, controlled. There is scant beauty in militarised zones or prisons. But beauty keeps breaking out anyway, like the roses on that Ferguson street.” A few weeks before I read those sentences, taken from an August 2014 Vice essay by the New York artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, a teenager called Tamir Rice had been murdered by police in Cleveland and, days earlier, a gunman held workers hostage in a Martin Place café. Crabapple’s words, written in the aftermath of Ferguson, reminded me that beauty can anchor us when the world spins off its axis. I didn’t realise that I needed to hear them until my eyes welled up.

Over the last decade, Crabapple has used art and, later, journalism to chronicle the moments that have defined the early 21st century but her work prompts a visceral reaction because of its willingness to stare down power before committing it to ink. Although Crabapple honed her style — a mishmash of punk-show energy and gimlet detail — at The Box, a Manhattan Burlesque club that doubled as a holding pen for high-rolling bankers, she made her name with her visual account of Occupy Wall Street and illustrated dispatches of Guantanamo Bay, migrant labour camps and life under ISIS for places like Vice and Vanity Fair.

“I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid,” grins the flesh-and-blood Crabapple, who I’m speaking to in a weirdly utilitarian chamber of the Opera House, where she’s presented as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. “My mother is an artist, my grandfather is an artist. I was just always obsessed with it – at first my obsession far outstripped my ability. I used to be one of those brats who would be pounding my fists saying that what I was drawing was ugly, his hands look like claws! But drawing had stuck its claws into me.”

Crabapple’s memoir, Drawing Blood, follows her trajectory from suburban misfit (she was born in Queens) to Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookshop known for housing vagabond writers to the hardscrabble toil of making a living in a New York where trust funds and Trump towers had all but vanquished the ghosts of artists past. For Crabapple, who supported herself as a nude model, a turning point came when Occupy Wall Street unfolded minutes from her apartment. Her surrealist paintings of the global financial meltdown lent the revolution a visual language. Two years later, Vice sent her to Camp X-Ray, a brutal Guantanamo Bay prison camp (“everyone lives in outdoor cages, with no shade, only buckets. When you’re there your skin crawls”).  She also travelled to Abu Dhabi, where she worked with a fixer to expose the plight of migrant workers who are forced to surrender their passports and can earn just $150 a month.

In December 2015, Crabapple, who’s also confronted Donald Trump about his labour abuses and documented the hearing of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, visited Domiz, a camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, which is home to 40,000 Kurdish Syrian refugees. Crabapple, whose portraits of refugee families possess an empathy that’s absent from a global conversation that reduces human life to a geopolitical chess game, says that we’re being sold convenient fictions about the power of borders and the circumstances under which people leave behind everything they know.

“The first moron fiction about refugees is that they’re all impoverished, starving people — the reason that they’re going on boats and not planes isn’t about charity it’s about oppression,” she says. “The refugees in Iraq may have escaped the physical danger of bombing but there were also in a place where there was no work and their kids couldn’t go to university. That they were making the trip to Europe because it was an unstable hopeless life with no future. Otherwise, they would run through their savings, live in a tent and get nothing.  There is no hard line between refugee and migrant. Rich people who are born in rich countries have passports that allow them to move and people who are born in poor countries don’t.”

I ask Crabapple, who’s working with collaborator Marwan Hisham to co-write and illustrate a book about the Syrian War, why we should cling to beauty when things seem so dark. “If we don’t have anything that we’re for, we don’t have any good arguments about the world we want to build,” she smiles. “Art can show us what kind of world we want to live in.”

Choosing experiences over things doesn’t make you morally superior

First published on  Daily Life, August 2016.

How the myth of the ‘starving artist’ is starving us of the art we need

First published on Daily Life, July 2016 

It’s a little absurd to think the idea that becoming an artist should mean foregoing financial security still informs our lives now, when it’s 150 years out of date.

In 1851, Henri Murger, a little-known French author, wrote a book called Scènes de la vie de Bohème, based on a group of writers, artists, composers and philosophers he observed during the nights he spent at a cafe in Paris’s Latin Quarter. These original ‘starving artists’ would fight, sleep together and, occasionally, retreat to their garrets to write volumes of poetry. But mostly, they regularly skipped rent payments and lived below the poverty line.

They called themselves the ‘Water Drinkers’ – a moniker that doesn’t refer to their thirst for creativity so much as it describes the fact that they were too broke to order any other kind of beverage.

From Van Gogh, who subsidised his productivity with a monthly stipend from his generous dealer brother to the 1950s Beat writers, who rejected anything vaguely material to reach a higher consciousness, somewhere along the way the starving artist myth convinced us that money was the enemy of artistic ‘purity’. It also made our willingness to subscribe to it proof of our commitment to being artists rather than the product of a broken system that undervalues creative work.

If you can paint, or make music, or write anything that resembles more than a game of Boggle while your bank balance dips into single-digit territory, then I guess you’re just more romantic than me. Not only is this bogus relationship between creativity and financial instability monstrously disrespectful to anyone who’s ever had to endure the misery of poverty while never dreaming of mustering the gall to call themselves an artist, it ignores the ways that being in a position to pay for basic needs – healthcare, meals, a stable home, let alone time spent with family and friends – fosters a base-level wellbeing that’s intrinsic to making art of any kind.

There are few writerly cliches I hate more than citing Charles Bukowski but in some cases he has a point. “Starvation, unfortunately, didn’t improve art. It only hindered it,” he wrote in his 1975 novel Factocum. “A man’s soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.”

But this hoax is corrosive not because artists have internalised it, but because of a culture that uses it to infantilise those who create for a living and neglect the material struggles they face. According to a January 2015 report inThe Guardian, an Australian visual artist makes an average of $10,000 a year. Given that March 2016 CoreLogic statistics found that it costs approximately $485 a week to rent in a capital city and that researchers are identifying ongoing links between housing affordability and poor mental health, this should be treated as a crisis, not accepted as the way things have always been.

The notion that financial security isn’t high a priority for artists also leads to disastrous decisions that deny them the infrastructure, opportunities and protections extended to other workers, obstructing pathways that could enable them to make a solid living from their work.

In a May 2016 Guardian article, Alison Croggon reported that the Australia Council had cut grants to individual artists by 70 per cent since 2014 and in June 2016, Sydney University announced plans to shutter the Sydney College of the Arts, transferring around 600 students to the University of New South Wales’ Paddington campus. The closure of the SCA, which counts painter Ben Quilty and director Jane Campion as alumni, is another symptom of a world that treats artist’s creative imperatives as an indulgence and their economic ones as completely nonexistent.

If you’ve ever read a book or watched a film or witnessed an installation that’s shattered your world view so completely that you’ve emerged a different person, you’ll know that art can throw us a lifeline when we feel like we’re sinking, strip away the lies we concoct to comfort ourselves and hold the powerful to account.

But by dismissing artists’ financial realities, the starving artist myth manifests in ensuring the artists we hear from are in fact those with the resources, contacts and trust funds; often white middle-class kids for whom dressing in rags is a temporary, romantic exercise; with a safety net slung above rock bottom.

Artists whose backgrounds are working-class, Indigenous or immigrant, those who don’t have the privilege or luxury to sustain an art career with pocket money, are left out of the equation in this system despite the fact that it’s the alternative perspective they offer that will challenge the status quo and move society forward. It’s this talent that really needs to be cultivated and compensated, and these voices that we can’t afford to snuff out.

Louise Hearman, the Melbourne artist who, last week, won the $100,00 Archibald Prize for her portrait of Barry Humphries and has been painting since she was a 14-year-old, summed up this crisis best:

“Most Australian artists, their income is down 80 per cent and a lot of people don’t earn that much money anyway. That leaves them in a pretty bad position, so prizes like this are fantastic. They keep you going.”

Any artist will tell you that on our best days, making art is a labour of love. The starving artist myth tells us many lies, but two stand out: The first is that our labour is worth nothing, and the second is that love conquers all.

How the myth of the ‘starving artist’ is starving us of the art we need

First published on Daily Life, July 2016 

It’s a little absurd to think the idea that becoming an artist should mean foregoing financial security still informs our lives now, when it’s 150 years out of date.

In 1851, Henri Murger, a little-known French author, wrote a book called Scènes de la vie de Bohème, based on a group of writers, artists, composers and philosophers he observed during the nights he spent at a cafe in Paris’s Latin Quarter. These original ‘starving artists’ would fight, sleep together and, occasionally, retreat to their garrets to write volumes of poetry. But mostly, they regularly skipped rent payments and lived below the poverty line.

They called themselves the ‘Water Drinkers’ – a moniker that doesn’t refer to their thirst for creativity so much as it describes the fact that they were too broke to order any other kind of beverage.

From Van Gogh, who subsidised his productivity with a monthly stipend from his generous dealer brother to the 1950s Beat writers, who rejected anything vaguely material to reach a higher consciousness, somewhere along the way the starving artist myth convinced us that money was the enemy of artistic ‘purity’. It also made our willingness to subscribe to it proof of our commitment to being artists rather than the product of a broken system that undervalues creative work.

If you can paint, or make music, or write anything that resembles more than a game of Boggle while your bank balance dips into single-digit territory, then I guess you’re just more romantic than me. Not only is this bogus relationship between creativity and financial instability monstrously disrespectful to anyone who’s ever had to endure the misery of poverty while never dreaming of mustering the gall to call themselves an artist, it ignores the ways that being in a position to pay for basic needs – healthcare, meals, a stable home, let alone time spent with family and friends – fosters a base-level wellbeing that’s intrinsic to making art of any kind.

There are few writerly cliches I hate more than citing Charles Bukowski but in some cases he has a point. “Starvation, unfortunately, didn’t improve art. It only hindered it,” he wrote in his 1975 novel Factocum. “A man’s soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.”

But this hoax is corrosive not because artists have internalised it, but because of a culture that uses it to infantilise those who create for a living and neglect the material struggles they face. According to a January 2015 report inThe Guardian, an Australian visual artist makes an average of $10,000 a year. Given that March 2016 CoreLogic statistics found that it costs approximately $485 a week to rent in a capital city and that researchers are identifying ongoing links between housing affordability and poor mental health, this should be treated as a crisis, not accepted as the way things have always been.

The notion that financial security isn’t high a priority for artists also leads to disastrous decisions that deny them the infrastructure, opportunities and protections extended to other workers, obstructing pathways that could enable them to make a solid living from their work.

In a May 2016 Guardian article, Alison Croggon reported that the Australia Council had cut grants to individual artists by 70 per cent since 2014 and in June 2016, Sydney University announced plans to shutter the Sydney College of the Arts, transferring around 600 students to the University of New South Wales’ Paddington campus. The closure of the SCA, which counts painter Ben Quilty and director Jane Campion as alumni, is another symptom of a world that treats artist’s creative imperatives as an indulgence and their economic ones as completely nonexistent.

If you’ve ever read a book or watched a film or witnessed an installation that’s shattered your world view so completely that you’ve emerged a different person, you’ll know that art can throw us a lifeline when we feel like we’re sinking, strip away the lies we concoct to comfort ourselves and hold the powerful to account.

But by dismissing artists’ financial realities, the starving artist myth manifests in ensuring the artists we hear from are in fact those with the resources, contacts and trust funds; often white middle-class kids for whom dressing in rags is a temporary, romantic exercise; with a safety net slung above rock bottom.

Artists whose backgrounds are working-class, Indigenous or immigrant, those who don’t have the privilege or luxury to sustain an art career with pocket money, are left out of the equation in this system despite the fact that it’s the alternative perspective they offer that will challenge the status quo and move society forward. It’s this talent that really needs to be cultivated and compensated, and these voices that we can’t afford to snuff out.

Louise Hearman, the Melbourne artist who, last week, won the $100,00 Archibald Prize for her portrait of Barry Humphries and has been painting since she was a 14-year-old, summed up this crisis best:

“Most Australian artists, their income is down 80 per cent and a lot of people don’t earn that much money anyway. That leaves them in a pretty bad position, so prizes like this are fantastic. They keep you going.”

Any artist will tell you that on our best days, making art is a labour of love. The starving artist myth tells us many lies, but two stand out: The first is that our labour is worth nothing, and the second is that love conquers all.

How the myth of the ‘starving artist’ is starving us of the art we need

First published on Daily Life, July 2016 

It’s a little absurd to think the idea that becoming an artist should mean foregoing financial security still informs our lives now, when it’s 150 years out of date.

In 1851, Henri Murger, a little-known French author, wrote a book called Scènes de la vie de Bohème, based on a group of writers, artists, composers and philosophers he observed during the nights he spent at a cafe in Paris’s Latin Quarter. These original ‘starving artists’ would fight, sleep together and, occasionally, retreat to their garrets to write volumes of poetry. But mostly, they regularly skipped rent payments and lived below the poverty line.

They called themselves the ‘Water Drinkers’ – a moniker that doesn’t refer to their thirst for creativity so much as it describes the fact that they were too broke to order any other kind of beverage.

From Van Gogh, who subsidised his productivity with a monthly stipend from his generous dealer brother to the 1950s Beat writers, who rejected anything vaguely material to reach a higher consciousness, somewhere along the way the starving artist myth convinced us that money was the enemy of artistic ‘purity’. It also made our willingness to subscribe to it proof of our commitment to being artists rather than the product of a broken system that undervalues creative work.

If you can paint, or make music, or write anything that resembles more than a game of Boggle while your bank balance dips into single-digit territory, then I guess you’re just more romantic than me. Not only is this bogus relationship between creativity and financial instability monstrously disrespectful to anyone who’s ever had to endure the misery of poverty while never dreaming of mustering the gall to call themselves an artist, it ignores the ways that being in a position to pay for basic needs – healthcare, meals, a stable home, let alone time spent with family and friends – fosters a base-level wellbeing that’s intrinsic to making art of any kind.

There are few writerly cliches I hate more than citing Charles Bukowski but in some cases he has a point. “Starvation, unfortunately, didn’t improve art. It only hindered it,” he wrote in his 1975 novel Factocum. “A man’s soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.”

But this hoax is corrosive not because artists have internalised it, but because of a culture that uses it to infantilise those who create for a living and neglect the material struggles they face. According to a January 2015 report inThe Guardian, an Australian visual artist makes an average of $10,000 a year. Given that March 2016 CoreLogic statistics found that it costs approximately $485 a week to rent in a capital city and that researchers are identifying ongoing links between housing affordability and poor mental health, this should be treated as a crisis, not accepted as the way things have always been.

The notion that financial security isn’t high a priority for artists also leads to disastrous decisions that deny them the infrastructure, opportunities and protections extended to other workers, obstructing pathways that could enable them to make a solid living from their work.

In a May 2016 Guardian article, Alison Croggon reported that the Australia Council had cut grants to individual artists by 70 per cent since 2014 and in June 2016, Sydney University announced plans to shutter the Sydney College of the Arts, transferring around 600 students to the University of New South Wales’ Paddington campus. The closure of the SCA, which counts painter Ben Quilty and director Jane Campion as alumni, is another symptom of a world that treats artist’s creative imperatives as an indulgence and their economic ones as completely nonexistent.

If you’ve ever read a book or watched a film or witnessed an installation that’s shattered your world view so completely that you’ve emerged a different person, you’ll know that art can throw us a lifeline when we feel like we’re sinking, strip away the lies we concoct to comfort ourselves and hold the powerful to account.

But by dismissing artists’ financial realities, the starving artist myth manifests in ensuring the artists we hear from are in fact those with the resources, contacts and trust funds; often white middle-class kids for whom dressing in rags is a temporary, romantic exercise; with a safety net slung above rock bottom.

Artists whose backgrounds are working-class, Indigenous or immigrant, those who don’t have the privilege or luxury to sustain an art career with pocket money, are left out of the equation in this system despite the fact that it’s the alternative perspective they offer that will challenge the status quo and move society forward. It’s this talent that really needs to be cultivated and compensated, and these voices that we can’t afford to snuff out.

Louise Hearman, the Melbourne artist who, last week, won the $100,00 Archibald Prize for her portrait of Barry Humphries and has been painting since she was a 14-year-old, summed up this crisis best:

“Most Australian artists, their income is down 80 per cent and a lot of people don’t earn that much money anyway. That leaves them in a pretty bad position, so prizes like this are fantastic. They keep you going.”

Any artist will tell you that on our best days, making art is a labour of love. The starving artist myth tells us many lies, but two stand out: The first is that our labour is worth nothing, and the second is that love conquers all.

Can robots help solve our gender woes?

“I’m sorry, you’re dating your computer?!” sputters Rooney Mara’s Catherine halfway through Spike Jonze’s 2013 romance Her. The fact that Catherine – who’s learned that her ex-husband Theodore has taken up with Samantha, a honey-voiced Operating System who screens his emails, entertains his fantasies and sends his writing off to publishers – comes off as judgmental is testament to Jonze’s filmmaking skills. But it’s also proof of how deeply we’ve internalised the notion that artificial intelligence is an extension of male desires and that, really, few things may be hotter than the hard-to-nail promise of female servitude.

As Laurie Penny writes in an April 2016 article in The New Statesman, the issue of whether or not robots are slaves designed to serve their masters or sentient beings with inner lives and autonomous instincts has long paralleled the questions we ask of women in the world. From Metropolis, the 1927 Fritz Lang classic in which Maria, a cyborg whose sultry ways plunge the city and its workers into chaos (she’s later burned at a stake) toAustin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the hit 1997 spy film whose comely fembots are programmed to ensnare the bumbling Powers with his own libido, female robots are often cast as temptresses or destroyers, coincidentally enough, the same roles reserved for flesh-and-blood women.

And from Apple’s Siri, the chirpy virtual assistant who can help you schedule meetings and find directions to Amazon’s Alexa, who can plan dinner and organise date night like a dutiful secretary, we’re inundated with AIs with female voices and female names. It’s a reflection of a world that sees women as servile, domestic creatures whose feelings are overlooked and whose labour goes widely uncompensated. “Our machines are projections of us. They’re dreams or metaphors for our own anxieties,” says Sophie Mayer, a film studies lecturer at London’s Queen Mary University in a January 2015 article in The Guardian.

But if our machines are simply a projection of us, can we design them to rewrite these sexist scripts? In a December 2015 article for The World Economic Forum, Dr Pascale Fung, Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – who cites July 2015 Carnegie Melon research which found that Google’s algorithm was more likely to serve up high-paying, prestige jobs to men than to women – argues that it’s possible to program AI to avoid gender bias completely.

This would be useful given that just 26 per cent of management personnel, 24 per cent of board directors and 17 per cent of CEOs are women, according to 2015 research by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. (An October 2015 Catalyst report, which found that women accounted for 95.3 per cent of secretaries and administrative assistants in the US, suggests that our reliance on female virtual assistants is inevitable, if depressing).

And the rise of social robots such as Pepper, an android that’s programmed to read and respond to emotions (it’s already relieving Japan of some of its childcare burden) and Jibo, a miniature critter that can read children bedtime stories and help them with their homework – duties often shouldered by women – may be able to ease domestic pressures and free up working mothers’ time.

But Professor Jon McCormack, the director of Monash University’s SensiLab, a space that specialises in robotics research, believes that we still have a long way to go before robots can take on human responsibilities.

“Robots can be used to keep children active through physical games, copying exercises that the robot does, somewhat like the way a personal trainer motivates you,” he explains. “Another emerging area is in remote telepresence, where the robot becomes a physical avatar of the parent or carer. While humanoid robots aren’t yet capable of performing childcare duties unattended, if they are controlled by a human remotely they can undertake some basic care duties, like an extension of the baby monitor. But at the moment, it’s better to think of them at the level of cute or recalcitrant pets, rather than at the level of human intelligence.”

The more interesting question may not be whether or not AI can bring us one step closer to gender equality, but how we can program a fairer vision of the future when our own programming is so deeply flawed. As long as we see technology as an extension of male desires, robots won’t help us move forward – they’ll just reflect all the things we get wrong.

Can motherhood make you a better artist?

Is motherhood really incompatible with creativity? Neha Kale speaks to three artists with children to find out if being a mother can deepen the ability to realise artistic ambitions and live a creative life.

Joan Didion regularly told her daughter Quintana, “shush, I’m working.” Josephine Baker choreographed performances involving her 12 adopted kids. Patti Smith put her work on hold in the eighties to live with her family in the suburbs of Detroit. Women with children have always done whatever it takes to reconcile the demands of motherhood with the drive to write books, compose music or make art. But how do you carve out the time, energy and room for failure that creativity demands in a world that tells us that motherhood means surrendering a part of yourself?

Saman Shad, a playwright and writer with two young children and an eight-week-old baby, writes when her kids are asleep, in pre-school or daycare and trains herself to make the most of the time she has.

“I’ve realised that when my kids are around, it’s better for me just to focus on them,” says Shad, who aired Mum In Progress a radio show on multicultural motherhood last month.  “When you have that gap of time, you become super-efficient, even if you just have an hour or two. But I have to be realistic about my responsibilities to my family. Now, that I have an eight-week-old, I need to be able to say that I can’t be a writer right now and know that it’s okay to give myself that time without feeling guilty.”

For Hiromi Tango, a visual artist whose intricate, woven installations can involve months of physical labour, juggling her practice with her children means letting go of expectations about what an artist’s life should be. “I wake up at six every morning, iron school uniforms and take my children to their after school activities but I always carry coloured pencils, yarn and needles to I can make work whenever I can,” explains Tango, who splits her responsibilities with her artist husband Craig Walsh.  “Before exhibitions, working without a break for 12 hours a day for a couple of months is common so my children fit around my workload. But two years ago, I became unwell by neglecting my health so now I set clear boundaries. Otherwise, I’m no good to anybody.”

Kim Bowers, a musical director and composer who performs under the name Busty Beatz and co-founded Hot Brown Honey, a critically acclaimed hip-hop cabaret that’s about to travel to the Edinburgh Festival, believes that accepting logistical hurdles has helped her nurture her eight-year-old daughter while investing in her artistic dreams.

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle — when I’m on tour she spends time with her dad or I work my schedule around school holiday time,” says Bowers who was born in South Africa and grew up in Sydney.  “As an artist, you have to fill that well to make sure you have inspiration. There are times when I have to do a school run but have been up all night and that’s just how it rolls. I’m lucky because at Hot Brown Honey we work with single mums so there’s lots of negotiation.”

In ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mom’, an April 2016 article in New York magazine, Kim Brooks suggest that this conflict arises because mothers strive to create a stable life for their children but artists are defined by the opposite impulse — the drive to create work that will unsettle the familiar and question the things we know. But for Shad, a former BBC scriptwriter who couldn’t travel for her job after having her daughter in London and started writing novels and short fiction, motherhood sparked a new period of creative exploration. “I was always going to be a writer but it was about finding new ways to work towards what that aim is,” she says.

And for Tango, reconciling the demands of motherhood with her artistic practice is about abandoning beliefs about what a good mother is. “I [rarely] bake and wonder what it would be like for my kids to grow up with home-made biscuits in the cupboard. But I design my life around my art and my family accepts it,” she says. “My seven-year old told me, I love you mum as you are my only mother’ and I thought what a strange thing to say!”

Bowers owes her  approach to reconciling creativity and motherhood to her own mother, who lived in South Africa under Apartheid and came to Australia as refugee in 1973. “My mother wasn’t allowed to take ballet classes because of the system and when she moved to Australia, she was like ‘I’m going to enrol my children in everything and now she has three daughters who are artists!” laughs Bowers. “She gave up everything she could for us and dealt with the trauma of moving countries. We want our kids to [understand issues] to do with self-esteem, race and body politics and instil in them that being a creative human is really important.”

Fernanda Ly: A Change of Face

The models we fall in love with are a powerful barometer of the times we live in. Back in the ’60s, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton – all gamine, wide-eyed and clad in curve-cancelling shift dresses – signalled a culture that was wising up to the lure of androgyny and the power of women’s liberation. In the early ’90s, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Elle Macpherson, whose megawatt beauty was rivalled only by a near-ubiquitous presence (perfume campaigns, music videos, lingerie lines) symbolised an era in which celebrity worship was a global past-time and consumers were taught to covet, rather than connect with, the biggest brands. Although the catwalks are still mostly ruled by towering glamazons (paging you, Gisele Bündchen), they’re also giving rise to a new kind of supermodel – one reflective of a world whose physical ideals aren’t necessarily synonymous with blonde hair, pale skin or all-American good looks.

“It’s slowly getting better now but back in the day, all the biggest models were from places like Eastern Europe and Russia and not everyone can aspire to look like that!” laughs Fernanda Ly, the rising Chinese-Australian model who, true to fashion industry parables, was scouted at a shopping centre in Sydney’s south-western suburbs in 2013. She has since landed on the cover of Vogue Italy, Vogue Japan, Teen Vogue and i-D.

“Back when I was growing up, there weren’t that many Asians in modeling.”

“Diversity is very, very important for me. Australia is so multicultural and where I grew up everyone was different. I was Asian, my friends were from Indonesia or the Pacific Islands or Greece. I feel very strongly that the world should be like that. It’s nice to look up to other people but it’s even better to have someone who you really feel connected with to look up to.”

Fernanda, who’s chatting with me from her base in New York City, bubbles with the warmth and no-holds-barred hopefulness of a 20-year-old who’s still coming to terms with the fact that she may have the world at her feet. Early last year, Fernanda – who’s known for her bubblegum-pink hair and a schoolgirl-meets-goth style that wouldn’t look out of place on the streets of Tokyo’s Harajuku – was handpicked by Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director, to walk for the fashion house’s Fall 2015 show. She has since closed Vuitton’s 2015 resort show in Palm Springs, California, and has been booked exclusively for their winter and summer 2016 shows and campaigns. And in November 2015, Grace Coddington, US Vogue’s legendary ex-creative director, singled her out as a model she “loves”. But for Fernanda, endorsements from the fashion industry’s tastemakers are just part of a roll call of pinch-me moments.

“The first time I walked for Louis Vuitton, it felt so unreal and I was like, ‘Why are they using me!’” recalls Fernanda, who can rock flatforms and a leather neck choker like no one else. “I thought it wasn’t really happening but I walked it and then thought, ‘Okay sure, why not?’ Being cast in the Vuitton campaign and meeting them in person has been such a highlight. It’s so strange receiving emails from family in Hong Kong who tell me, ‘I saw a picture of you here’ and then being on the cover of Vogue and seeing it in store and trying not to smile. And then you just hope that they don’t notice at the cash register!”

Googling Fernanda Ly is proof that our obsession with those bloggers responsible for banishing colour from our wardrobes has done nothing to curb our appetite for figures who aren’t scared to break the mould. From breathy editorials advising readers how to hijack her style to listicles fawning over her fondness for ice-cream and video games, Fernanda fever makes it easy to forget that her modeling career may not have happened at all.

“When I got scouted, I was in Year 12 and then I was really stressed out – I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ to the agency. But they accepted me during that time,” says Fernanda, who dreamed of becoming an architect (like most architecture devotees, she idolises Japanese minimalist Tadao Ando and his Church of Light building) but deferred her local course so she could relocate to New York. “When I started studying, I was also getting bigger jobs – I got my first Bonds campaign and was modelling for Alice McCall so I was skipping school and was always late.”

“And then I decided that I’d come back to school afterwards. I was getting so much work in New York but when I came back, I didn’t really get work in Australia. I talked to my agency in Sydney and in New York and they all decided that it might be better for me to be based in New York.”

The pink-haired beauty, who has also cycled through purple, orange and green locks (“but I’m pink right now. I think that I’m different but it sometimes backfires on me that I’m different. They might not like someone who’s different”) is clearly enamored with the city that never sleeps.

“You can do or buy anything whenever you want. It will probably be delivered to you for free in a few hours. That’s what I love about it. It’s got such great energy as well.”

She may inspire the likes of Nicolas Ghesquière, but it’s fronting her first campaign for Bonds – the underwear brand whose fair-haired, fresh-faced models signify to young girls everywhere what ‘Australian beauty’ looks like – at the start of 2014 that means the most.

“I feel really proud to be able to say that I’m a face of a Bond’s campaign, that they chose me,” grins Fernanda, who is back this year fronting their 2016 winter campaign. “I used to see their ads everywhere growing up – all those girls in their Bonds singlets! Everyone knows it and wears it. It’s really amazing and it makes me so happy.”

For all her gratitude, Fernanda – who counts fellow models and friends Sora Choi and Lineisy Montero (“she has natural hair”) among those she most admires – isn’t afraid to stick to her guns.

“We work very long hours – there’s a lot of waiting – and you feel really mentally drained because you’re not using your mind, you’re just waiting to hear from other people,” says Fernanda, who has long-term plans to return to her architecture studies, but hopes to model for as long as the industry will let her.

“It’s also hard working with people you don’t know who tell you, ‘You have to do this and this and this.’ It’s important to have your own voice and stand firm about who you are. If you’re uncomfortable about something, make sure you tell them. Some girls get really scared and think, ‘If I say this, I’m not going to get this job, I’m going to get cancelled.’ But it’s better to be happy than anything else. I’m getting so much better at it.”

Fernanda might be practical but she also knows that long hours and discomfort are no barrier to the thrills of achieving something truly worthwhile.

“The other day, I was buying milk and some girls who were of Asian background stopped me and were like, ‘Oh, you’re Fernanda, and you’re Asian – that’s amazing! I’m so excited that I’m helping change people’s ideas about fashion. It’s so surreal.’”

Is our obsession with ethnic eating a sign of cultural progress?

First published on SBS Life, March 2016. 

Our fascination with Korean chicken joints, pocket-sized Turkish mezze parlours and backyard pickling is a welcome antidote to meat pies. But does our new-found culinary sophistication signal real diversity or something else altogether, asks Neha Kale.

On the rare occasion that my brother and I find ourselves in my grandmother’s kitchen in Mumbai, overlooking the Arabian Sea, we become the happy recipients of an endless stream of dishes. When I’m in her kitchen, I remember that failing to speak the same language doesn’t mean that I’m oblivious to what she’s trying to say. The dishes range from fiery golden fish curries, laced with turmeric and tamarind to vegetables spiced with fenugreek and freshly made chapaatis, rolled painstakingly by hand. My grandmother cooks with the velocity of someone who believes that a meal can compensate for the distance between the place we were born and the place we live our lives. Flavours and textures can mean so much when language always seems to fall short.

Like any kid who immigrated from India but grew up in nineties-Perth, I binned the lunches my mother packed me, cursed my distaste for Vegemite and ranked pie and chips for dinner at the house of a friend I was enchanted with among the most thrilling encounters of my young life.

All grown up now, I have a new-found appreciation for my heritage. And it’s not only me. In the last few years, I’ve noticed that this appreciation of flavour and texture is changing the way we eat on a national scale. These days, Australia’s increasingly sophisticated culinary culture means that dining out in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane is as likely to involve wagyu phở, cooked in ginger and star anise, at a shoebox-sized Vietnamese eatery; a midnight quest to find the city’s flakiest roti canai, courtesy of that vendor who relocated from Kuala Lumpur; or a Bangladeshi eating house where patrons savour tandoori spatchcock (and Dhaka-themed cocktails) rather than an oversized bowl of pasta or medium-rare cut of steak. For every second-generation talent reinventing the food they grew up with, you’ll find a faux izakaya whose menu recounts the (white) chef’s lifelong connection with a mythical Tokyo ramen master. In a country where nearly 28 per cent of all residents are born overseas, according to 2015 ABS statistics, this culinary diversity can’t come quickly enough.

Although our evolving palates are a powerful metaphor for evolution, this obsession with ‘ethnic’ eating isn’t without its flaws. For every second-generation talent reinventing the food they grew up with, you’ll find a faux izakaya whose menu recounts the (white) chef’s lifelong connection with a mythical Tokyo ramen master, a Korean-Mexican fried chicken joint whose owners are neither Korean or Mexican or a much-hyped diner whose curry prices could put an Indian apprentice through culinary school.

There’s no doubt that articles that urge foodies to travel to far-flung suburbs to sample that tiny mezze place or the city’s best Sichuan cooking have made eating out more exciting. But they also risk creating a Foodie Olympics, where points are awarded for the spiciest, strangest and most obscure – as if turning the food staples of entire cultures into a “culinary adventure” isn’t offensive enough.

“Eventually, a hole-in-the-wall reaches critical white-Instagrammer mass, and the swarm moves on to its next discovery, decrying the former fixation’s loss of authenticity,” Soleil Heil writes in her February 2016 essay ‘Craving the Other.’ Worse still, it sparks the probability that the enthusiasm that sees your average ‘ethnic’ food lover identify star anise from Sichuan pepper with their eyes closed, won’t extend to acknowledging the actual differences between Chinese people.Like Ruth Tam, who described her reaction to finding out that the bone broth her grandmother used to make was being co-opted by paleo dieters, thrilled by their “discovery”, in an August 2015 Washington Post article, recently seeing kitchari – an unsightly Indian porridge known for its healing properties – appear, airbrushed, on wellness blogs left me with a feeling I couldn’t place. There’s something profoundly unjust about a world in which immigrants renounce their eating habits, for fear of being reduced to the food they consume when white people – who receive kudos for pickling and fermenting produce without so much as a nod to the Middle Eastern and South Asian communities that have been perfecting these techniques for centuries – get to be cultural connoisseurs.

In the brilliant Netflix series Master of None, Aziz Ansari’s Dev, the son of Indian immigrants, is passionate about pasta and I can relate. In both my personal life and my career writing about culture, steering clear of the food I grew up with freed me from the burden of deflecting curiosity, when – truthfully – I’d rather be pursuing my interests.

But as I get older, I’m starting to revise my stance. Flavours and textures don’t tell a whole story but they can help you understand the things that words never can.

In defence of female scruffiness

First published in Daily Life, March 2016 

Every big city dweller knows that nothing signals impending emergency like being interrupted during a blissful commute. When I felt a woman’s hand touch my knee on a recent train trip, I instantly scanned the carriage for a masked assailant or, at the very least, an opportunist using his captive audience to deliver a well-timed racist spiel. But when I turned to the woman in panic, she looked at me with a mix of pity and concern. “I’m not sure if you realise but the tag on your skirt is sticking out,” she said, lowering her voice so that passengers couldn’t hear her. She smoothed the fabric over my leg and tucked in the nylon culprit.

Unsolicited advice about less-than-perfect self-presentation rank high among my life’s recurring themes. I was taught how to adjust my skirt the same time I learnt to recite the alphabet, thanks to the stream of distant relatives who believed that proper sartorial etiquette was the difference between a perpetually scrappy toddler and a harlot-in-the-making. Since then, perfect strangers have chased me down to adjust a dress hitched up by shopping bags, point out an unruly bra strap and once – while I was jogging to Grimes on an especially carefree Saturday – alert me to the fact that my leggings became transparent in the morning sun. Each time, these anonymous advisors delivered these missives with zero regard for my personal space and the gravity of a profound favour for which I’d obviously thank them later. Each time, their advice missed the mark when it came to correcting my sloppy attempts at grooming but managed to burst my happy bubble with the jellyfish sting of shame.

As anyone who’s read The Beauty Myth will tell you, our world conflates a woman’s looks with her value but this also extends to the way she presents herself to the world. We’re supposed to aspire towards Alexa Chung’s lithe frame and Jennifer Lawrence’s chiselled cheekbones, sure, but we’re also meant to berate ourselves for leaving the house with unkempt hair, showing up to a party with a ladder in our stockings or unconsciously flashing our underwear when we’re running for a bus or laughing uncontrollably – irrespective of our genetic jackpots. This is why caring less about techniques for applying smudge-free mascara or leaving the house with socks that don’t match rather than oh, I don’t know, the lifespan of your fern collection, often feels like failing femininity rather than evading its many traps.

In a May 2015 blog post, academic Sarah Bernstein suggests that we mock those who wear maxi dresses in public because women have been historically expected to look comfortable without ever being comfortable. “Getting rid of the corset didn’t mean we stopped policing women’s bodies […] What we really did was not so much ‘free’ ourselves from the corset as internalise it,” she writes.

And shockingly, this blueprint for what counts as polished is difficult to quantify and impossible to sustain. Reach for the red lipstick and you’re too sexy to be taken seriously, and throw out the Frizz-Ease and you’re too slovenly to be credible. Flaunt your obsession with grooming, however, and you’ll attract the vitriol reserved for Kim Kardashian. Like Seth Rogen’s Steve Wozniak in the new Steve Jobs movie, be a man in rumpled chinos and grown-out mop and you’re a lovable genius, too devoted to work to care about anything so shallow as your appearance. If you’re a woman of colour, your chances at finding stockings to match your skin tone or straightening your hair without chemical relaxants are about the same as spotting a man on public transport being coerced to shine his shoes.

In a December 2015 essay for The New Inquiry, Autumn Whitfield-Madrano writes about how receiving a compliment from a man about her neckscarf felt as uncomfortable as receiving a catcall because of the way it keeps patriarchal surveillance of women’s bodies alive. Next time a stranger attempts to primp my outfit or tuck in my tag in public, I’ll step away and look at them with indifference. I like to move through the world with happy and messy abandon. And the way I choose to present myself is entirely up to me.

Grayson Perry: Psychic Matters

First published in VAULT magazine, February 2016. 

Laden with pastiche, symbols and signifiers, the work of shapeshifting British artist Grayson Perry transports us to the edge of self-awareness while preventing us from plumbing its darkness and depths. 

There are two Grayson Perrys. The first makes ceramic pots, tapestries and etchings that wrap winking takedowns of gender, class and British identity in a package once reserved for suburban housewives; parlays a traumatic childhood in working-class Essex into a BBC Reith Lecture series delivered in plainspoken, electrifying language; and embraces Claire, a female persona who proves that feminine, domestic traditions count at least as much as balls and bombast when it comes to contemporary art. The second creates formally unimaginative pieces that rely on rote observations, borrows from African textiles and 19^th century Japanese pottery while boldly renouncing context and distances himself from art world theatrics, clad in a bright-blue nappy. Your willingness to celebrate provocateurs over populists will determine the Grayson Perry you see.

“I haven’t got a strategy!” the real Grayson Perry tells me, with the type of soul-deep, gravelly guffaw that makes you want to snort with laughter yourself.  “I’ve achieved a lot of my ambitions and have been very lucky. My British Museum show was a big ambition; I built a house in Essex, which was another ambition of mine. My TV series have been really fun – but I didn’t plan to do them. A lot of my work is a case of post-rationalisation. I’d already made something and then later asked myself, ‘what was I trying to do when I made this?’ My first exhibition happened close to Christmas, so I wanted to make things that people would buy as presents. That idea seemed to have a frisson in the art world, which was all about art for arts sake. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of making things that are accessible, covetable and feminised. These things felt like they had a charge around them.”

I’m talking to 54-year-old Perry, who’s the picture of studied eccentricity complete with Mad Scientist hair and purple slacks held up by suspenders, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, on the eve of My Pretty Little Art Career, his first major survey in the Southern Hemisphere and his biggest retrospective to date. Upstairs, journalists pore over whimsical sketchbooks, stand dumbfounded in front of giant tapestries and mill around the ceramic vases, decorated with scratchy war scenes, surprise acts of fellatio and collaged council estates, which sealed his celebrity and landed him the 2003 Turner Prize. Spending time with the 60 artworks feels like tumbling headfirst into Perry’s consciousness. “I expect that a lot of people here won’t have seen my work before and I hope that they’re engulfed by the sensual aspect of it,” he grins, betraying that elliptical way of speaking that’s peculiarly and endearingly British. “And if they don’t like it, well, I’ve tried my best!”

Perry was born in Chelmsford, Essex, a place that’s become the punchline of English class warfare, in 1960 and grew up with a violent stepfather and mother who ran off with the milkman when he was four (“I have an intense allergy to cliches,” he writes in his 2014 book Playing to the Gallery, based on his popular Reith lecture of the same name.) At 12, he started dressing up in his sister’s clothes, moved in with his father’s family as a 15-year-old, only to be rejected after he was discovered wearing Claire’s hyper-feminine dresses to go out with friends. “I was going to join the army to until I was 16 but my art teacher suggested that I join art school,” quips Perry, who’s working on a new BBC series on masculinity. “I always enjoyed doing art but didn’t really consider it as a career because I never knew what an artist did.” Perry attended Portsmouth College of Art and relocated to a squat in Camden in 1983, briefly sharing quarters with Boy George and Stephen Jones and frequenting The Blitz, the famous New Romantic nightclub where gender fluidity and flamboyant self-expression was a cause for celebration rather than concern. He also took up evening pottery classes, showing his first-ever plate Kinky Sex (1983) – inscribed  with a garish crucifixion that’s confronting even thirty years later – with Chelsea’s James Birch Gallery in 1984.

“When I first came to London, I hung out with a group of young people who were all filmmakers and performance artists and they taught me not to buy into those myths about being an artist, to laugh at cool people and that being naff could be a creative impulse, that it could be okay,” explains Perry, who is married to the London psychotherapist Phillipa Perry and whose first brush with Henry Darger,  the American outsider artist who suffered abuse in an orphanage and produced monumental watercolours starring hermaphrodite children, helped galvanise his own work. “Coolness is an orthodoxy and when you’re young it’s very easy to think it’s the thing to be.” That guttural laugh again. “But everybody is a rebel love! That’s just what everyone does.”

Sometimes, Perry’s status as a self-styled outsider and public aversion to conformity feel less like biographical happenstance and more like a force calibrated to cement his authority as a cultural observer and give his work the ring of truth. The Rosetta Vase (2011), a blue-and-yellow earthenware pot inscribed with intricate illustrations and sly aphorisms (“iconic brand”; “museum as cathedral”; “hold your beliefs”; “Facebook generation”) reframes historical artifact to knowingly invoke the cultural soupiness and vacant hero worship typical of late capitalism. Like all his pots, the piece – which takes cues from Japanese Satsuma pottery, an 18th century form decorated with lavish landscapes and produced cheaply for Western markets – collapses the boundaries between art and artisanal and skirts the perimeter of luxury and junk.

Elsewhere, The Vanity of Small Differences, a series of tapestries that follows a character called Tom Rakewell from an unashamedly tacky suburban home to trophy wife and car crash via a middle-class purgatory complete with organic carrots and Penguin Classics coffee mugs dazzles and nauseates by unspooling the ways class anxiety masquerades as good taste. These tapestries, which are woven on a mechanical loom and are  based on William Hogarth’s 1732 painting The Rake’s Progress, also hint that the pleasures of Grayson Perry are less about his artistry than the “me too!” moments he elicits. His output can feel like a Where’s Wally? for our hidden delusions and secret shames.

“I’m interested in an anthropological view of who we are in every culture and I’m British so that’s what I know,” explains Perry,  whose 2011 British Museum exhibition Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman cast his own work alongside objects made by anonymous craftspeople through history and who built the wildly popular A House For Essex, an ode to a fictional working-class character called Julie in 2015. “When we inherit the culture, we stick emotions to it because we’ve got feelings that are positive and negative that are part of our lives. But I’m very fond of some things about Britishness that seem daft. It’s a kind of self-examination. My schtick has always been man hours, detail and labour but as an artist you also have to learn thinking skills.  It’s not about just being able to make something. You have to make something well.”

But although Perry, who was rightly criticised for suggesting that indigenous artist “borrow” from the status of contemporary art earlier this year (a gaffe that for the record, he’s sincerely apologised) insists that he’s a “postmodern potter”, pulling from a grab-bag of influences, his brand of self-examination is selective when it comes to social and historical currents. It also recalls the rather old-fashioned idea that sees the primacy of the artist’s vision supersede the work itself. While Perry’s self-portrait A Map of Days (2013), an ink-blue etching that borrows the lexicon of 17th century cartographers to trace the trials of modern-day manhood via exquisite drawings and phrases such as “Sad Puberty,” “Internet Porn” and “Lingering Doubt” proves that this approach can be poignant and powerful, works such as Claire at the Tate Gallery (1999) – in which Claire, dressed as Camilla Parker Bowles, brandishes a placard screaming “No More Art” – feels interesting mostly because of the way the artist’s life story works as subtext.

But perhaps Perry’s greatest trick isn’t his ability to make postmodern pottery or lavish tapestries but his ability to convince us that populists can shake up the establishment and provocateurs can provoke comfort rather than resistance and  open our eyes to hypocrisy – while saving us from the freefall of dissolving the status quo. “People say I’m a performance artist but no, I’m a just a tranny and an artist, even if the two sometimes overlap,” Perry chuckles. “I’m glad if some young guy wants to put on dresses finds confidence by seeing me out there in the world but I don’t see myself as part of that trans-rights campaign that’s prominent on the Internet right now.. If you’re erotically motivated to put on women’s clothes, then everything else is easy.” He grins, blue eyes huge, and I’m struck by how hard it is to dislike him. “But me? I’m just getting on with what I’m doing.”

Grayson Perry: My Pretty Little Art Career shows at the MCA until May 1, 2016. 

mca.com.au 

The trouble with millennial sitcoms

First published on Daily Life, April 2016. 

Marnie Michaels recently discovered how far people can deviate from their former selves. In a recent poignant Girls episode, Marnie, who’s played by Allison Williams, finds out that Charlie, the long-lost boyfriend who was once devoted enough to carry around her retainer, is no longer the rich tech bro who she once serenaded at a party for his startup but a coke dealer who stores his clothes in garbage bags and takes heroin in his spare time. The episode, which captures the way the world is more magical when you’re with someone who loves you, sees the pair spend a night laughing together in a fancy restaurant and capsizing a boat in Central Park after a passionate kiss. When Marnie leaves after finding his needles, it doesn’t make their time together any less real.

The millennial sitcom mines this gap between fantasy and reality to powerful effect. Unlike ’90s comedies such as Friends or Will and Grace, whose twenty-somethings aspired to jobs in management and whose will-they-or-won’t-they trysts were a jaunty induction into marriage and suburbia, as Jenny Jaffe suggests in a March 2016 article in Vulture, the millennial sitcom is ruled by characters for whom the path to self-knowledge is less a linear trajectory than a giant game of Tetris – one in which dreams of a creative career are replaced by ritual workplace humiliation, sex comes without grand, romantic catharsis, real estate is contingent on roommates and that entrepreneur boyfriend you may have married can turn out to be someone you’d cross the street to avoid.

Consider Broad City‘s Abby, who shelves her hopes of becoming an artist to clean toilets at Soulstice, Love‘s Mickey, whose hook-ups are an outlet for her hedonism and Girls‘ Marnie, whose attraction to crybaby manipulators like Desi prevent her from growing up herself. Like its viewers, who are postponing home-ownership thanks to debt and Recession-era job insecurity and are rejecting marriage in droves according to July 2014 research by The Urban Institute, the millennial sitcom embraces contradiction and disappointment as its default state. “It’s reflective of the target audience: millennials who have had the world’s information at their fingertips for most of their adult lives, and learned to take in conflicting information from different sources at once,” Jaffe writes.

But as Laurie Penny suggests in a March 2016 article in The New Statesman, conversations about millennials that claim to reflect the plight of an entire generation are actually code for the failure of a middle-class ideal. On Girls, the occasional junkie who makes an appearance in the shape of an ex-boyfriend might prove that a Brooklyn dotted with fourth wave coffee shops is still sufficiently edgy but it also reminds us that – for a respectable, white girl like Marnie – sleeping with a heroin addict is still a cultural taboo.Love owes its premise to the fact that Mickey and Gus, a pair of college-educated Californian creatives, should be buying furniture and planning a future like a good, rom-com couple rather than crossing wires and getting high. As Rebecca Wanzo says of Broad City in a March 2015 piece in the LA Review of Books, Abby’s job mopping up vomit is deeply hilarious because girls like her aren’t supposed to perform tasks that disgusting. The workers who call this a day job probably aren’t as amused.

More insidiously, it plays to the lie that if working class people hold down service jobs and are on the poverty line, it’s because they’re not savvy or educated enough to excel. That’s why a 40-year-old single mother working a minimum wage cafe job will inspire less empathy than Girls‘ Ray, whose extended stint making coffees is down to systemic problems such as, say, a bad economy or generational failure to launch. For all its inclusiveness, if Master of None expanded its portrayal of millennials beyond those who can afford sprawling lofts and time to dish on relationship dramas, the show would be considerably less charming.

In a March 2016 feature series for Fusion, Nona Willis Aronowitz attempts to get past our obsession with the relatively small percentage of millennials who are middle-class and educated by interviewing those whose experiences have been completely erased. “Brief chats with them revealed that they were more worried about being able to feed their children, staying safe in their neighbourhoods, or juggling community college with three crappy jobs. They were the young people whose families couldn’t afford to send them checks, whose parents didn’t have a basement for them to languish in,” she writes.

The millennial sitcom mines the gap between fantasy and reality to powerful effect. But it also focuses on those whose lives lend themselves to comic turns and witty subplots at the expense of those who’ve always known that fairytales don’t exist.

How to conquer your inner yoga cynic

Published on SBS Life, April 2016.

The commodification of yoga is proof of a culture that empowers white people to tap into ‘otherness’ and convinces people of colour that rejecting difference is a way to fit in, writes Neha Kale.

Kerrie* was the type of girl around whom I could never be sure where I stood. She would smile at me on the way to maths class on the same day as ignoring my friendly query about an assignment. One lunchtime, she asked if I was going to band practice, although I’d abandoned my recorder in Year Six.  Suddenly, I realised that she thought I was the grade’s other brown girl. “There are so many of you, I can’t keep track,” she said, with a well-meaning laugh.

The yoga classes that I’ve been attending since the start of the year have heightened my sense of wellbeing but they’ve also guaranteed a standing date with Kerrie’s ghost. Although abandoning my twenty-something belief that balance is a byword for weakness has felt like a personal evolution, encountering the enthusiasm with which my white classmates chant in Sanskrit (while I mumble the words halfheartedly), a studio adorned with garlanded Indian deities whose grinning faces I’d long forgotten, and instructors who swore by philosophies that I’d spent my life actively renouncing, clouded the energy I reaped from tadasana with a bewildering sense of guilt.

I suspect that for my classmates, who wore leggings stamped with Ohm signs and expressions of easy devotion, yoga – true to the advertising – simply offers a blissful union of mind and body or a holistic alternative to hitting the gym. For me, the strangeness of partaking in an activity linked to a culture from which I’d distanced myself outweighs the post-class sensation of floating on air.

As yoga has shifted from patchouli-scented basements into sun-splashed city studios, accusations of cultural appropriation have followed suit. In November last year, the University of Ottawa cancelled free yoga classesafter complaints that the practice was taken from a culture that experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and Western supremacy, while last April, Kamna Muddagouni, a Mumbai-born Melburnian, (rightly) argues that a million-dollar industry increasingly ruled by slim, white instructors and Instagram-friendly slogans conveniently overlooks the fact that “yoga is a spiritual practice with Hindu roots”.

Despite this, yoga’s mounting popularity – there are now 36.7 million yogis in America according to a January 2016 study by Yoga Journal – has meant that these issues are being slowly addressed. From websites such asDecolonising Yoga, which offer tips for honouring the ritual’s South Asian origins, to a wave of studios dedicated to serving students of colour, we’re wising up to the fact that yoga – like hip-hop and headdresses – has been repackaged for the benefit of middle-class, white devotees.But for me, this army of white instructors peppering classes with references to Indian mythology isn’t half as jarring as the ease with which these are embraced. This ease feels like the ugly flipside of my life-long discomfort. A discomfort that manifests in an internal gymnastics, practiced most days by people of colour, in which one must size up stupid, arbitrary things like a craving for naan bread against the silent assumptions of a teenager at a checkout, rehearse snarky dismissals for mentions of Bollywood and swallow the urge to spit back “Perth!” when a colleague asks you where you’re really from.

This ongoing labour stems from the delusion that you must do whatever it takes to prove that you’re an individual with passions and interests rather than some interchangeable member of an invisible race.When I first started practicing yoga, I admired how effortlessly my classmates could spring into a headstand and move from cobra to downward dog. But it was their ability to tap into the signifiers of ethnicity without fear of being ridiculed, laughed at or dehumanised that I envied a whole lot more.

As you get older, you become brave enough to make decisions that improve your quality of life. In the last year, I’ve resolved to get eight hours’ sleep, avoid working on weekends and prioritise my yoga class no matter how busy I get. I’ve also stopped caring whether or not the choices I make play into some racist fiction about how someone of Indian descent should be. Kerrie made me feel like I wasn’t a whole person but if I take responsibility for it she’ll always have the last laugh.

Designing Sydney’s Favourite Spaces

First published in Broadsheet, February 2016. 

For Smith and Carmody, design is less about grand gestures than it is about understated details.

Rufus: Bass of Hearts

First published in The Collective magazine, April 2016. 

Lightning Ridge, a New South Wales mining town known for forty-degree weather and the world’s highest percentage of black opals, feels a galaxy away from the dancefloors of Sydney or the nightclubs of Berlin. But for Tyrone Lindqvist, the lead singer of RÜFÜS, the Australian trio whose lush brand of indie-electronica could spark instant euphoria in the most bass-averse among us, an isolated hometown can be a musical initiation.

“Dad’s from Sweden and he flipped a coin to either go searching for gold in South America or for opals in Australia and the opals won out,” grins Tyrone, over an iced coffee near Studio 301, the Sydney recording studio where RÜFÜS are putting the finishing touches on their wildly anticipated second album Bloom. “All of our electricity was transmitted via a generator and when I got home from school, I didn’t watch TV because it wouldn’t be on. Instead, I headed for our crappy, little upright piano and lost two to three hours each day – not playing anything grand or spectacular – just tapping away at the chords. It would get loud and soft, loud and soft. It was my love.”

These days, it’s fashionable to comment on a musician’s refreshing lack of ego but in the case of Tyrone, who started RÜFÜS with keyboardist Jon George on a night in Byron Bay back in 2010, it’s actually true. He’s warm and unguarded, prone to lively digressions and boyish bursts of enthusiasm. At one point, he demonstrates the way he improvises in the studio by singing me a lyric, oblivious to people sitting around us. Critics sometimes attribute RÜFÜS’ off-the-chart success to instincts that are overly commercial. They forget that – like talent and vision – few assets in the music world are as powerful as the ability to make listeners feel good.

“I wasn’t so big on electronic music growing up but listening to The Presets and Cut Copy – the way they combined electronic music with live bands and guitars –made me open up,” says Tyrone, adding that the trio put out their first self-titled EP themselves in 2011, following up with a second in 2012. “At the time, I was dabbling in a bit of songwriting and Jon[George] – who’s the older brother of my best friend – was studying sound engineering at SAE in Byron Bay. We were visiting him one weekend, decided to stay in rather than go out and started talking about how much we loved [Danish multi-instrumentalist] Trentemoller and [German house duo] Booka Shade. That was the first time we started writing a song together, which became the foundation for our first single ‘We Left.’ We came back to Sydney, wrote a few more and got James [Hunt] onboard as our drummer. We didn’t have any plans – all we wanted to do was get into the studio – or as it was at the time – our bedrooms. I think our first gig may have been in Sydney’s Gaelic Club, in a small 180-person room. It ended up being much better than we imagined.”

Although RÜFÜS – who spent 2012 playing the national festival circuit – had their sights set on releasing their first album, saving money to spend three weeks writing tracks in a makeshift studio in coastal Berry, the response from the industry was lukewarm at best. It wasn’t until their demo landed on the desk of Adrian Thomas, better known as DJ Ajax of Bang Gang DJs, the troupe whose freewheeling parties trained the world’s eyes on the Australian electronic music scene in the early noughties, that their luck began to change.

“We were trying to shop the demos to anyone who would be interested, Future Classic, Modular, the bigger labels, the smaller labels, but found it really hard to find anyone who wanted to work with us – everyone was like ‘yeah, it’s pretty good’ but the passion wasn’t there,” he recalls. “Ajax was the first person we met who was like: ‘I love this, I believe in this – I want to take this as far as I can.’ There are ups and downs writing a record and sometimes it’s just a matter of personal satisfaction. He is a really enthusiastic person and would give us such constructive feedback – like ‘when I heard this song, I cried’ or ‘I think the record should have an instrumental track.’ It was so exciting to have an electronic artist that we’d looked up to growing up believe in us. We signed to his label Sweat It Out and it motivated us to push what we were doing for the last two months. We were on the biggest high.”

In August 2013, a week before RÜFÜS planned to release ‘Take Me’ – in which Tyrone’s vocals soar over irresistible, synth-heavy melodies – the trio received the news that Ajax had been killed in a collision with a truck. The tragedy sparked an outpouring of grief from all corners of the music community but for RÜFÜS – who had yet to finalise their paperwork – Ajax’s death was compounded by their newly uncertain future.

“We were really worried and sad and scared like everybody but were also wary of what would happen next,” says Tyrone, who is preparing for a headline Australian tour, performances in London, Paris and Barcelona and will play at landmark US festival Coachella next year. “But at the funeral, we realised that the team at Sweat It Out were going to champion what we doing, almost as a tribute to Ajax, to finish off what he had started. The whole team had to work really hard and I don’t know what it would have been like for the label or his friends and family. The album, Atlas, was dedicated to him.”

The trio’s worries were proven unfounded when Atlas, which has since achieved gold status, debuted at number one on the ARIA charts. “Lucky timing – Justin Bieber could have put out a record that week but the stars aligned,” Tyrone deadpans. By the summer of 2013, singles such as ‘Desert Night’ and ‘Sundream’ – the latter a shapeshifting anthem that begs to be put on repeat – became the sound of friendships, parties and late-night summer adventures. The band spent 2014 on playing sold-out shows around the country, touring America and Europe and clocking up performances at the likes of South by Southwest.

Tyrone says that RÜFÜS’ new record, Bloom – which was recorded in an Airbnb apartment in Berlin at the end of 2014 – that nods to the serendipity that’s guided their creative journey and proves how much they’ve evolved.

“We stayed at this place in Freidrichshain, set up some analogue syths and would work into the night because we were so hungry to write,” smiles Tyrone, who says the band came full circle after a chance Berlin encounter with Booka Shade. “A lot of the percussion is influenced by the minimal techno that was playing at Berlin clubs and the lyrics are a lot more personal. It’s not that we’re afraid of our audiences or ignore what people enjoy but we just follow our intuition until we’re happy and satisfied. Ajax told us that our first album would get us on the map in Australia and the second recognised globally.” He pauses for a minute and it’s easy to recall the boy in Lightning Ridge playing the piano after school. “When we were mastering the record, driving from Detroit to Chicago in the snow, the weight of that conversation suddenly hit really hard.”

Rachel Platten: Fight or Flight

First published in The Collective magazine, issue 30, February 2016. 

Rachel Platten believes that when the universe speaks to you, it’s a mistake not to listen. When the US singer-songwriter, whose 2015 hit “Fight Song” has become the unofficial anthem for anyone on the wrong end of a cosmic battle, was studying abroad during university, an onstage encounter changed the course of her life.

“Growing up, I always sang with my mum and my sister and I took classical piano lessons from when I was five all the way throughout high school but I didn’t consider music as a career because I didn’t think I was talented enough,” she says, her voice, which betrays hints of her Boston upbringing, flitting between honeyed and husky. “When I was at Trinity College, I spent some time studying in Trinidad and I ended up playing backup for a friend’s band – the first time I was on stage, it was in front of 80,000 people and I just remember feeling like lightning had struck. I was so in love with the experience that I wanted to find a way to get to the microphone. After I came back to the States, I moved straight to New York.”

We’re chatting at Sydney’s Pullman Hotel the day before Rachel, who’s wearing a patterned sweater and caramel fedora, is set to perform her hotly anticipated new single Stand By You on Australian breakfast show Sunrise. She’s a study in the electricity that marks out artists who are on the cusp of becoming stars. In the last twelve months, “Fight Song”, a track that combines the life-affirming power of Adele or Kelly Clarkson with a dazzling vulnerability that’s increasingly rare in pop music, has sold over two million copies and reached number one in the UK and the US Adult Contemporary charts. It’s an outcome that could be straight out of a biopic – if wasn’t the high point of a decade-long journey littered with personal sacrifices that are too real to translate on screen.

“I was living in a walk-up in MacDougal Street, in the same building as Bob Dylan and I didn’t have any connections – I was acting like my own booking agent and my own manager, just making it up as I went along,” recalls Rachel, who spent ten years juggling daytime temp work with gigs that stretched into the early hours. “I couldn’t get any attention from labels and was almost signed several times before things would fall through. I was never in bands while I was growing up, so didn’t know what I was doing. It was hard to get attention from anyone who would give me access to anything beyond the indie circuit I was playing in.”

But despite the sinking feeling that her career was going nowhere, Rachel also stumbled upon a secret of artistic longevity – the ability to find a silver lining and let this fuel her work. “At the time, I was doing a lot of charity with an organisation called Musicians on Call, where I’d go and sing bedside to patients – it would negate any discouragement because it was so good for my soul to feel like I was reaching people in a small way,” she smiles. She also assembled a tight-knit community of friends and musical collaborators, who taught her that the markers of external success are no match for the internal rewards being true to your art. “We used to have these magical Tuesday nights where we’d fill out Slane, a tiny bar in Greenwich Village and it was just about being on stage and feeling the love,” she says. By November 2013, Rachel – who had seen her 2011 single “1,000 Ships” hit the US Top 30 – was halfway through writing her second studio album and had almost abandoned hopes of achieving musical recognition. Fate, as it turns out, had other plans.

“My publisher called me a month or two into writing this album and said ‘You’ve been writing and writing and haven’t really told your story or shared your hurt and rejection’ and I told her that I didn’t want to go there or for the hurt to come out that way,” explains Rachel, who spent her summer on a cross-country US tour alongside Colbie Callait and Christina Perri and whose musical influences range from Stevie Wonder and Sly and the Family Stone to Robyn and Lauryn Hill. “After that, I went to my friend [record producer] Dave Basset’s house and the chorus for “Fight Song” just poured out of me like it was a gift from the skies. Over the next year and a half, I wrote six different versus and five bridges and it was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Writing the song itself was almost as difficult as the fifteen years that came before. But I knew that if I could unlock it, I had something special.”

Enter the hashtag #myfightsong on Instagram and it’s clear that “Fight Song” isn’t just a universal ode to perseverance, it also connects with the personal struggles that shape listener’s lives. From cancer sufferers undergoing treatment to teenage girls facing body issues, the track – which was released by Columbia Records in February – is proof that pop music still has the power to help us tackle our obstacles and remind us that personal strength always wins out. Platten, whose music has made cameos in shows such as One Tree Hill and the Biggest Loser   has previously supported Lady Gaga, The Strokes and Regina Spektor, is also finally reaping karmic rewards. Taylor Swift famously pulled Rachel on-stage to perform an exuberant duet of Fight Song in front of a 50,000-strong crowd during her sold-out June 2015 show at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. Swift, who’s endorsed Rachel on Twitter, is among her greatest advocates.

“It’s incredible – she’s a really kind and genuine person and good friend,” grins Rachel, whose new album Wildfire includes collaborations with Swift’s producers Jack Antonoff and Joy Williams. “After so many years of feeling like I’m doing this in a tunnel, it feels larger than life.”

But like feeling a telltale lightning bolt during an impromptu performance, it’s the encounters that are easy to overlook that remind her that she’s living her dream.

“When I first released “Fight Song”, I put it on You Tube and someone sent it to her aunt whose tumours had returned after being in remission,” she recalls. “The song made her feel strong and inspired and her family reached out to me so we flew out to Virginia and sang it to her at church in front of everyone she knew.” A smile. “Receiving the plaques for going platinum, singing with Taylor and travelling halfway around the world is incredible. But it’s the moments that make me see the impact my music can have that are my true highlights.”

Evolution of the Workspace

First published on Semi-Permanent online, March 2016. 

When you walk into NeueHouse, a private co-working space housed in a 50,000-square-foot building in Midtown Manhattan, it’s easy to feel like you’ve entered a clubhouse for the city’s aesthetes rather than a workspace designed to punch deadlines and strike deals. But for co-founder James O’Reilly, the five-storey space, where members can browse art magazines on midcentury-modern sofas, hear Werner Herzog speak on a staircase designed by the architect David Rockwell and collaborate over gin at a downstairs bar, is the logical extension of a global shift.

“At NeueHouse, we recognised that something profound was happening internationally that was changing the way we work, think about work and live,” explains O’Reilly, who launched NeueHouse (pronounced “noya-house”) with tech investors Josh Abram and Allan Murray in September 2013. “There’s been this convergence of both historical trends and technology enabling lots of different modes of work. Reports are showing that nearly 40 percent of the US workforce are freelance or independent contractors. People are working this way as a choice. It’s a viable means of survival and success.”

Since the early noughties, the co-working model has been closely associated with Silicon Valley tech culture or as O’Reilly puts it, “guys in hoodies with a beer keg in the corner”, but NeueHouse is breaking new ground. For starters, the space – whose charter members include Dazed & Confused’s Jefferson Hack and Island Records’ founder Chris Blackwell – is fiercely interdisciplinary. Workers, which hail from industries as diverse as media, fashion, film and advertising, are vetted by an application process and choose from three tiers of membership. However, NeueHouse’s exceptional series of talks, dinners and screenings, are open to the public.

“Although there’s a market for co-working, Neuehouse offered an opportunity to do something more elevated which was about connecting with a very established group of creative professionals,” offers O’Reilly, who helped open Neuehouse in Hollywood in October 2015 and plans to open a London branch in the next few months. “We think about ourselves in terms of how the hotel market developed but you wouldn’t compare a Holiday Inn in the outskirts of the Bronx with a cool hotel downtown. The people who seek out Neuehouse would usually pursue a direct lease but the common trait they share is that they’re curious. We don’t have an application process to be elitist but to find the right industries. If you look at the salons of Paris or coffeehouses of London, the best things happen when you throw industries together. The magic is in the mix.”

Leah Stuhltrager, CEO and co-founder of The Wye, also subscribes to this sentiment. The former gallerist, who co-founded the co-working space in a sprawling post office on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz with Inken Bornholdt and Verity Ortberg back in 2009, says that curating the The Wye’s occupants meant that the space could evolve the co-working model and make itself sustainable in the process.

“Most co-working spaces are based on landlord-tenant models but I wanted to change that to empower the people who were there,” says Stuhlrager, who has given up The Wye’s physical co-working space and instead draws on its network to offer marketing and consulting services and curate events like London festival Convergence in 2016. “If we got in mediocre talent, or people who were just starting, who weren’t valuable to clients we would have no way of making money. We nurtured everyone from the Berlin Film Society to FIER Management, Berlin’s leading fashion promoters. In Berlin, now, there is an influx of spaces and that’s really changed the dynamic. We stopped co-working because there’s a lot of corporate investment in incubator programs and innovation spaces, doing what we have done but with the financial backing. It made more sense to partner with those places and evolve.”

O’Reilly believes that work and life are becoming increasingly seamless and its only a matter of time before workplaces catch up. “At Neuehouse we try to integrate work and life,” he says. “We try to see the world of work a little differently.”

Acing the Hotel Game

 First published on Semi-Permanent online, March 2016. 

Hotels have always doubled as refuge for artists, writers and musicians intent on putting the world on pause to make their art. Although Ace Hotel, the trailblazing hotel group reimagining hospitality for a new generation, might not lay claim to the history of New York’s Chelsea Hotel or LA’s Chateau Marmont, its blend of creativity and community is forging a legacy of its own.

“Ace Hotel came about when the original partners, Alexander Calderwood and Wade Weigel, were working on a barber shop and music venue in Seattle and realised that there wasn’t anywhere for friends to stay when they came into town,” smiles Kelly Sawdon, Partner and Chief Brand Officer at Ace Hotel and creative services arm Atelier Ace. “It was a hotel built by friends for friends. The fact that the founders weren’t from a hospitality background meant that we were willing to make unorthodox decisions.”

The original Ace Hotel, which was housed in a maritime worker’s building in Seattle’s Belltown and featured guest rooms dotted with upcycled furniture and paintings by Shepard Fairey, was an antidote to the hotel world’s faceless luxury – especially back in 1999. But from Palm Spring’s Ace Hotel and Swim Club, where guests convene around outdoor fireplaces and pools plucked out of a Slim Aaron’s photograph to the Ace New York, a 268-room property whose lobby and Stumptown Coffee outpost are an unofficial office for Manhattan freelancers, the group has since proved that considered design, when paired with a left-field perspective, can reinvent what a hotel can be.

“Ace was so ahead of its time,” says Pamela Shamshiri, co-founder of Commune Design, the LA design firm whose countless cultural references and laid-back California sensibility have shaped Ace Palm Springs and Ace Downtown LA, which took over the city’s 1927 United Artists Building in early 2014. “It focused on design before that was a big deal in hotels. Ace Hotels incorporate communal spaces where people who might not necessarily meet can hang out. They’re slightly under-designed because it’s about happy accidents.”

“Creative directors at Nike want to be rubbing shoulders with a band who might be on the charts but staying in a smaller room because they haven’t made it yet,” adds Sawdon, who says that the group will open its ninth property in New Orleans in March 2016. “Ace  pioneered the concept of trying to have affordable rooms to cater to people who share a cultural mindset rather than an economic class.”

Although this commitment to breaking down barriers applies everywhere from Portland to Pittsburgh, Ace’s approach to building community and collaborating with artists is inspired by the location itself. For instance, Ace New York is known for Five at Five, 5pm  performances in the lobby by the likes of Father John Misty, Ace London puts on short film festivals at its basement music venue Miranda and Ace Los Angeles – a hub that’s credited with reviving the city’s downtown neighbourhood – has seen Patti Smith play its Spanish Gothic theatre and recently hosted a live reading of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Sawdon also says that Ace’s artist in residency program, which has hosted New York artists Christen Clifford and Kenzo Minami, and Dear DTLA, a collaboration with WeTransfer that beams work by LA artists on a giant billboard, offer ways to support people doing interesting things in the city.

“Artists stay in our hotel on a Sunday night and give them free reign to leave behind whatever they consider art,” laughs Sawdon, adding that she’s looking forward expanding the Ace community when the pair speak at Semi-Permanent in May. “We look at what drives a city and go the extra mile to help and influence a neighbourhood. For us, hotels are an opportunity to create an environment where guests can be exposed to new ideas.”

5 Mad Men office policies we’re glad were left in the ’60s

First published on the Robert Half blog, July 2014

From chain-smoking directors to outdated views on race and gender, the celebrated drama – which revolves around ’60s Manhattan advertising agency Sterling Cooper (and its many name iterations) – shines the spotlight on attitudes that would spark an outcry in the modern workplace.

Here are five policies we’re glad we don’t tolerate today.

Pregnant women must give up their jobs

These days, working mothers in Australia and New Zealand are eligible for as much as a year of maternity leave, but in the 1960s, women contemplating babies were forced to give up their jobs. When Sterling Cooper’s office manager Joan Harris becomes pregnant, she’s immediately forced to surrender the job she loves.

Non-white staff members are relegated to administrative roles

Although diverse hiring practices play a starring role in the modern workplace, Mad Men is proof that this wasn’t always the case. In season five, Sterling Cooper’s management team published a joke advertisement asking African Americans to apply for a position and were shocked when dozens of applicants flocked to the office in response. In the end, this led to the hiring of Dawn, the company’s first African-American employee.

Indoor chain-smoking is a daily ritual

In an era in which smoking indoors is considered unthinkable, it’s surprising to note that cigarette consumption was once a regular part of professional life. In Mad Men, creative director Don Draper is often hunched over a typewriter, inhaling countless cigarettes – a workplace practice that spells disaster for public health.

Women aren’t encouraged to pursue leadership positions

Mad Men sees women stuck in secretarial positions, while the men are creative directors, art directors and senior managers. However, Peggy Olson’s anomalous ascent from receptionist to head of copy – a path paved with double standards – is a central focus of the show.

Partners are urged to take long, whisky-fuelled client lunches

At Sterling Cooper, employees and clients discuss contracts and new projects over long, alcohol-heavy lunches. In fact, the partners at Sterling Cooper spend more time consuming alcohol than they do meeting professional responsibilities, leaving little room for getting work done.

From rampant sexism to on-the-job drinking, Mad Men’s office policies prove just how far we’ve come. And though we’re glad to kiss these outdated and over-the-top practices goodbye, we’re always on the lookout for the positive workplace trends now and beyond.

A Guide to Little Havana and Little Miami

First published on the Flight Centre blog, September 2014 

There’s more to Miami than South Beach. The Florida capital is often associated with the sherbet-coloured buildings and glitzy cabanas that line the United States’ most glamourous southern beachfront. But the real Miami begins when you bypass the sequined beachgoers and head for the neighbourhoods responsible for the city’s cultural pulse.

Little Havana, a lively enclave that houses Florida’s thriving Cuban population, should top any Miami agenda. And Little Haiti, a precinct known for independent businesses and a freewheeling arts scene, shouldn’t be far behind. Here’s our guide to two of the city’s most vibrant and colourful neighbourhoods.

LIVELY LITTLE HAVANA

The vast neighbourhood that unfolds west from the Miami River earned its name in the 1960s when it became an unofficial hub for Cuban migrants. Since then, the precinct has blended old-world traditions with a modern-day take on Hispanic culture.

Little Havana owes its kaleidoscopic character to the technicolour streetside murals which depict scenes of city life. Make sure you stroll along Calle Ocho – an eclectic thoroughfare where shoebox cigar shops sit alongside bustling fruit vendors. Cuban eateries boom out live calypso and serve fish croquetas before workers decamp to Domino Park, where friends and family convene for games of domino.

In recent years, galleries such as Kontempo Art and Molina Fine Art Gallery have seen the precinct play a starring role in Miami’s art scene. Viernes Culturales – a monthly festival that lures revellers with live music and endless mojitos – also keeps the party atmosphere alive and well.

SPEND A PERFECT DAY IN LITTLE HAVANA

Start with a pork sandwich and Cuban espresso at Sergio’s Restaurant. This local institution is known for fare that’s as wallet-friendly as it is authentic. Next head to the Latin Walk of Fame – a strip dotted with monuments to famous Cubans such as Celia Cruz and Gloria Estefan. Spend your afternoon taking in the works of celebrated Cuban artist Agustín Gainza. His studio is a short stroll from the Calle Ocho. Finally, sip on guaroapo – a sticky liquid made from sugarcane stalks.

EXPATRIATE FLAVOURS IN LITTLE HAITI

Little Haiti was shaped by the Haitian refugees who flocked to the neighbourhood in the 1980s. The neighbourhood has since undergone a cultural renaissance and these days, local vendors peddling mangoes and sugarcane rub shoulders with sleek French bistros. Billboards written in Creole also bookend record stores heaving with vintage vinyl and iconic pubs such as Churchill’s. If you’re chasing local flavour, head to the Caribbean Marketplace. This pastel-coloured building channels Haiti’s gingerbread houses and plays host to handmade crafts, a Creole bookstore and an evolving lineup of music and theatre.

HOW TO SIZE UP LITTLE HAITI

Have breakfast at Leela’s Restaurant – a neighbourhood favourite known for Haitian fare with an American twist. Follow this with a trip down Little Haiti’s side streets, which host the likes of Moksha Family Arts Collective. This mixed-use gallery champions everything from tribal art to electronic music. Finally, spend your afternoon at the Little Haiti Community Garden, where local children grow fresh produce before selling it at the Upper Eastside Farmer Market.

Creating Space for Change

 Report: Neha Kale 

A group of researchers cluster around a humanoid robot with the mannerisms of a child. Nearby, a scientist swaps Melbourne for medieval Angkor by donning a headset while a designer pores over a ring equipped to simulate sight. If you wander into sensiLab, an interdisciplinary facility that launched in May at Monash University’s Caulfield campus, you would be forgiven for thinking that your favourite science fiction novel had come to life. But for sensiLab director Professor Jon McCormack, the trailblazing space is less interested in fantasy than it is in tackling challenges we face in the real world.

“We wanted to address the changes that were happening around us and the fact that innovation was coming from non-traditional areas by bringing together people from different disciplines,” explains McCormack, adding that the lab hosts over 50 researchers across fields like IT, engineering, medicine, art and design. “SensiLab is oriented around visualisation, interaction design and digital fabrication. There are a lot of exciting things happening in the next year and we’re just at the start.”

SensiLab, which is modelled on hackerspaces and innovation hubs such as the MIT media lab, is interested in how technological acceleration has created low barriers to entry and what this means for problem-solving on a global scale. McCormack says that working with low-cost equipment such as the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that enables wearers to simultaneously enter immersive spaces, has sparked new possibilities for collaboration and learning.

“Virtual reality technology used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but now headsets cost around $350 so the question is no longer about affordability but about what happens when we connect them together,” says McCormack, a winner of the 2012 Eureka Prize. “Our Angkor Project uses data to build an interpretation of an ancient metropolis so you can be anywhere around the globe but in the same virtual space. Scientists across different cities will be able to view complex data collaboratively. It’s a game-changer.”

For McCormack, accessibility – in terms of using technology to create a more inclusive society and collapsing boundaries that exist between disciplines – is a defining theme. At sensiLab, technologies such as 3D printing are the basis for interactive maps for the vision-impaired and engineers and industrial designers join forces to conceive wearables such as the Haptic ring.

“We’ve used 3D printing and some basic electronics to print out a digital version of a map that can help visually impaired people find their way around places – when you touch sections, a voice will tell you the building’s name and various helpful things,” explains McCormack, who says that sensiLab will relocate to a purpose-built facility next year. “It’s inexpensive and could be placed in train stations and shopping centres to help the vision-impaired move around with a greater sense of freedom. Similarly, the Haptic ring generates vibrations to help decipher graphics on tablets and mobile devices. We have designers working on beautiful aesthetics because a lot of stuff associated with disability looks clunky and functional. It’s a fashion device as well.”

McCormack says that sensiLab is equally focused on exploring the ethical issues that technology can bring. For instance, experimenting with the ways in which a humanoid robot can teach children with autism to engage with reading and writing has raised interesting questions about the divide between humans and machines.

“Robots are often associated with slave labour but when robots and humans co-operate to achieve something, they are incredibly precise,” McCormack smiles. “Our robot, which is designed by a French company Aldebaran Robotics, is approachable and friendly and sometimes acts like a petulant child. Down the track, we will see these beings looking after the elderly or providing companionship to people with dementia – so it’s not that unrealistic to consider them halfway human. SensiLab is interested in how things are connected in terms of social impact. It’s not about asking what can we can do or what we can’t do but about what we should be doing.”

Golden Age: Five inspiring 50-plus celebs

Getting older doesn’t mean slowing down. From Sophia Loren, the fabled actress who’s campaigning for children’s safety to Lenny Kravitz, the rock icon who’s trying his hand at furniture design, here are five celebrities who prove that age is nothing but a number.

Getting older doesn’t mean slowing down. From Sophia Loren, the fabled actress who’s campaigning for children’s safety to Lenny Kravitz, the rock icon who’s trying his hand at furniture design, here are five celebrities who prove that age is nothing but a number.

Sophia Loren

If you think that the film industry is ruled by twentysomething ingénues, you may want to reconsider. Sophia Loren, the 81 year-old screen legend who owes her fame to classics such as Two Women and Houseboat regularly combines acting roles with fundraising efforts – she recently starred the Human Voice and was the guest of honour at La Dolce Italia Gala Charity Dinner, an event whose proceeds go to children’s safety organisation the Alannah and Madeleine Foundation.

Lenny Kravitz

Lenny Kravitz proves that it’s never too late to switch gears when it comes to achieving your dreams. In 2003, the 51-year-old Grammy winner, who’s best known for rock n’roll anthems such as American Woman, fulfilled a lifelong passion for furniture by launching Kravitz Design, a design firm that takes creative cues from his travels around the world. He’s also partnered with commercial interiors brand CB2 to launch a ‘70s inspired homewares range heavy on zig-zag graphics and touches of brass.

Yoko Ono 

Age hasn’t dampened Yoko Ono’s relentless work ethic. The trailblazing 82-year-old performance artist, who achieved cult status with her ‘60s work Grapefruit and was the subject of a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art this year is an ambassador for women’s and gay rights as well as an ardent peace activist – her charity Imagine Peace has built over 90 schools around the world to date.

Ken Done

Ken Done knows that artistic ambitions aren’t limited to the young. The iconic Australian painter, whose Techicolour images of Sydney hooked the world on the Harbour City, still works every day in his Mosman studio and actively launches new exhibitions and projects despite turning 75 this year. He’s also an advocate for conversation – he painted a Black Rhino sculpture as part of a Taronga Zoo community art project that raised awareness about rhinoceros extinction rates in 2014.

Vivienne Westwood

Few fashion designers wear the icon tag as well as Vivienne Westwood. Although the British fashion designer is best known for training the world’s eye on the London fashion scene, she’s also known for applying her outlandish creativity to her politics – a September 2015 incident that saw the 74 year-old drive a tank into prime minister David Cameron’s property to protest fracking is a case in point.

High spirits: A road trip weekend in the Blue Mountains

A two-hour drive from Sydney, the Blue Mountains has the makings of a dream road trip, thanks to towns that feel plucked from a film set and walking trails that punctuate rainforest and waterfalls with other-worldly views.

Although the World Heritage-listed destination spans 1.03 million hectares of majestic eucalypts and sandstone cliffs and boasts a biodiversity rich enough to inspire Darwin’s theory of evolution, it’s also home to easy-to-navigate highways tailor-made for a weekend on the road. Here’s how to cover the best of the Blue Mountains in two days.

Day one: Katoomba

Katoomba, a historic town known for Art Deco architecture, hilly streets and a cliff-side location overlooking the gorges and ravines of Jamison Valley, is often the first port of call on any Blue Mountains agenda – and for good reason. It’s also five minutes from the Three Sisters, a trio of ancient rock formations that tower 3000 feet above sea level and take their name from a famous Aboriginal legend.

Head here first to skip the late-afternoon tourist crowds and make time for a ride on the Scenic Railway(corner of Violet Street and Cliff Drive) – a set of glass-roofed carriages that see passengers descend on a 52-degree incline through Jurassic rainforest onto the valley floor. Once the mountain air has stoked your appetite, make a beeline for the fireplace at The Carrington (15-47 Katoomba St). This opulent 19th-century hotel served as a weekend getaway for wealthy Sydneysiders during the 1950s and 1960s and now serves up local Bilpin cider and a delicious beef and Guinness pie.

After lunch, browse the shops on Katoomba Street, where you can pick up a rare first edition at antiquarian bookseller Mr Pickwicks (86 Katoomba St). Or score a piece of 1970s glassware from Katoomba Vintage Emporium (59 Katoomba St), a mazelike antiques mecca you could get lost in for hours. Top off your day with slow-roasted lamb and a glass of pinot noir at Avalon (8-18 Katoomba Street); the restaurant’s building, which once played host to poetry readings, jazz and opera, is a colourful slice of Blue Mountains bohemia.

Day two: Leura

Start your morning with a short drive down Lovel and Megalong streets to Leura, a nearby township known for fiery autumn trees and dotted with homegrown boutiques, pocket-sized cake shops and elegant cafes. If you’re here on the first Sunday of the month, stop at Leura Public School for the Sunday Market (Mount Hay Rd) for local jam and handmade gifts before pulling up a patch of courtyard at the Red Door cafe (134 Leura Mall). Order the fluffy scrambled eggs and an organic flat white from La Luna roasters.

Leura Cascades, a secluded reserve known for crystal waterfalls and dizzying vistas, is only a few minutes’ drive from Leura Mall. Enjoy a picnic or take a big hike. Follow the Prince Henry Cliff Walk alongside the rapids – savouring the afternoon sun as it filters through the rainforest canopy – before ending your walk at the Bridal Veil Lookout. This serene spot, where you can watch the Bridal Veil Falls plunge down the cliff side, is the perfect place to soak in the view before the drive back home. (Note: The Prince Henry Cliff Walk is 6.8 kilometres long and takes approximately 3.5 hours. NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service has given the walk a difficulty grading of medium.)

www.mynrma.com.au/living-well-navigator

The Space: Joe Snell

For architect Joe Snell, transforming the headquarters of the Mamamia publishing empire was a lesson the power of good design. 

Joe Snell is a believer in the relationship between good design and positive energy. The award-winning architect, who studied at Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts and serves as a judge on home renovation show House Rules, says that the right design elements can transform the way we feel in certain spaces.

“I think society has forgotten how important the built environment is when it comes to how we feel,” he says. “The space you inhabit affects your mood. If you’re sitting in an air-conditioned, badly lit space and there’s no inspiration around you and it’s not reflecting your creative culture than what’s the point?”

Recently, a collaboration with media powerhouse Mia Freedman allowed Snell to test this theory. Earlier this year, the founder of popular women’s website Mamamia as well as sister sites The Glow and iVillage asked Snell to redesign her team’s Sydney headquarters to better reflect the company’s evolution and growth.

“Mia came across another project that I delivered for an advertising agency in the same building and asked me to work on her office,” he explains. “Mamamia is growing fast so I worked really close with them to understand how they’re going to grow and what that meant for the office layout. Mia is a force of nature when I was listening to her, I realised that she needed an uplifting space. When you walk into that office, there are TVs, conversations and post-it notes everywhere. I wanted to create an environment that represented that energy.”

For Snell, transforming the office – which features high ceilings, columns and classic timber flooring – called for clever use of colour and breakout spaces modeled on indoor greenhouses. Elements such as a yellow table and bench from NOMI’s Dove range create the flexibility essential for accommodating growth.

“I used a lot of neon colours such as yellow, green, pink and purple to create definition,” he explains. “I also used greenhouses that serve as rooms within rooms and provide different areas for staff to hang out in. The injection of the greenhouses add a bit of fun and reflect the forward-thinking, alternative nature of the company.”

Snell conceived and installed a separation device made out of colourful tubes to introduce borders between zones and embody the organisation’s spirit. It’s also his proudest achievement.

“Instead of building a wall, I introduced a separation device made out of colourful tubes the resembles the billowing of a dress – it sways in and sways out, there’s a softness to it and your perspective of it changes depending on where you are in the office,” says Snell, who detailed the device after lengthy research. “Mamamia is a disruptive company and there isn’t an aspect of the design that’s conformist. At the same time, it’s functional and allows everyone to work and produce.”

The Insider: Henri Wilson

The Chevron shelf, a new storage staple by Sydney design star Henry Wilson, proves that elegance plus practicality is a formula for magic. 

Henry Wilson believes that beauty is a byword for functionality. The Sydney furniture designer, who received a masters degree at the fabled Design Academy Eindhoen in the Netherlands and has since enjoyed a swift career trajectory thanks to commercial fitouts for brands such as Aesop and initiatives such as Things Revisited – a series that sees him re-imagine design icons such as the Wassily Chair – says that aesthetic value stems from utilitarianism, not the other way round.

“For me design is about honestly resolving problems,” says Wilson, whose plaudits include the 2011 Bombay Sapphire Design Discovery Award and a SOYA Craft and Design Object Award, which led to a mentorship with Mark Newson. “I’ve always thought that an object’s beauty stems from the way that it’s resolved. I try to resolve a sense of truth in each piece and hopefully create a bond with the user in the process.”

It’s difficult to dispute the power of Wilson’s approach. For instance, his singular take on the Wasily Chair – which incorporates tan bridle leather and powder-blue coating – captures the spirit of the Bauhaus classic, which was designed in 1925 by Marcel Breuer, while rewriting it for the Australian user. And Wilson’s Chevron shelves, a  modular storage unit that represents his first collaboration with NOMI, speaks to the needs of modern-day customers and preserves the integrity of the Ancient Greek design.

“The Chevron is an ancient interlocking symbol – it’s an honest shape that can be seen in Ancient Greek and Aztec cultures and I’ve always been struck by it,” says Wilson, who designed the shelves a year before joining forces with NOMI to manufacture and distribute the product. “At the same time, I’d noticed that print media was dying in the sense that cheap, monthly magazines were going away but there was a rise in well-crafted independent magazines. For instance, if you collected Monocle magazine or a particular journal, the Chevron shelf is somewhere you can store them. I designed it for people who are storing a small selection of quality books and magazines rather than a large library of paperbacks.”

Wilson says that the Chevron shelves, which are made from precision-milled Birchwood, available in shades such as rose pink and teal and revolve around the symbol’s interlocking pattern – the perfect union of elegance and functionality – are also designed to evolve with user’s lives.

“You can add more shelves to the system as your collection grows and simply stack them up,” he explains. “And if you’re moving house, you don’t have to empty them all, you can just carry them like a box.”

Wilson, who cites successfully maintaining his own practice as his proudest career achievement, says that the next twelve months includes making space for his own evolution.

“I’ll be working with NOMI on on some possible new collaborations – I’m continuing to work on my new practice and some interior fitouts. I’m also opening a new studio in Darlinghurst that will be an open studio and showroom that the public can visit,” he says. “By necessity or interest, I love how varied my job is.”

Ariel Books

Sprawling, sun-dappled and artfully curated, Ariel Books is a design lover’s paradise.  We speak with manager Julia Blanks about creating a space that’s inspired devotees for three decades and counting. 

If you’re a bibliophile, stepping into Ariel Books feels like nothing short of a homecoming. The sun-splashed Sydney space might owe its following to a flawless edit of art and architecture books but it’s also known for a design nous that inspires visitors to cancel plans, curl up in a corner and while away the day.

“I think it’s the way the space is laid out,” laughs Ariel’s manager Julia Blanks, whose parents established the Oxford Street institution in 1985. “People feel relaxed staying in here. It’s somewhere they can go, chill out for half an hour and get some new ideas and inspiration. Even if they don’t buy a book, it’s somewhere they know they can come back.”

Blanks is onto something. At Ariel, coffee table books sit atop rectangular tables and sloping shelves lined with a rainbow of spines feel like an art installation you want to reach out and touch. The store’s high ceilings, white walls and hardwood floors are the perfect canvas for paper bouquets, vintage maps and the row of hot air balloons that float above windows – bursts of colour that both punctuate the space and give it life.

“We’re definitely drawn to colour,” says Blanks, who recently added foldable storyteller chairs and a series of sleek, modular tables to the space, courtesy of a collaboration with NOMI that saw her choose colours and customise pieces that would elevate and complement the bookstore’s aesthetic. “I think the collection of furniture we’ve gathered over the years is one of my favourite aspects of the space. Some of it is from eBay and some of it is handcrafted but it all works together.”

For Blanks, who says that new releases from Flying Eye Books, an audacious UK publisher specialising in witty picture books and a new shipment of  from Mack, a distributor of ambitious, cloth-covered photography titles are among her favourite things in-store, curating and designing Ariel Books is an ongoing process.

“My parents always had a passion for art and design books and when they opened the store 30 years ago, there was nothing like it on Oxford Street,” she recalls. “Ariel Books is collaborative and we slowly build it over time. We just play it by ear and if we see something we love we make it a part of the store. We don’t just have one idea in mind – the space is always changing.”

The Broadsheet Cookbook

In 2015, I was commissioned to co-write the first-ever Broadsheet Sydney Cookbook, which presents over 80 recipes from Sydney’s favourite restaurants, cafes and bars. I wrote all the major pieces of editorial — including the introduction and features on how to make the perfect coffee, cook a steak, match food with wine and enjoy cocktails after dinner. I also had the pleasure of interviewing talented chefs and culinary tastemakers such as Rockpool’s Neil Perry, Bulletin Place’s Adi Ruiz, Billy Kwong’s Kylie Kwong and Iceberg’s Maurizio Terzini. The cookbook was published by Broadsheet and Pan MacMillan imprint Plum Books and is available online and at good bookstores around the country.

Sydney Style Seekers Guide #8

For the 2014 Autumn-Winter issue of Urban Walkabout Style Seekers, I profiled Vivid Ideas’ Jess Scully and Richard Munao from Cult, a Sydney furniture emporium that plays host to everything from Philippe Starck coffee tables to Arne Jacobsen egg chairs. I also wrote a guide to industrial Alexandria and road tripped to the Central Coast. Circulation: 80,000.

A Food Lover’s Guide to Chinatown

Sydney’s Chinatown is a warren-like enclave that’s home to heaving yum cha palaces, basement food courts ladling legendary ramen and food emporiums stocking ingredients that range from the everyday to the further-flung. As contributing editor, I wrote and edited a food lover’s guide to this historic part of the city for Urban Walkabout and the City of Sydney. Along with information about Chinatown’s most-loved dining institutions, the guide includes a primer on yum cha etiquette and a visual glossary for doing your food shopping. Circulation: 50,000 copies.

The Boroondara Pocketbook

In June 2014, I was commissioned by Urban Walkabout to spend a fortnight in Melbourne to research and write The Boroondara Pocketbook, an insider’s guide to the city’s leafy and underrated eastern suburbs. I spent time interviewing locals and exploring the area’s many restaurants, shops and heritage landmarks (including one of Melbourne’s most opulent art deco cinemas!), conceived the editorial concepts and wrote copy for the entire guide. You can view the publication here. 

Aida Tomescu, Eyes in the Heat

First published on Broadsheet, November 2015. 

Eyes in the Heat, a new exhibition by acclaimed abstract painter Aida Tomescu, features dazzling painterly visions that are the products of experience and time.

“Looking at this now, it makes perfect sense!” laughs the painter Aida Tomescu. She nods at a hulking canvas with thick, sun-coloured brushstrokes that make you suspect that it might be a millisecond away from bursting into flames. “I reworked and introduced elements, scraping back and forth, back and forth. The blue brought in the red, the red brought in the yellow, the yellow brought in the orange. I choose painting because you can say something that you can’t in any other media. This quality doesn’t have a name and you can’t understand it analytically. Paintings can be about beauty but it’s a beauty that always comes with tension and power.”

Tomescu is standing in front of Eyes in the Heat, the titular work in a new exhibition that will open at Sullivan+Strumpf. Last week, the artist – who migrated to Sydney from Bucharest, Romania in 1980, and who is considered one of Australia’s leading abstract painters – turned 60. It seems the passage of time has been emboldening. Her new paintings – large-scale pieces that use cadmium oranges and joyful yellows to evoke a flurry of light and movement – are a study in late-summer radiance. They’re also her most cohesive body of work to date.

“Some of my paintings take up to two-and-a-half to three years to complete, but this year, I experienced this intense creative flow that brought all the pieces together,” explains Tomescu, whose past accolades include the Wynne Prize, Sulman Prize and Dobell Prize for Drawing. “Each piece that I painted promised something and retained a kind of poetry. The forms that emerged became like fictitious identities that play off each other.”

Tomescu has held more than 30 solo shows during her career, and says her artistic evolution has hinged on her ability to let go.

“I started off as a figurative painter and when I came to Australia and tried to reconnect with still life and landscape, it felt like an old language that I’d left behind,” she smiles. “When I was an art student at 17, I never would have dreamed that I would be doing the kind of painting I’m doing now. I’ve realised that I needed to focus on the experience of painting, not the result. And it’s liberating to know that this can take years.”

Nirvana by Needlepoint

First published in Knit Wit magazine, November 2015. 

Clara Vuletich believes that the line between the practical and the spiritual is only the width of a needle. The textile designer and yoga instructor behind Sutra Stitching, a workshop that explores the surprising connections between sewing and mindfulness, thinks that the ability to stitch isn’t just a corrective to a world hooked on fast fashion – it’s a practice whose restorative powers are good for your soul.

“In the 2000s, I was living in London and became interested in slow fashion,” says Vuletich, who enrolled in a textile design course at London’s Chelsea College of Art after working with fashion consultant Yasmin Sewell at cult boutique Yasmin Cho.“A few years later, I retrained as a Kundalini yoga instructor and started bringing that influence to my research. I then discovered that the word “Sutra” means thread in Sanskrit. There are so many parallels between prayer and stitching and so many interesting artists – such as Louise Bourgeois – who talk about stitching as a metaphor for repairing things.”

We’re chatting over flat whites and avocado toast in a sun-splashed Sydney cafe on a winter morning that feels dangerously like the start of spring. In a few weeks, Vuletich, who recently returned to Australia, will submit a PhD thesis on social textiles, a project that’s commanded her  energy over the past five years but today she’s more concerned about the delicate algebra of meeting friends who share her passions and finding the perfect venue for her workshops. At one point, she hands me a tissue-soft swatch of fabric featuring a constellation of patterned squares and her eyes sparkle with the thrill of someone already living their new beginning. The effect is contagious.

Vuletich, whose practice revolves around patchwork and quilting, has always had faith in the revolutionary magic of textiles and the ways in which stitching can fill holes in the supply chain and knit together communities around the world.  “At art school one of my tutors was very interested in fashion sustainability issues and I started working at her research hub MISTRA Future Fashion after I graduated,” she says, adding that this research was funded by the Swedish government, who saw that its vision could transform the likes of H&M. In September 2013, she was asked by a collaborator Katherine May, to teach meditation and hand-stitching at The Arthaus, a mixed-use East London factory space. “We used all this naturally dyed indigo fabric and were making all these connections together,” she grins, lighting up at the memory. “I knew that there was a disconnect between producers and consumers but after that workshop I realised that this relates to a disconnection between the mind and body.”

Since then, Vuletich, who sources naturally dyed fabrics in India and has given workshops to garment workers in China, has made it her mission to bridge this divide. During classes, she leads students in a meditation while sitting on a sheepskin (the Kundalini yogi’s answer to a yoga mat), lays out the fabric and sewing kits in the middle of the circle and invites them to put their thread through the needle using Kantha running stitch, a quilting technique from West Bengal. “I tell my students to treat the fabric as they would a messy paper collage because the outcome isn’t important, it’s the process,” explains Vuletich, who held a workshop at a garden studio in Bondi earlier this year. “Something happens when you combine meditation, repetitive hand movements and fabric. They often have lightbulb moments as they make the link in their heads.”

Vuletich hopes to invite artists, scientists and makers to participate in future workshops and prove that her belief in the relationship between sewing and wellness is more than a hunch. “We’ve lost the sewing skills that our grandmothers had and at the same time we need mindfulness as the world becomes faster than it was before,” she smiles. “I’ve always been interested in what happens to the brain when you meditate. I’d love to do the same thing for stitching one day.”

Can we re-imagine sadness as an empowering force?

Published in Daily Life, February 2016. 

‘Girl Power’, that slogan once associated with 90s pop acts, has now become the blueprint for being a woman in the world. These days, it’s easy to believe the route to feminist empowerment has less to do with bloodlust or punk-rock anarchy than with signing up to an all-female career network, complete with an art-directed Instagram presence, using Beyonce’s self-titled album as a motivational soundtrack. Or gifting your daughter a Barbie, thigh gap replaced with curves.

We live in a time in which 62 million girls don’t have access to education, one in six Australian women suffer violence at the hands of a partner and men’s rights activists stage clandestine meetings as part of a mission to legalise rape. Forgive me if relentless positivity doesn’t seem like an alternative for women’s suffering, but like an elaborate and well-packaged lie.

Audrey Wollen is an advocate for female pain. Last year, the 23-year-old, LA based artist conceived ‘Sad Girl Theory’, a movement that reframes sorrow as a weapon against this pressure to celebrate the female experience rather than accept the everyday ways it hurts.

“Sad Girl Theory is the proposal that girls’ sadness and self-destructive behaviour should be re-read as an act of political resistance,” says Wollen, who built a cult following viaRepetitions: a series of images in which she inserts her naked body into arresting recreations of classic paintings like Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Ingres’ Grand Odalisque.

Despair doesn’t sell face cream or leadership seminars as well as celebrity figureheads or pro-women platitudes, but history proves it’s a subversive force. From Sylvia Plath, whose poems are so unsparing in their depictions of 1950s motherhood that the world feels leached of colour when you read them, to Frida Kahlo – who broke her spine in a tram crash and painted her injuries on autobiographical canvases – the queens of the sad girl movement understood that working within tragic circumstances could be quietly revolutionary.

Wollen, who’s currently working on a body of artwork about the patients of La Salpêtrière – the 19th century French hospital that incarcerated women believed to be ‘hysterical’ – says her own sad girl icons include Lana Del Rey, Kathy Acker, Brittany Murphy and Elena Ferrante (the anonymous Italian author whose Neapolitan Novels are a study in the violent realities of women’s lives). She also believes that the ways in which sad girls are sidelined in our culture points to their ability to disrupt the status quo.

“The fact that girls have been literally imprisoned over the course of centuries for being sad just proves what an amazing weapon it is already, how frightening it can be to those in power,” says Wollen, who’s writing a book based on Sad Girl Theory and was named among the 10 new faces of feminism by Teen Vogue this year.

“The history of girls is the history of sorrow, from the very beginning. The stereotype of the hysterical girl, driven mad by sorrow, is used to warn girls: don’t turn out like her, don’t be a drag, don’t complain, don’t go crazy. If we all collectively admitted that being a girl sucks in this world right now, that it is scary and sad, that these are unliveable, unacceptable, conditions: what then? Something would have to change.”

Wollen is equally committed to reclaiming ‘girl’ – a word that stands in for youth, foolishness and vulnerability – as a badge of pride. She says girls often “can’t live up to the demands of contemporary feminism – to have high self esteem, a lot of money, great sex, fearlessness – and end up in a shame spiral as if we could just pull up our bootstraps, work a little harder, and fix things!”

Sad Girl Theory reverses the impulse to put the responsibility for empowerment on individual girls, rather than the system itself, Wollen adds: “Sadness is not narcissistic or foolish: it is an informed, rational, articulate, and embodied response to a devastating set of circumstances.

“Hypothetically, you start out as a girl and you level up, to become a woman. But when does womanhood actually happen? When we are of childbearing age? When we are in charge of our own lives? When we’re free? I never saw girls level up, the way they promised us we would. Under the patriarchy, it doesn’t matter how old we are, we’re all still girls, and we can work with that.”

Meghan Daum: ‘Why does tragedy have to be cathartic or redemptive?’

Published in Daily Life, November 2015. 

“I’ve always been somebody who exerts a great deal of energy trying to get my realities to match my fantasies,” writes Meghan Daum in her 1999 New Yorker essay ‘My Misspent Youth‘. “Even if the fantasies are made from materials that are no longer manufactured.” The piece, which traces Daum’s attempts to make it as a writer in New York by buying into the overpriced trappings of lifestyle (pricey martinis, hardwood floors) summed up the directly proportional relationship between twenty-something ambition and financial ruin more than a decade before Girls‘ Hannah Horvath. It also proved that some writers have a knack for both predicting the zeitgeist and ushering it in.

“It’s so funny that people now think of that as a classic essay because at the time I was called out for being self-indulgent and whiny,” laughs Daum, whose work appears everywhere from Vogue to GQ and who’s speaking to me from New York, where she’s recently relocated after 13 years in LA.  “I grew up mostly in New Jersey – so if you grow up in the suburbs of a city, you’re sort of drawn to that city in that mythological way. When I was in high school, I watched a lot of Woody Allen movies and realised that there was a culture and an intellectual community there and I became totally fascinated by that. Because of this, I thought that you could work at a tiny, non-profit art magazine and still live in a huge apartment on the Upper West Side. I didn’t think the story was going to be timeless but I did feel very strongly about publishing it and wanted to tell it in a particular way. At one point, I was dealing with an editor who didn’t like it but I felt so strongly about it that I told myself that if it didn’t run I would write it on a billboard. Because I couldn’t afford to rent a billboard, that could never have happened.”

Although ‘My Misspent Youth’, which gave rise to a 2001 collection of the same name and prompted Daum’s move to Nebraska, is considered a touchstone for a generation of writers (swap New York for London or Melbourne and fresh-cut flowers for cold-drip coffee and see what I mean) it also signposted Daum’s own terrain as an essayist – a commitment to exposing the gulf between the stories we tell ourselves and the substance of our actual lives. From “I Nearly Died, So What?”, a New York Times piece about how a brush with a fatal disease taught her less about how near-death experiences transform us than it did about our culture’s insistence that the sick teach us something to “Difference Maker“, which appears in her new collection The Unspeakable and reconciles her own ambivalence towards motherhood and her volunteer work with troubled children, she uses her own experiences to peel away our collective delusions. And, in spite of the growing belief that first-person writing (particularly first-person writing by women) has all the artistic integrity of a Livejournal, her work is warm yet sharply observed, empathetic but brutally honest. It’s a sensibility that also underpins the approach she took as editor ofSelfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed, a 2015 anthology that sees 16 writers explore their decision to remain childless by choice.

“It was a project that I wanted to do for a very long time and I could never get anyone interested until now,” says Daum, who’s also a longtime columnist for the LA Times and won the PEN Centre USA Creative Nonfiction Award for The Unspeakable in September 2015. “I think the decision to avoid having kids is as interesting to parents as it is to non-parents. Selfishness is such a funny word – it often gets bandied about and a lot of us tend to call parents selfish. The title is tongue in cheek because it requires a certain selfishness to get out of bed in the morning! I feel like thinking long and hard about whether you want a child is respecting parenthood. On both sides, there’s been a thoughtlessness in terms of how we talk about it. It’s really hard to raise kids in this world, in this particular moment and being a parent is an important job. It should be done by people who want to do it.”

“I almost didn’t publish that essay – it took me almost a year, I started and then I stopped and when I finished it and showed it to some friends and they said I had to go ahead with it,” recalls Daum, who also wrote Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, a memoir about her real estate addiction and tells me that she has ideas for a new novel and a non-fiction book in the works. “I feel like with so much of what we experience in life, there’s this mandate to have a cathartic experience or a redemptive experience through crisis and tragedy. But if you don’t have that experience you’ve failed. For me, it’s like ‘what better way of weathering a situation than staying the same person?’ but it’s something our culture just doesn’t like. I hate the word confessional, because I feel like your job as a writer is to confide in order to achieve a certain intimacy with the reader. You don’t do that by trying to make yourself look better than you are. You do that by being honest.”

On the thrill of seeing first gen immigrant leads on TV

First published on Daily Life, November 2015. 

There’s an episode of ‘Master of None’, the brilliant new show co-created, written and starring comedian Aziz Ansari, which proves that if you’re asked to betray yourself for a career break, then perhaps that career isn’t worthwhile.

It sees aspiring actor Dev Shah (Ansari) audition for a Friends-style sitcom role, only to be faced with every Indian person’s personal Titanic – a white casting agent that cheerfully asking him to, you know, “do an accent”.

Flash to real life: in a recent op-ed written for The New York Times, Ansari reminds us that it’s taken an eternity to recognise that first-generation immigrants might be complex, funny beings. “I wouldn’t be in the position to do any of this, […] unless some straight white guy, in this case Mike Schur, had given us jobs on “Parks and Recreation.” he writes in the article. “Without that opportunity, we wouldn’t have developed the experience necessary to tell our stories.”

Back in the 90s, ‘All-American Girl’, an ABC sitcom starring Margaret Cho as a rebellious Korean-American teenager was an antidote to the likes of ‘Full House’, but – courtesy of network pressures – it devolved into a schlocky mess of stereotypes. (cue the Chinese grandmother with a pet cricket)

Closer to home, author Benjamin Law’s much-anticipated SBS series ‘The Family Law‘ is a hilarious but heartfelt take on what it’s like to grow up in a Chinese-Australian family in the (very white) Queensland suburbs. It’s also a powerful example of the fact that some stories are richer, and more authentically told when the kids of immigrants take their rightful places as showrunners and creators.

Unsurprisingly, ‘Master of None’ has been universally praised since it dropped on Netflix a fortnight ago, not least because of the clever ways it wrings laughs out of the the internal gymnastics people of colour deal with everyday.

There are no earnest lessons on ‘the merits of diversity’. Instead, it simply depicts a world in which the son of Indian migrants (Dev) craves gnocchi rather than curry, a Taiwanese-American guy named Brian (Kelvin Yu) inspires a lustiness typically reserved for Ryan Gosling and Denise (Lena Waithe), a queer black woman, delivers one-liners with the zing of someone whose baseline wit is undiminished by the chore of negotiating one’s identity.

“If I do a show with two Indian guys on the poster, everyone’s gonna think it’s an Indian show. It wouldn’t be as relatable to a large mainstream audience,” says a network executive in one episode. But look closer, the show seems to retort, and you’ll find people of colour are just as compelling a study in human weirdness. Whether or not network executives are starting to see it, audiences can definitely relate.

The way ‘Master of None’ portrays outsiders as flawed insiders may be revolutionary. But I also can’t deny that at times the show simply makes me want to physically hug the screen. The easy diversity of its friendship group, as well as the way its characters swing between debates about race and mindless banter about the subtext of emojis and David Scwhimmer’s career, could have been lifted from my actual life.

And like Dev, I’ve never asked my parents about their own foundation myths or what it felt like to put roots in Australian suburbia without a clue how your life will turn out. When Dev and Brian take their parents to dinner to learn more about the journeys that brought them to America, Dev finds out that his father worked in a zipper factory to fund medical school, faced racist barbs from his American colleagues and longed to play guitar as a child. Dev buys him a guitar only to find out that it can’t compete with the thrall of an iPad.

In a November 2015 article in Buzzfeed, Bim Adewunmi explores the ways in which the show gets the nuances of race. “In Master of None, race is not a Very Special Episode issue. It’s a fact of life, just one of the many variables that determine our experiences,” she writes. ‘Master of None’ owes its strengths to the way it writes people of colour who are curious, complicated and frivolous all at once. But it’s masterful because it honours the journeys we take as migrants but believes we’re shaped by the journeys we take as human beings.

Hitting the Right Notes

First published in The Collective, February 2016.

Boy & Bear talk ditching hierarchies and piping down every now and then to listen.

The route to modern rock ’n’ roll stardom is known for its paint-by-numbers uniformity. Yet these days, the ability to banter with your fans on YouTube and withstand a gruelling touring schedule without collapsing can shape your trajectory as much as your talent for writing songs that become the soundtrack to people’s lives.

Boy & Bear know that you can’t boil creative chemistry down to an industry formula. When the indie-folk five-piece retreated to the New South Wales South Coast to write material for their highly anticipated third album Limit of Love earlier this year, they discovered the ideas that come out of nowhere are those that can define how far you’ve come as a band.

“When creative ideas pop up, they just pop up,” laughs guitarist Killian Gavin, whose bandmates are David Hosking as lead singer, David Symes on bass and brothers Tim and Jon Hart on drums and keys respectively. “We always have so much fun on these writing trips on the South Coast – we just rent a house, surf and drink red wine. It’s just us boys and it’s pretty special. One evening, a couple of us went out to get dinner for everyone and when we came back, someone was playing a record player really loud and it was drifting in and out of tune but it sounded amazing. Dave was on the keyboard and had this weird organ sound going and it ended up being a song on the new record, called ‘Showdown’. It almost took me back to my first experiences of writing music, which is a really special thing.”

“Boy & Bear started a long time ago as my solo project, but when writing this album I realised that there’s been a natural progression towards being really collaborative,” grins lead singer Dave Hosking, who uploaded the track that first garnered the band airplay, ‘The Storm’, back in 2009. “Usually, I write most of our material but for the first time there were songs that we wrote together, completely from scratch. The song now drives the process rather than any other hierarchy. We seem to be working together instinctively more and more.”

Sitting with Boy & Bear around a rectangular table at Universal Music’s Sydney headquarters feels like witnessing a secret language – in the most inclusive possible way. They trade jokey asides, finish each other’s sentences and riff on each other’s responses. It’s as if their on-stage camaraderie is simply magnified in real life. As Tim puts it, “When you travel and tour as much as us, it becomes like the relationship you have with family. The guys are always going to be there, so you might as well get used to it.”

The fact that Boy & Bear share the kind of kinship that’s a hallmark of every group who once riffed together in university makes it easy to forget that they’ve achieved stratospheric levels of success. In 2011, their debut album Moonfire went platinum and won five ARIA Awards. But it was Harlequin Dream, the 2013 follow-up that channels ’70s-era Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen, that would set the stage for their international career and showcase their range.

Although the record debuted at number one on the Australian ARIA album chart and saw the band play 170 shows across the US, Canada and Europe – including the Italian Riviera and the 10,000-seat amphitheater at Red Rocks, Colorado – it also had its setbacks.

“We were signed to a big label overseas who threw a lot of money at us and then dropped us,” says Dave Hosking. “We’re not the first band that’s happened to and we’re not the last. But the truth was, we never wanted to be signed and the regret was maybe getting ourselves into a position that saw us make a decision we didn’t want to make.

“When you become successful, you do have to partner up with record companies and management and sometimes they have an agenda that runs parallel to your interest and sometimes they don’t. You make smart decisions about working with people who value the core of what you do. Now, we’re at the point [where] we don’t compromise on fundamental things.”

Limit of Love, which was shaped by legendary producer Ethan Johns, who has worked with Ryan Adams and Kings of Leon, is proof that this refusal to compromise underpins the band’s next steps, with the boys skipping digital wizardry to record a take straight to tape. The process meant they had to rehearse relentlessly and draw heavily on the group bond.

“A lot of bands will record all the drums first, then the guitars, then the vocals, but when we were recording this, Dave sung everything live – it’s the first time I’ve been able to listen to our music and say it sounds like we do on stage and that’s really exciting,” enthuses Dave Syme. “But there are times during the recording process when you feel like you’re [doing] something really good or believe in something passionately but the other person disagrees. Tim and Killian sometimes believe in things that are at the different end of the spectrum. But we tend to work it out because the best thing just seems to win in the end.”

For Tim, who says he gives his brother Jon space in the band, working so closely with your best friends and sibling means pausing your creative ego and listening to their point of view.

“I play the drums but if someone suggests I try something different I’m open to that. We have a healthy respect for each other, even when we have different ideas,” he explains. “When you’re in a band with people who know you so well, they will remind you when you get things wrong if you’re always trying to be brash and get your own way. You realise how much you get it wrong but luckily these guys are forgiving.”

Killian, who says that playing the new material during the band’s headline Australian tour in January is going to feel like “trying on a new jacket,” believes that the crew together is greater than the sum of its parts.

“You realise that when it’s just you, your music might not be as interesting,” he says, flashing his bandmates a conspiratorial grin. “If you’re in a band, you need to know how to listen – not just to music but to other people.”

Cotton Candy

First published in The Collective, February 2016. 

Will Cotton owes a debt to the gods of real estate. When the New York artist, whose lush oil paintings conjure cotton-candy wonderlands that feel like long-forgotten figments of our wildest childhood fantasies, moved into a loft equipped with an oven, he never could have guessed that his sweet tooth would lead the way towards a full-blown creative calling. “It was the mid-nineties and I had started painting these images that had more and more to do with sweets because I was looking for good metaphors for desire, consumption and insatiability,” grins Will, speaking from his studio in Manhattan’s Tribeca, during a brief painting break. “I started baking serendipitously because I’d moved into a new place and it was the first time I’d had an oven in a while. I started baking these cakes and then remembered that there was a game called Candyland that I’d played as a kid where everything was made out of confectionery. I started to research this kind of imaginary paradise and found references to this from very early on in human history. And then I realised that it was a really great way for me to get at broader ideas.”

Even if you’ve never heard Will’s name, chances are that his ideas have left an indelible mark on your consciousness; much like the feather-light macaron you once ate in Paris or the deep, persistent craving for your mother’s cake. In the last two decades, Will’s body of work, which features everything from nudes submerged in a lake made from ice-cream and landscapes dripping with molten chocolate to Katy Perry reclining on a candy-floss cloud has coined a sugary vocabulary that’s permeated the world of fashion, music and art. His exquisite canvases – which he makes by concocting edible creations from scratch in his kitchen before painting them in photorealist detail – make him a rare bird in an art world that worships edginess over beauty. This same devotion to pleasure has made him a star.

“I’ve always been accustomed to painting things that people didn’t necessarily find relevant,” says Will, who attended fabled art school Cooper Union and knew he wanted to be a painter when he sold a watercolour to a grandmother’s friend at age 12. “When I went to art school, the dominant style was really grounded in 1970s conceptual art, which had nothing to do with the sorts of stuff that I was really interested in. I looked at painting as a narrative, a chance to tell a story but one that’s open to interpretation – like good fiction writing.”

Although Will, who graduated in the late eighties, spent his early years painting sixties advertising icons such as the Pilsbury Doughboy and the Nesquik Bunny, it was building his first “maquette” – in this case, a six-foot tower of cake crowned with a gingerbread house – that allowed him to explore desire and indulgence by painting landscapes made from sweets. In 1996, his first solo show at the now-defunct Silverstein gallery in Chelsea, depicted a world shaped by lollipop forests and root beer waterfalls and combined candy shop innocence with the shadows of a Grimm fairytale. He joined prominent Fifth Avenue gallery Mary Boone a few years later.

“I had done some landscape paintings before but when I worked out how to build a maquette, it meant that I could control every aspect of symbolism and paint an object as if it was a real thing,” recalls Will, who’s since shown everywhere from the Roncini Gallery in London to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC and who’s preparing for an upcoming exhibition at the Orlando Museum that delves into the props and process behind his work. “I’ve really come to believe that making a good painting means telling the truth about something. I know it’s an oxymoron because my works are such fictions but to me the truth about desire and overindulgence is both wonderful and terrible. I first started making these paintings at a time in my life when I was really experimenting with boundaries, going to clubs all night and taking full advantage of the hedonistic possibility of New York City in the nineties. I felt like I knew both sides of that pleasure coin. It’s about accepting the totality of what it could mean to be in the place you’ve always dreamed of. If you try to shape a perfect world, if it’s not in human nature, it just won’t work.”

This obsession with manufactured illusion extends to Will’s side projects. In 2009, the artist introduced fans to the heady aromas that inspire his paintings via a pop-up bakery peddling sherbet-coloured baked goods. In 2013, he adorned the actress Elle Fanning with an elaborate headdress made from icing in a now-famous spread for New York magazine. And in 2010, he received an email from Katy Perry, the real-world version of the pin-up girls that rule his paintings. He went on to paint Cupcake Katy, a portrait that was recently gifted to the National Portrait Gallery and helped conceive the Technicolour wonderland that’s the backdrop to her hit California Gurls.

“Katy was coming over to my studio to pose for the painting she used on the cover for her album Teenage Dream but I suddenly received a call from her music video director who said ‘We’re looking at reproductions of your paintings and trying to figure out how to make the clip look like this,” laughs Will, who’s also painted Princess Marie-Chantel of Greece and the fashion designer Tom Ford. “It felt very important to me because I had been thinking about pop culture for decades and this was a way to contribute to the source and have a dialogue with someone I’ve thought about for so long. There’s no way that the number of people who see that music video or her album cover will see my paintings. It’s such a broad audience.”

Will, whose paintings reflect the obsession with capturing materials that’s a legacy of the Dutch Old Masters, might enjoy a reach that most artists could only dream of but it’s one that stems from a lifelong commitment to his craft.

“I graduated from art school in 87 and the first decade of my career was so hard because New York is such an expensive city to survive in,” he recalls. “I spent the first ten years trying to make money by decorating windows and painting walls because you can’t always count on finding a gallery. It’s always about trying to carve out the space to make your work. I think the best thing I ever did was to learn to live on almost nothing because as soon as you have bills to pay, there’s this temptation to find a good job and work in another profession. I survived by renting a studio and subletting the space and never eating at fancy restaurants like New Yorkers expect to do.”

He pauses, his smile audible over the phone line. “My allegiance has always been to be in the studio, painting, and to guard that time jealously. I feel like I learned something today when I was making a painting because it’s such a rich and complicated medium. And this is after 30 years of doing it.”

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg: Laughing in the Netherworld

First published in VAULT magazine, November 2015. 

The claymation films, immersive sculptural installations and throbbing soundscapes of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg ricochet between darkness and light. 

There are few litmus tests as profound as the ability to spark laughter. In the art world, nervous giggles and spontaneous guffaws are wrongly dismissed as door prizes for lightweights and populists rather than proof that a work has shaken off the weight of our collective delusions to tap into a powerful cultural vein.

Googling Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, the acclaimed Berlin-based duo whose Claymation videos feel like they were plucked from the Brothers Grimm – if the Brothers Grimm hallucinated a plasticine netherworld in which tigers defile girls’ bottoms, yogis are disembowelled by lustful snakes and children prise their mother’s legs apart to crawl back into their wombs – is a lesson in the fine line between amusement and debasement. The partners and collaborators, who met through friends in 2004, have spent the last decade setting installations that riff on sexuality, violence, bestiality and bloodlust to a jaunty electronic soundtrack. Improbably enough, they’ve also proved that the darkest recesses of humanity can be funny as hell.

“In a way, the humour comes naturally to me,” smiles Djurberg, her fresh-faced Skype visage chasing away my secret fears about the potential progenitor of material this dark. “But I also think that there is something happening when you laugh that cuts through the seriousness and the illusions you may have about something. It makes you more vulnerable. You’re stepping on something that shouldn’t be stepped on. It breaks apart the beliefs that you have.”

“Music is a way to make things lighter,” adds Berg, who runs a parallel career as a respected techno producer and whose heroes include Bjork and Aphex Twin. “I’ve been hammering away on a piano or making music on the synthesizer for as long as I remember and consciously work with the contrast between funny and scary. I think it was David Lynch who once said that those qualities belong together. If it’s just scary, you distance yourself.”

Djurberg and Berg, who trade affectionate glances and regularly finish each other’s sentences, are warm and measured and it’s instantly clear that their body of work isn’t motivated by brashness or a yen for provocation but something altogether richer and more complex. In 2004’s Tiger Licking Girl’s Butt, a clay girl dries herself after a shower in her gelato-coloured bedroom only to find herself confronted by a tiger intent on doling out carnal pleasure. When she lets it climb into her bed, she hints that abject desires and girlish innocence may exist on the same continuum. For the 2009 Venice Biennale, Djurberg and Berg created The Experiment, a three-channel video installation in which robe-clad puppets, whose grotesque faces recall a Goya painting, move from happy camaraderie to games of torture and submission while gargoyle-like flowers – that are meant to evoke a twisted Garden of Eden – bloom all around. The piece, which mines religious hypocrisy as well as the arbitrary nature of good and evil, won Djurberg the Silver Lion award for Most Promising Young Artist and marked the duo out as a singular presence in the art world. And The Parade, a 2012 work shown at New York’s New Museum, sets demonic ostriches and sickly-pink pelicans to Berg’s creepy, electronic loops. He breathes life into Djurberg’s stilted scenarios and turns them into fractured fairytales where moral codes break free from their sugary casing to rival the murkiness of the real world. Unlike the Grimm’s classics, where calm surfaces are a front for sinister realities, there’s something oddly reassuring about this display of excess.

“Hans and I talk a lot about what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do and for him, it’s much easier because he has the abstract part,” explains Djurberg, whose 2006 work Natural Selection sees a series of naked, dark-skinned figures forced to parade in front of a shadowy master before they’re accepted into his fold. “I always ask myself the question, ‘am I really allowed to do this, am I allowed to work with things like racism or sexuality or violence?’ But every time you ask yourself that question, you almost have to go ahead and do it because if you don’t your agreeing to society’s terms. For me, I always feel like if you don’t dare to look inside and examine what’s really there or what something is really doing to me, it’s like living with a blindfold on. And if I’m working on something that feels painful, I ask: ‘what would happen if I censored myself? What would that really mean?’”

Djurberg, who was born in Sweden in the late seventies and whose mother briefly ran a puppet theatre, has always seen art as a refuge from cultural mores. “I went to Malmo Art Academy but when I got there, I started questioning why anyone would want to be an artist because it didn’t always pleasurable – for me, art is the part of society that’s supposed to be really free, where you’re supposed to be able to explore things that you otherwise would not,” she recalls. At first, she dabbled in sculpture and painting, but it wasn’t until she taught herself Claymation  – a primitive technique that uses stop-motion photography to animate clay figures – that her ideas started to gel.  In 2004, she met Berg, a Berlin transplant, through a friend who was convinced that they should work together. “I gave him one of my animations but I didn’t really like the idea of collaborating with anyone,” laughs Djurberg, who had her first solo exhibition at Milan’s Gio Marconi Gallery in 2005 and joined Chelsea art gallery Zach Feuer after a standout show at the Berlin Biennale the following year. “But he really changed it by making this really quirky, super-strange, stupid sort of music. It ended up being something that was actually really good.”

“In the beginning it was just Nathalie’s work and I would add music to it and now it’s a deep collaboration on all levels,” grins Berg, whose soundscapes – which can be soaring, jarring or bone-chillingly eerie – have become as much a character in Djurberg’s menageries as her bulbous mothers, skeletal bunnies and sadistic priests. “The way I work is instinctive and organic and sometimes it enhances what I think is happening and sometimes it goes against it. It’s very hard to get intellectual with music as it steers your emotions so much.”

As the couple’s chemistry has deepened, it’s also worked a curious kind of alchemy on the direction of their work. For instance, The Black Pot, an immersive installation that showed at Moscow’s Garage Centre for Contemporary Art in 2013, saw Djurberg swap the narrative for the abstract, creating neon shapes that morph, move and respond to Berg’s otherworldly compositions. Like The Secret Garden, their upcoming retrospective at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, which – according to Berg – uses clay sculptures, light and sound to take audiences deep into their subconscious, the show is less interested in confronting viewers with their own transgressive urges than it is in gently escorting them towards a primordial truth.

“That shift came quite naturally because I had done so many stories to the point that it was no longer interesting to me and I told Hans that I never wanted to do claymation again,” says Djurberg, adding that these days, she works on their projects early in the morning while Berg composes the music late at night. “We had gone back to Hans parents house in Sweden and it was so lonely, there was so much nature and it was so empty that it gave me vertigo. We were down in the basement and we were playing on the theme of creating something from nothing. Then our work became more about going inward and accessing a certain type of mode and consciousness. It was so important for us to pull away from what we are doing.”

But Djurberg, who’s started to re-experimenting with clay puppets, has no intention of relinquishing her commitment to examining the dark side of human desire or bleeding pools of putty on the Disneyfied fables that keep us trapped. “There’s a work called Through the Night Sky Softly by Chris Burden that I’ve always loved, where the artist naked and crawling on glass and it’s such an incredibly strong piece that I keep returning to,” she says, a smile flickering across her face. “Sometimes, Hans and I go and look at art and we’re like “okay, we don’t give a shit about this” but then we also know that it’s not for us. And even though some art can cause pain, I find it so liberating to say things that aren’t sayable. I think that maybe the worst thing is if someone has no reaction to your work at all.”

Pauline van Dongen: Fashion’s New Frontier

First published in VAULT magazine, November 2015.  

For Dutch fashion designer Pauline van Dongen, technology, science and form are irrevocably intertwined. 

The digital age often miscasts the practical and the beautiful as polar opposites as if an accessory’s usefulness makes it intrinsically ugly or an object’s elegance confines it to your coffee table. Our resentment of the Apple Smartwatch is rooted less in its clunky interface than the way it chirpily summarises our health lapses while those who’d choose their Kindle over a first edition forget that the book – an invention that allows us to start or stop a story without so much as flicking a switch – is wildly innovative, even today.

Pauline van Dongen is a rare exception to this theory. Since 2010, the acclaimed Dutch fashion designer, who’s currently preparing for Dutch Design Week, has been conceiving garments that combine sartorial discipline with a futurist’s ambitions. Such as a dress, created in partnership with robot hacker Daniel Schatzmayr, that uses flip dots – the electromagnetic technology that powers bus displays – to turn the wearer’s body into a canvas for hypnotic patterns and mimics the way light glitters on the water and stars flicker in the sky.  Or a shirt, embellished with 120 thin film solar panels, that charges your smartphone while managing an off-the-cuff glamour that begs to be paired with your favourite denim and worn to cocktails.

“I’m interested in how technology can have aesthetic value,” smiles van Dongen, who’s Skyping me from her Arnhem studio where she often finds herself consumed by design research until well into the night. “When you’re working with wearable technology, you have to look at things like wiring, the way the designs are constructed, the type of interactions a person would have with this garment … But I try to explore how a circuit can work as embroidery or how it can shape the construction. My Wearable Solar Shirt incorporates a prosthetic foil and an interesting construction that I wouldn’t have considered if I hadn’t been working with technology. I like to look at these functional requirements as if they are aesthetic opportunities. The design is informing the technology and the technology is informing the design.”

For van Dongen, who was born in Amsterdam, thriving in the creative tension that’s a consequence of disparate interests has long been a way of life. “When I was younger I wanted to study medicine and take after my dad, who’s a doctor, so I was always fascinated by human biology, physics and science but at the same time I was really into arts, studying to get into The Conservatory, drawing and dancing a lot,” she recalls. Although she attended the Artez Academy of Arts in Arnhem, a prestigious art school whose alumni includes fellow experimental Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, stumbling across 3D printing, a process that draws on digital fabrication to create three-dimensional objects, during her Masters Program at the Fashion Institute of Arnhem, that shifted her path. Her graduate collection, Morphogenesis – a series of cocoon-like, polyamide dresses along with a 3D-printed shoe, developed alongside product design company Freedom of Creation – sealed her vision as a designer as well as the collaborative way she approaches her work. The pieces, whose playful, shifting outlines trouble notions of inside and outside and invert the relationship between a wearer and their surroundings, also cemented her belief in the fact that fashion can help us better understand how bodies behave in space.

“Looking back, I think going into fashion was very intuitive and because it involves working with body, constructing materials, working with imagery, video and photography, it’s the accumulation of so many different things,” she explains, in her considered way. “I’m inspired by Hussein Chalayan as well as Issey Miyake’s pleating techniques and the fact that his materials play when you start moving. The British sculptor Anthony Gormley shaped my way of thinking about the body and the negative and positive spaces that we inhabit. But now, which I could never have forseen, I’m working with scientists, engineers and people in biology and my work has a scientific angle. Although I come from a traditional fashion background, I was always exploring and I have an inquisitive nature. I liked to stretch my own boundaries right from the start.”

Over the last few years, van Dongen has made it her mission to prove that radical things happen when you pair fashion design with scientific inquiry and that technology and nature aren’t as adversarial as we’d like to think. In 2013, the designer showed Wearable Solar, an ink-black coat and dress featuring nipped waists and shoulders that resemble dorsal fins, at London’s Wearable Futures exhibition. The pieces, which were designed in partnership with Christian Holland from the Han University of Applied Sciences and solar energy expert Gert Jan Jongerdon, incorporate solar cells that store enough energy to charge an iPhone if worn in the sun for an hour. And last year, van Dongen previewed Phototrope, a running shirt that incorporates LED ribbons, couched in TPU foils the colour of quicksilver, at Austin tech conference South By Southwest. The light-refracting garment, which was prompted by van Dongen’s own experiences as a runner, turn the wearer into a shimmering part of the nightscape while improving their visibility when the sun sets.

“These days, we are so dependent on connectivity but at the same time, we’ve become these modern nomads with this “always on mentality” and I think it’s a really interesting notion that we can carry our own energy with us wherever we go,” says Van Dongen, who believes that innovations such as 3D printing and generative design can tackle fashion’s sustainability issues while reimagining traditions such as tailoring for the modern world.  “I started thinking about ways to generate energy on the body and had come across these really thin film solar cells that could be integrated into clothing and designed the coat and the dress to show to people that this could potentially become a reality. It’s opened up a lot of conversation with manufacturers. I’m focused on solar right now, but I also think that thermal and kinetic energy is really interesting. People always tend to think that nature and technology are opposed because there’s this idea that technology alienates us from the world. But when you look at what fashion is, it’s already a second skin, a human extension of our physical capabilities. It’s not a strange thing to be developing this further.”

Van Dongen, who’s increasingly swapping catwalk shows for exhibitions and lectures, says that her practice is becoming more rigorous and that she’s ready to bring her ideas to the world. “As a designer, my approach is becoming even more research-based and if things are done in a certain way, I’ve never stopped questioning them,” she says, her face lighting up. “My ambition for the coming years is to bring some of my designs to market because I think that customers can really respond and benefit from them. I’m also very interested in collaborating with larger brands. I want to facilitate this exchange between technology and fashion because I’m always in the spaces in between.”

Creative Spaces: Paramount by The Office Space

First published in Broadsheet, July 2015 

Paramount, a bold new workspace from co-working company The Office Space, hints that understated luxury might be the future of work.

Honeyed lighting. Brass fixtures. Mid-century chairs by Ray Eames and Walter Knoll. Stepping into Paramount by The Office Space is like entering a parallel dimension, where co-working spaces are a utopian antidote to the office cubicle rather than well-meaning incubators for the next Steve Jobs. But the bespoke workspace, which is on the first floor of Surry Hills’ Paramount House, is also proof that good design can foster new models of working while serving as a sanctuary from the outside world.

“You can go into the most beautiful museum in the world and it can feel cold, but this space feels soft and humane, like it could be someone’s home,” smiles Sam Preston, communications manager of The Office Space, a boutique serviced office specialist which established its first site on nearby Reservoir Street a decade ago.

Director of The Office Space, Boris Tosic’s main business is construction and fit-outs. The Reservoir Street building was leased out to friends in graphic design and architecture, so design and curation has been a focus for the company from the start. “Boris has always been in love with this building and we jumped on it when the offer came. It’s different to the Reservoir site because it’s very Mad Men, with an air of ‘50s and ‘60s luxury, whereas the original is young and fresh,” says Preston. “Here, all your senses are engaged in the softness, the smell of the wood, the oak paneling.”

We’re chatting in the boardroom, a stately space where floor-to-ceiling cabinets house a secret compartment for Cuban cigars and a rare Japanese whisky collection. It’s impossible not to feel a little overwhelmed. From the kitchen, which features a custom brass bar and Marc Newson for Noritake glassware, to the sumptuous, curved suites – lined with goat-hair carpet and lit with moon-like pendant lamps from Sydney designers Light Practice – the space could have been plucked from a Modernist fantasy. Miraculously, though, the design elements avoid film-set associations and speak to each other in a way that feels inviting and real.

“For us, Paramount marks our tenure in the business, and demonstrates a maturing of our offering,” says The Office Space business manager Naomi Tosic, adding that the space was a collaboration between architecture firm Woods Bagot, furniture company A.B. Projects architectural joinery and fit-out company Elan Construct. “We wanted to honour the iconic Paramount building and achieve a working environment that is functional and beautiful,” says Tosic, adding that everything, with the exception of the integrated desk phones, has been custom-made, highlighting the original Art Deco features. Design pieces such as Molteni & C’s Gio Ponti armchairs and Eames Time Life boardroom chairs have been carefully selected to tie in with the era of the original building. “The styling is exquisite,” says Tosic. “We’re hoping to position Paramount as the most exclusive ‘inclusive’ space in Australia, and perhaps the world.”

Preston says Paramount, which offers business concierge services and invites tenants to take meetings and conduct presentations in the Golden Age Bar & Cinema, attracts people who come from a spectrum of industries but share similar sensibilities and aesthetics. She also says the space’s rotating art collection, which includes Jim Morrison was Here, a striking diptych by Archibald winner Ben Quilty, a series of works by Croatian painter Julije Knifer and silkscreens by US pop artist Corita Kent, is a personal highlight.

“We think of it like a hotel for business, where everything you need is at your fingertips – in the same way as at a five-star hotel,” Preston says. She adds that the space has partnered with Golden Age Cinema to host a panel series featuring insights from leaders in their respective fields. “We attract a range of businesses and individuals, from the head of a design company who uses the space as a breakaway for himself, to CEOs completing side projects, to startups and consultants. It’s not industry-based, it’s a matter of taste. So many people in the Sydney design world brought this together and so many people are now involved in making it what it is.”

The Power Couple

First published in Renegade Collective October 2015

When we talk about those who’ve reached the dizzying heights of social media stardom, we forget that mastering a platform isn’t so different from mastering an art form. Composing a poetic one-liner in 140 characters or taking an Instagram shot that awakens a long-buried fantasy might be technically simpler than writing a novel or making a movie but the ability to spark an emotional connection with an audience takes the same kind of creativity, passion and skill.

But scroll through the Instagram accounts of Jay Alvarrez and Alexis Ren and you’re likely to have the uncharitable thought that some people lucked into a charmed life. Whether they’re frolicking on a postcard-perfect Thai beach, jumping out of an azure sky or kissing passionately in front of a palatial Santorini villa, the couple – who have 4.5 million followers between them – are a living, breathing advertisement of the alternate reality that awaits if you’re young, in love, and unafraid to chase down your dreams.

“Instagram is Instagram and real life is real life,” laughs 20-year-old Jay, an extreme sports obsessive who’s been shooting photos and making videos since he was a teenager in Hawaii. “Our approach is half inspiration, half organic. People say that my videos are staged but how can you stage jumping off a plane? You know how people look up to TV and movie stars? I’ve always looked up to random, niche people on Tumblr. I think people like us because a lot of people do what we do but not in the way that we do it. I like to be distinct.”

We’re chatting on a deck overlooking the infinity pool at the Byron on Byron, a Byron Bay resort that feels custom-made for L.A Instagram stars but Alexis and Jay – in town to star in Cotton On Body’s summer campaign – are refreshingly unassuming in the flesh. Sure, they boast the type of sun-kissed good looks and tanned, toned bodies that have hooked a generation on almond butter and green juice but they punctuate their California drawls with loving in-jokes and easy laughter. It’s not until a teenage girl asks for a photo, trembling with excitement, that it strikes me that young people idolise them the same way my friends and I once looked up to rock stars. Alexis gives her a warm hug and flashes a megawatt smile and the girl walks away, shaking her head in disbelief.

“You know that photo that couples use as an example of the perfect photo they want to take of themselves? We want to BE that photo,” says Alexis, a former ballerina who has been modelling for the likes of Calvin Klein, Nasty Gal, Forever 21 and Surfing magazine since the age of 13. “I met Jay a year ago at a friend’s place in Malibu and although I had a boyfriend at the time I’d found his Instagram nearly a year before and always wondered ‘who is this kid?’ We basically went from not seeing each other, to seeing each other for a week to living together. The first time I decided I would fly out to Hawaii to see him, I would never in a million years think that I’d jump out of plane. I’m so scared of heights that even driving around Malibu Canyon is terrifying. But I feel like with him by my side, I’m much more capable of things. He pushes me to my limits.”

This focus on pushing limits has been a defining theme in their relationship since its earliest days. A few months in, the pair shot a Youtube film documenting their adventures in California. The montage, which splices together skydiving shots with an aerial sequence that flits between Alexis plummeting into a swimming pool and Lamborghinis hurtling down coastal highways set to a catchy deep house soundtrack, might have sunk into obscurity but the combination of Jay’s breakneck editing and Alexis’s on-screen magnetism was a winning formula. The video went instantly viral.

“I didn’t really go to school but always took photos for fun and made Youtube videos,” say Jay who combines photography and filmmaking with modelling and has featured in campaigns for Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren.  “Alexis came to see me in Hawaii and I returned to California to stay with her. We made a video of us hanging out and driving sports cars and we got two million views which was crazy and a lot of the Instagram stuff filtered through that. I’ve always loved shooting girls and portraying the idea of love and started posting pictures of Alexis and I was like wow, people love this! We went from 100,000 followers to millions very quickly. Everything I do is self-taught.”

But although this following has seen the couple inundated with offers and endorsement requests from companies, they’re focused on using their platform to fund their creative ventures and working with brands whose values align with their own. And while their fame attracts both frenzied fans who dream about copying their trajectory and commentators speculating about everything from the size of their bank balance to the strength of their relationship, the pair are wise to social media’s power and pitfalls. They know that the world that they’re depicting is partly rooted in fantasy.

“Because Instagram is the biggest market for youth we get offers to go places and everything gets paid for and they just want us to take photos and advertise – that stuff is fun,” says Jay. “There’s more money in Instagram than in modelling – you can make 10 to 20,000 dollars a post compared to a job where you might make 5 to 10,000 dollars but personally I prefer to do jobs. The more followers you have, the more money you can charge. We only work with companies who  represent a really cool product or brand or support something that is important to us. We also try to help friends  who might not have our following but have the creativity and ideas. But people look at our lives and say it’s it’s perfect and write “goals” on our photos all day when that’s not the case. Whatever you see on Instagram is an idea, it’s constructed. That’s what designing is.”

“If you accept every single offer, it lowers your value,” explains Alexis, adding that the pair’s Instagram following is her biggest source of work. “It’s like a business and we change it up all the time. But we’ve been on so many so many trips and with every trip there’s an up and down. It’s like another life where we travel to a place and live there but every trip also has its low points. And when things go wrong, you take it out on your significant other because they’re like your family. You trust them the most.”

Jay, who says that friends such as New York bikini designer Rocky Coulbourne are his biggest inspiration, believes that the couple have managed to build a life of travel and creative freedom because they resolved to leave fear at the door.

“We don’t just have a plan B, we also have plans C,D and E. But you can’t be insecure about your creativity and if you have an idea, you have to go after it even if 99% of people shut you down and society tells you not to do it. Even if you make the worst thing in the world and one person likes it then who the hell cares?”

What our obsession with adult colouring books says about us

First published in Daily Life, September 2015 

The realisation that you might have squandered your childhood freedom is up there with adulthood’s most depressing cons. There’s a reason that an afternoon with a box of rainbow Crayolas as your only companion seems positively blissful when you’re attempting to squeeze yoga into your lunchbreak or breaking the speed limit on your way to that baby shower you’ve been dreading all week.

As Tim Kreider put in his now-legendary New York Times essay ‘The Busy Trap‘, we live in a world that values “histrionic exhaustion” and makes “crazy busy” a badge of pride. Who could blame us for sometimes believing that we had it right before we grew up?

Johanna Basford has an answer to this question. In March this year, the Scottish illustrator and “ink evangelist” stoked a worldwide obsession with adult colouring whenThe Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book – which features impossibly intricate drawings of birds, foliage and mushrooms – replaced Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman as Amazon’s number one bestseller. It’s since sold 1.4 million copies, been translated into 14 different languages and spawned the wildly successful follow-up,The Enchanted Forest.

And in the last few months, titles such as Jim Gogarty’s The Mandala Colouring Book(“Inspire creativity and reduce stress!”), Emma Farrarons’ The Mindfulness Colouring Book, whose “dazzling patterns prompt you to meditate on your artworks”, and Mulga’s Magical Colouring Book (a riot of giant toucans and bearded hipsters) have seen adult colouring overcome its unfortunate erotic subtext to become a global craze.

For Minnesota blogger Jenny Finlayson, it’s a fuss-free creative outlet that’s also a mindful reprieve from our screen-happy existence. “Colouring can be a form of escapism where one can shed the stress and worries of the day and just focus on a simple creative task,” she told New York magazine in May 2015. In an April 2015 article in The Guardian, Matt Cain, an author and serial colourist, says that friends in less creative careers greet the colouring book he leaves on his coffee table with “squeals of delight”.

Adult colouring is also celebrated for its transformative potential – Emma Farraronsreceives emails from fans reporting that her book has helped ease grief, trauma and depression, while the neuropyschologist Dr Stan Rodski recently told ABC’s Radio National that adults who colour experience changes to their brainwaves that are nothing short of “amazing”. So whether you’re reeling from digital overload, stuck in a career rut or suffering an emotional ordeal, there’s evidence that reaching for your Jumbo Washables is the catchall cure.

But while adult colouring might rekindle blissful childhood memories, it’s also more insidious than it appears.

It’s no accident that the cultural shift that prizes productivity over achievement and sees the average Australian worker donate $9471 in unpaid overtime to employers each year correlates with the rise of the Mindfulness Industrial Complex, a multi-billion dollar phenomenon whose fruits include adult colouring circles, Vedic meditation classes (where students recline on Eames chairs), and a smartphone app called Headpace that bills itself as a “gym membership for your mind”.

It’s mildly ironic that adult colouring books, which promise to unleash the creativity you misplaced in childhood, are booming in a world that infantilises artists and whose material conditions make it increasingly impossible for them to make a living from their work. They’re a sign of a culture that repackages the creative freedom we had as children to compensate for the choices we lack in our adult lives.

In his bitingly funny video ‘Adult Colouring Books: Is this the apocalypse?‘, Russell Brand argues that this move towards an activity we loved in kindergarten isn’t an embrace of creativity or mindfulness but an attempt to distract us from the things that keep us trapped. “They’re part of an ideology that tells us that we can solve our problems by purchasing things, that the solution to the way you feel is buying an object and doing something passive and individualistic instead of [undertaking] a communal, collective activity,” he says.

Out of curiosity, I purchased The Mindfulness Colouring Book and attempted to shade a page of starbursts orange, green and blue. Five minutes in, I put my pencils down. Staying between the lines always made me anxious.

Stefano Manfredi’s Regional Dinners

First published in Broadsheet, May 2015

For Stefano Manfredi, the iconic chef behind Sydney’s Osteria di Balla, the most memorable culinary encounters are those that see regions and seasons take centre stage.

For many of us, growing up is fraught with the process of wishing away the things that make us different from our friends. But for Stefano Manfredi, the Sydney chef who’s often credited with championing Italian cuisine in Australia, embracing what set him apart has cemented his status as a culinary pioneer.

“I’ve been in Australia since I was six years old and grew up in Blacktown, a working-class suburb in Sydney’s west. From an early age, I knew we ate differently from my Australian friends,” says Manfredi. He runs Balla, a sleek, Italian osteria at The Star and the fabled Central Coast eatery Manfredi at Bells.

His now-defunct The Restaurant Manfredi is still Australia’s most awarded Italian restaurant. “Everything we ate at home was handmade by my mother from scratch. We’d eat things like rabbit, which a lot of people didn’t seem to have. When I opened my first restaurant, I wanted to show people that Italian food wasn’t what people thought it was. For instance, spaghetti bolognaise is an American invention. In Italy, when you travel between one town and the next, you change cuisines. And the locals will argue about which is better.”

Now in its third year, the Balla Regional Dinner Series sees the restaurateur collaborate with chefs such as Ormeggio at The Spit’s Alessandro Pavoni, Balla’s Gabriele Taddeucci and Marco Ribechini from Manfredi at Bells. They will present four-course menus that showcase the ways in which regions and seasons profoundly shape the way Italians eat. For instance, the event’s autumn instalment featured earthy dishes such as baccala of glacier toothfish and roast turkey stuffed with mustard fruit as a tribute to Pavoni’s native Lombardy – a region shaped by mountains, plains and freshwater lakes. Highlights of the upcoming Tuscany and Puglia editions include house-made pappardelle with rabbit and chestnut sauce and ricotti gnocchi with cannellini beans.

“I’m often in Italy two months of the year and have fallen in love with the cuisine of southern regions like Sicily and Campagnia. I thought by doing a regional series, we could expose people to different things,” explains Manfredi, who plans to take diners on a cooking tour through Italy later this year. “The Lombardy dinner with Alessandro is slightly different because we’re not only from the same region, we’re from the same province. But we cook very different things because he comes from the mountains and I come from the plains. When Puglia comes around, it’s coastal as well as mountainous – some of the mountains are higher than Kosciuszko in some parts, so the cuisine is heavily based on olives and tomatoes, as well as that famous cheese, burrata. The Tuscany dinner next month will see my two chefs, Gabriele and Marco, do two menus – one in Balla and the other at Manfredi at Bells based on dishes from their families. They’re a reminder that even though you might be cooking food from your own town, every family has their own take.”

Sam Leach: New realms of perception

Sam Leach’s paintings might be known for an oil-slick glossiness but his preference for sheen over substance is a visual trick. The Melbourne-based artist, who won the Archibald and Wynne prizes in 2010 and recently showed at Time Space Existence, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, combines flat surfaces with landscapes that recall the 17^th century Dutch Masters, rendered with the kind of startling acuity that reconfigures your understanding of the real and the imaginary along with your place in the world.

Leach’s full-colour new monograph, which features paintings such as Cinder with Partial Dymaxion (2013) and Evacuation of the Real (2011) and charts an ongoing fascination with nature, non-human animals and the history of science, is an arresting survey of his artistic terrain. He speaks to VAULT about his interest in corporate capitalism, his terror of sealing his ideas in print and how dead ends are only visible in retrospect.

Your paintings draw heavily on 17^th century Dutch traditions and combine figurative and abstract elements that invite the viewer to question their relationship with the world. What have been the big shifts in your practice in the last few years?

I guess I started off being interested in the way that we relate to the built environment and phenomenon of the corporate foyer. This was around the 1990s and early 2000s when corporate capitalists were totally unstoppable. Around the same time, I came across a fascinating link between corporate foyers and the architecture paintings made in the Netherlands in the 17^th century and the fact that this period corresponded with the rise of corporate capitalism really resonated with me because I could see aesthetic echoes everywhere. It made me ask ‘what is it about images that were produced during that era that have something to say about how we structure our society now?’ I then introduced references to non-human animals and how we relate to them. I then wanted to represent the history of science.

In terms of shifts that have been important to me, the incorporation of flatter abstract elements, which take visual cues from things like infographics and data visualisation has been significant. And another big step was experimenting with epoxy resin. Earlier on, I tried a whole range of finishes because I wanted to find a way to create some distance between the act of creating artwork and the viewer and lengthen that moment the viewer has before connecting with the artist. That’s now become a standard part of my practice. But the other elements are fluid.

In the last year, you’ve presented a body of work as part of Art 14 in London and the Melbourne Art Fair. And you’re also involved in Not Fair. In what ways do art fairs allow you to connect with your audience in ways that galleries don’t?

Art fairs are a really interesting phenomenon and since I’m pursuing art as my career, they’re kind of inescapable. And in some ways, if you take it seriously as a place to present your work and make a show with some integrity they can be a really interesting proposition. When you see work at a museum, it has this air sometimes of being sanctioned – the curators have made a selection and there’s a safety in that presentation of work that doesn’t exist at art fair. At the same time, they can feel like gigantic supermarkets and being one artist out of two thousand can feel very depressing.

Your new book features some of your most well-known works such as Cinder with Partial Dymaxion, Proposal for a Landscaped Cosmos and your Archibald-winning portrait of Tim Minchin. Can you tell me about how the project came about and what your motivations were for working on a print book?

I sort of resisted doing a print book for a while because I’ve always believed that my ideas are a work in progress and putting it in print kind of feels like this is the final point. But I guess it’s been approximately 10 years now that I started professional practice. It seems like a good time to survey what I’ve produced during that period and reflect on what themes have emerged, personally speaking. It’s also clearer which directions have been cul de sacs and which have been more fruitful.

What was the book’s curatorial and editorial focus and how did you go about choosing which paintings to include?

Initially, we talked about organising it as a chronological sequence but I also wanted it to reflect the broad themes that I address in my work from non-human animals and landscapes to science and technology. We loosely structured the book around those themes and then took in some design considerations. It was important to me that the book flowed in a coherent way. I also asked Tim Winton to write the opening essay. I met Tim through the Australian Marine Conservation Society where I’ve done some fundraising work with in the past. I’m a huge admirer of his writing and I approached him hoping that he would want to be involved. The essay that he produced blew me away.

How do you hope the book will resonate with your viewers in a way that other mediums don’t permit?

As my painting progresses, certain ideas are proposed or expressed in different times throughout my practice. Sometimes, there are references to ideas that I’ve addressed in different bodies of work and having a book like this is a useful way of giving a context to a painting in relation to another thing. So, if I put in a little motif, which might be a certain colour or shape in one painting and introduced it in another painting, the narrative threads become clear. The book offers a way for people to understand some of those relationships or appreciate where some of the elements of my work have originated and I hope that they enjoy that back story. And if others just appreciate the book in its own right, that’s fantastic.

Is YA becoming more diverse?

First published in Daily Life, August 2015

Nancy Larrick had a knack for asking timeless questions. In her landmark 1965 essay ‘Children’s books: Still an all-white world?‘, the American educator and founder of the International Reading Association surveyed 5,200 books published between 1962 to 1965 and found that only 6.4 per cent included African-American characters in the illustrations. “Across the country, 6,340,000 nonwhite children are learning to read and to understand the American way of life in books which either omit them entirely or scarcely mention them,” she writes. “There is no need to elaborate upon the damage – much of it irreparable…”.

Larrick’s essay was published half a century ago, but its manifesto could have been written today. A June 2013 study – that found that only 10 per cent of children’s books featured or were written by people of colour, despite the fact that minorities comprise 47 per cent of the US population – was the catalyst for #WeNeedDiverseBooks, an explosive social media campaign launched at BookCon last year. “It was 30 authors that were all white and the only diversity was the Grumpy Cat,” said co-founder Ellen Oh in a May 2015 interview with NPR.

Although #WeNeedDiverseBooks focuses on US publishing, its catchcry resonates powerfully in Australia, where 25 per cent of the population is born overseas. Is it such a stretch for a medium capable of dreaming up boy wizards and dystopian netherworlds to extend its imaginative possibilities to the human experience? “We’re right to push for diversity, we have to, but it is only step one of a long journey,” wrote fantasy author Daniel Jose Older in an April 2014 article in Buzzfeed.

For Sarah Ayoub, an Australian-Lebanese author whose debut YA novel Hate Is Such A Strong Word was published by Harper Collins in September 2013, this journey started when she couldn’t see her own life in the books she devoured as a girl.

Ambelin Kwaymullina, a YA author and illustrator whose dystopian Tribe trilogy features Ashala Wolf, an Indigenous girl leading a band of rebels in the wake of an environmental disaster called ‘The Reckoning’, believes that this tunnel vision is compounded by inequities across the publishing industry, along with a system that assigns value based on delusions about authenticity rather than the power of the narrative itself.

“In Indigenous culture, we have restrictions on who can tell a story and Indigenous books might be about all sorts of things but they’re really reflective of the reality of the author – I think that it’s really important that the stories are judged on their own terms and not by how other people think that culture should be,” explains Kwaymullina, who comes from Western Australia’s Palyku people and is partly influenced by detective fiction, thanks to a childhood diet of Agathie Christie. “There’s also a difference between diverse characters and diverse voices and the fact remains that most diverse writers in Australia are published by small presses. I view publishers as having a considerable amount of power and expect them to use it. The will is there.”

Kwaymullina also points out that diversity isn’t a publishing category – it has the potential to reinvent tired genres and give birth to new, inclusive forms. For instance, her own work has been classified as ‘Indigenous futurism’ – a strand of speculative fiction that sees Indigenous writers around the world use sci-fi conventions to rewrite colonial tropes on their own terms. And in the last year, YA books such as Erin Gough’s The Flywheel, which follows a romance between two girls in high school, and Darren Groth’s Are You Seeing Me?, which charts the bond between 19-year-old Justine and her disabled twin Perry, offer young people with LGBQT identities or disabilities the relatable characters they so sorely deserve.

Gabrielle Wang, a Chinese-Australian author and illustrator who writes books for 8 to 12-year-olds, thinks that it’s dangerous to frame books by nonwhite voices as special interest or minority literature rather than universal tales. “My Our Australian Girl series is set in Darwin during World War II and follows the friendship between a Chinese and Japanese girl,” says Wang, who read Enid Blyton as a child. “What do you do when your best friend becomes your enemy during war? It’s a universal story that’s still happening around the world today. Growing up Chinese in white Australia was very difficult and all my books are about finding your place in some way. I think a lot of readers can relate to that.”

Kwaymullina says that diversity isn’t important, it’s just the reality of the world in which we live. “How is a young person supposed to aspire to do well in life when they can’t even be the hero of the stories that they read?” she asks. Here’s hoping we have an answer soon.

Sitting Pretty

First published in Renegade Collective magazine, September 2015

Eleanor Pendleton recently discovered that the universe reserves unlikely payoffs for those who dive headfirst into their dreams. When the beauty editor and founder of Gritty Pretty, a trailblazing online beauty publication that combines the possibilities of digital with the magic of flipping through your favourite glossy magazine, sent her second issue live in March this year, she found herself making the headlines she’d become accustomed to writing. She also made a case for grit in an industry better known for luxury spa retreats on far-flung islands or the art of identifying the perfect moisturiser than it is for hard work or steely resilience.

“We had Lara Bingle on the cover to coincide with the launch of her new cosmetics line The Base but we had also broken the news of her pregnancy globally so the site crashed in the first day,” laughs Eleanor, who’s wearing a black, funnel-neck sweater from Viktoria + Woods. “We worked until 430 am in the morning and went to sleep and then someone rang me at 7am to say that Gritty Pretty was on the news. It turned out she’d posted the cover the night before the magazine was due to go live at 9am but it wasn’t finished! I was still pumping out the editor’s letter. We got coverage everywhere from the Daily Mail to Channel Nine news.  Whether people like her or dislike her, there’s something incredibly beautiful about Lara so it’s difficult to look away. We had 300,000 page views for that issue. I knew it would do well but I didn’t know it would happen like that.”

It’s only a few minutes into our conversation at La Porte Space, the sleek, monochrome studio that doubles as Gritty Pretty headquarters and plays host to the likes of fashion bloggers Margaret Zhang and Nadia Fairfax, when it occurs to me that Eleanor is perhaps the best advertisement for her own vision. She might have the kind of luminous complexion and pared-back style you’d expect from someone who was once Australia’s youngest beauty editor (for Famous, aged 20) but she’s also articulate and unguarded, prone to warm, infectious laughter. Like Gritty Pretty – where high-end spreads featuring animated Chanel eyeshadow palettes coexist with how-to stories showing readers how to achieve a casual topknot – she mixes glamour and accessibility in a way that seems effortless. The effect is magnetic.

Eleanor, who attended high school on the Central Coast, had her own early brush with the magnetic forces that can shape the course of your life.  “My dad ran a newsagency, so I was allowed to take whatever magazine I wanted and I just fell in love with them,” she says, lighting up at the memory. “When I was 8 my sister and I used to play games where I was her editor and she would write things and I’d pretend I was editing her work. I always knew I was going to be a writer. When I was 17 I knew I had to do work experience. I had no connections at all but I was very tenacious.”

Thousands of teenage girls around the country fantasise about channeling Ann Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada but few do whatever it takes to kick down the magazine industry’s famously fortress-like walls. Eleanor, who deferred university offers in favour of a two-year journalism course at Sydney’s Macleay College – a strategy that meant she’d enter the market faster – emailed her favourite publications obsessively until she landed an internship at Cosmopolitan, working under legendary beauty editor Zoe Foster. She was offered a job within a year.

“When I was assisting Zoe Foster, I fell in love with beauty journalism and the fact that it combines the trend element of fashion but you had to write to tight word limits,” explains Eleanor, who went on to become beauty editor at Famous and first launched Gritty Pretty as a blog in 2009 – a light years ago in the online world – inspired by then-fledgling Swedish style websites like Style by Kling. “ After I’d graduated my first year, I had every intention of finishing my studies. But the editor offered me a role as beauty writer and editorial co-ordinator. The salary was appalling but I didn’t care. It was a life-changing moment.”

It’s easy to bask in life-changing moments but it takes courage to respond to the voice that tells you that there’s something bigger out there, especially if it means giving up what you know. After a three-year stint as the beauty editor of InStyle, Eleanor quit her job to go freelance, a decision that allowed her to relaunch Gritty Pretty, which she’d shelved for three years.

“It was terrifying because I was leaving a full-time salary and a job that was perfect on paper but when it was the first thing I was thinking about when I was waking up in the morning and the last thing I was thinking about before I went to sleep I knew it was time,” says Eleanor, who launched the first issue – which featured a hypnotic cover shoot with model and musician Cheyenne Tozzi and a feature on must-have mascaras shot by leading stills photographer Edward Urrutia – in December 2014. “After six months of freelancing, I realised that no one in the country is doing an online magazine dedicated to beauty and that I could give Gritty Pretty readers what they deserved. I worked with my friend Morgan Tait, who’s an insanely talented art director, to build the first issue and we shot everything and created every single template from scratch. We worked evenings and every weekend and it was seriously challenging. But there’s nothing about Gritty Pretty that’s unoriginal. That’s its biggest point of difference.”

In a market ruled by Instagram copycats and beauty sites peddling identikit makeup tutorials, this commitment to originality has seen Gritty Pretty rewrite the old rules of beauty journalism and create a new blueprint for what the genre could be. Eleanor says that experimenting with digital innovation such as the cinemagraph, a technology that can transform a still image into an animation – executed to perfection in a shoot that shows Jessica Gomes’ hair blowing in the wind –  has sparked fresh opportunities for engaging the reader. And whether this reader is a hip twentysomething or a mid-thirties career woman, Eleanor’s focus on empowering her audience rather than playing to their insecurities that makes Gritty Pretty compelling. It’s an allegiance that’s attracted advertisers such as Balmain, Clinique and Chanel.

“I’m really committed to elevating it every issue and about doing innovative things in  digital to make a difference – there’s so much that excites me about it and I have no plans to go back into print anytime soon,” grins Eleanor, who says that her biggest markets are Australia and the US but she’d like to see women reading it all over the world. “I knew from the  beginning that it was financially viable but I didn’t have investment so I backed myself and poured my life savings into it. There were moments when I was crying on the floor and asking myself “what am I doing?”, terrified about what I was spending. But my boyfriend told me that I needed to think of it in terms of investing. I’m commercially minded so we have our budget and what we need to make it turn a profit although I think it’s going to take a few years.”

Eleanor might be as pragmatic as she is ambitious but she can feel the magazine’s future in her bones. “I know that it’s different and that it connects with women and because of that brands would come on board,” she says, with a smile. “You only get one life and to spend it wondering sounds like a horrible existence to me.Quitting my job was a risk and launching it was a risk but I’m pouring so much love and passion into it. How could it not work?”

How many close friends do we truly need?

First published in Daily Life, August 2015

If you grew up binge-reading magazines, there’s a high chance that you can spot the phases of romantic attraction with a detective precision but be clueless when it comes to identifying friendship soulmates.

You know, the people who are destined to down too many espresso martinis with you on your birthday, pick up a panicked 3am phone call or swallow their laughter when you describe an encounter that could make Hannah Horvath blush?

My bond with the friend who helped me flee Melbourne to Sydney was forged over two months trading Buffy references as workmates in our early 20s. The ties I share with the friends who helped me celebrate my 30th were formed during five months as impoverished travellers in a flat in London. And the connection with the friend I called when I crashed my car was conceived during four years of teenage phone marathons that went long into the night.

But numbers can’t quantify the forces that galvanised my closest friendships. After all, the number of friends and followers we have on social mediabetray nothing about those special few.

The study also says we’re only truly comfortable calling or texting between four to seven people if we’re ever in trouble late at night or have a burning personal crisis related to relationships or sex.  Interestingly, the findings fluctuate slightly with sexual orientation and age.

Twentysomethings expect between 8 to 10 friends to celebrate them turning a year older while gay and bisexual men and women are likelier to count on an even number of close male and female friends than straight respondents, who tend to depend on those of the same gender.

But most importantly, the research shows that life satisfaction is determined by friendship satisfaction and job satisfaction and not by the number of friends we have both online and off. “At a time when Facebook friend lists run several hundred—if not several thousand—names long, it can be easy to feel as though we live in a world with enormous emotional cocoons. But the truth is that while we share travel photos and life musings with a long list of virtual friends, the average person still only relies on a few people,” Robert A. Ferdman points out in a July 2015 article in The Washington Post.

We know that rom-coms offer us a blueprint for our romantic fantasies (or nightmares), but our attachment to films that chart the trajectory of tight-knit friendships – or the idea that these can be as formative as your relationship with your family or partner – is woefully under-explored.

It’s no accident that Stand By Me, the cult Robert Reiner film that sees Will Wheaton’s Gordie Lachance, a 12-year-old boy who’s neglected by his father, find his family in a group of misfits made $52.3 million when it hit cinemas in 1986. And Now and Then, which focuses on four women who reflect on how their lives were shaped by their intense, pre-teen adventures and captures the awkwardness of adolescence in Technicolor detail is a touchstone for any girl who grew up in the 90s.

My Sex and the City boxed set is gathering dust in the back of a drawer but I can’t bring myself to throw it out. Ten years ago, a friend and I, jobless and aimless, put on it repeat and watching Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte turn to each other again and again brought our own bond into focus. Now, the telltale pink shoebox feels like a talisman. As Tavi Gevinson writes in her most recent Rookie Editor’s letter, “I find it odd find it odd to characterise romantic relationships as “more than friends.” It seems friendship ought to be the prized jewel.”

In a November 2014 New York magazine article, “Friendship Breakups Are Our First Heartbreaks” Ann Friedman, who co-hosts the much-loved podcast Call Your Girlfriend, attributes this issue to the fact that the culture lacks institutions that speak to the value of our important friendships, the same way we spend Christmas with our families or throw a party if we get engaged.

Although social media can put us in touch with anyone in the world, it can also flatten out the histories that brought us together, so that the people we can count on are indistinguishable from the acquaintances who favourite your Tweets.

In Internet parlance, connection is the highest order of existence. But connection stems from the Latin word that describes the permanence of joining together rather than the real-time thrills of plugging in.

It’s true that our potential for connection is endless but true friendship is a closed circuit.

Are we entering the golden age of the female gaze?

First published in Daily Life, August 2015

Three decades before we learned how to adjust our arms in front of a smartphone screen and commit our most winsome angles to Instagram, Cindy Sherman turned the selfie into high art. One late seventies summer, the American photographer started taking the Untitled Film Stills, a series of grainy black-and-white photographs where she transformed herself into a Hitchcock heroine, a lonely housewife about to be murdered and a doe-eyed ingenue cast adrift in the big city, via wigs, make-up and props.

Untitled Film Stills exposed a world in which women are only ever allowed to be mysterious muses, silent victims or objects to be desired. But Sherman didn’t just show us the claustrophobic limits of the male gaze, an artistic tradition premised on “the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning,” as film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote in a famous 1975 essay. She also proved that something powerful happens when women become their own subjects.

Recently, a body of work by a different kind of auteur has shown us how much the female gaze has evolved. Selfish, Kim Kardashian West’s hotly debated book of selfies, presents a version of womanhood that doesn’t just eclipse the claustrophobic limits of the male imagination – it inhabits a solar system that’s entirely its own.

From cult photographer Petra Collins, who uses a sherbet palette to capture all the pleasure and pain of female adolescence, to YouTube star Grace Helbig, who gives her teenage fan base make-up tutorials clad in pyjamas, to Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham, who’ve made careers out of mining the female experience and skewering its countless taboos, these creators are less interested in protesting the role of women as sexualised objects than they are in asserting our place as the all-seeing subjects of our own world.

Unlike Sherman, whose work is limited to fabled art institutions, online platforms such as YouTube and Instagram – mediums joyfully exempt from  male artistic traditions – have empowered these image-makers to connect with those who need their vision most.

​The female gaze might be buoyed by technology, but it’s also shining a new light on the complexities of womanhood. In 2013, Collins uploaded an image of her unshaven bikini line to Instagram (it was promptly deleted); Helbig’s show explores the secret language of female friendship via hangouts with her best friends Hannah and Mamrie; and Amy Schumer’s character in her new film Trainwreck sleeps with as many men as she likes without being branded morally.

Three decades ago, Cindy Sherman proved something powerful happens when women become their own subjects. But that was clearly just a taste of things to come.

Clare Milledge: Searching for meaning amid the mess

First published in VAULT magazine, July 2015 

We live in a world that reserves a special affection for clear-cut borders and shiny surfaces but Clare Milledge is rekindling my suspicion that mess is the stuff of life. When the artist, whose process-based installations knit together everything from glass paintings, textiles and sculpture to costumes, video and performance in a way that’s both wilfully chaotic and carefully calibrated, returned from a trip to Europe in 2006, an encounter that would see some wrinkle their nose in distaste proved to be the call-to-arms she needed.

“In 2006, I spent some time in Oslo and my friends Kristian and Steinar from the D. O. R. group, a collective of Norwegian artists that I work with, took me to the Berlin Biennale where we walked into this installation by Kai Althoff and Lutz Braun,” smiles Milledge, who’s preparing for a series of exhibitions including  shows in Istanbul and Vienna, a group exhibition at her Sydney gallery The Commercial as well as a much-anticipated new project with longtime collaborator, the Norwegian contemporary artist Tori Wrånes. “They had basically just lived and worked in this apartment for a month and everything was painted, there were food scraps on the ground, it was disgusting and it smelled. People were like, ‘why do you connect with this work so much, what do these German dudes have to do with you?’ But it surprised me that it wasn’t a more celebrated work. For me, it was like the ecology of the forest I grew up in, where things feed into each other, rot and then grow again. At that point, I had been holding myself back but when I got back to Sydney I felt so much more connected to my process.”

Milledge greets me warmly when I meet her at the Alexandria warehouse she lives and works in, an orderly space that’s happily impervious to the autumn sunlight, and I’m annoyed at feeling a flicker of relief. In the past nine years, the artist – who paints words backwards on glass in a version of hinterglasmalerei, a painstaking tradition with roots in the sacral paintings of the Middle Ages and whose last solo show, 2014’s Theoretical Regression: A Warm Sheen Against Received Ideas included a sculpture of a cowboy riding a giant dildo in a wink to philosopher Georges Batailles’s elliptical essay “The Solar Anus,” – has produced a body of work that’s so unflinching in its refusal to pander to art-world shorthand that attempting to parse it can feel like tumbling headfirst into a rabbit hole of signs, referents and signifiers. “Most people didn’t really like the first installation I made when I got back from Oslo but I didn’t give a fuck. A friend of mine told me, ‘I saw your work, very ambitious’ and I was like, okay – whatever. There was a radical shift in a way that I’d begun to work. And it was better than being told that your work is ‘very nice.’”

Milledge, who studied painting at Sydney College of the Arts under the likes of the virtuosic painter Matthys Gerber, lays claim to a background that could double as the creation myth for an anarchic brand of superhero and this blissful lack of convention has helped shape her worldview.  “Both my parents are environmental scientists and we lived in the bush near the Byron Bay area for 15 years, without a telephone or electricity, in what was basically a converted army tank,” says Milledge, who dropped out of art school to join a blockade for Sydney’s M2 highway, worked for a trompe l’oeil murals company and in visual theatre, before re-enrolling at SCA when she was 27 years old. “When I was a kid, I’d have these parties and there would always be all this fabric strewn around in the bush and lamps and weird costumes and performances and body painting with mud from the creek. My HSC project was so appalling – I was always interested in dualisms but I had no deep understanding and saw it as a black-and-white thing. I can’t remember when I first started making art because I was making shit then that I’m making now. That line of enquiry has carried on throughout my life.”

For Milledge, this line of enquiry is less concerned with seeking one-dimensional answers than it is with creating states buoyed by ambiguous and ambivalent energy, where meanings hover like flotsam and the human obsession with transcendence is unmoored from a binary understanding of the world. Motivated Reasoning: Strategic, Tactical, Operational, a 2013 installation at her Sydney gallery The Commercial cast works such as Future Feminist Cathedral, a fabric sculpture that resembled a shredded, gutted building and a hessian wall hanging emblazoned with the words “The property gods are smiling” alongside a series of coffee tables topped with glass painted with motor oil and made from teak. By exposing the tattered materiality of religious ritual and conflating the domestic  with the totemic, she sets up a philosophical riddle in which the things we worship – much like looking in a funhouse mirror – might be joke reflections, something we’d best look for in the black hole of our selves. Last year’s Theoretical Regression: A Warm Sheen Against Received Ideas, takes its title from her personal favourite Bataille’s proclamation that his surrealist magazine, Documents, was a “war machine against received ideas.” For Milledge, who heard the words “warm sheen”, this mildly ridiculous substitution points to the slipperiness of language and the tyranny of a single context. And in Altus Duel: Total Environment, a 2014 show at Melbourne’s Gertrude Contemporary, Milledge transformed the gallery space into a walk-in painting, smeared the Tony Abbot quote “When the suppository of all wisdom hits the weathervane of all seasons” on the glass window and set sculpture, costume and an armour made out of beer caps with to a percussive and spoken soundscape courtesy of  Melbourne sound artists Baker’s Delight. In doing so, she calls up the artist-shaman, a figure first conceived by Joseph Beuys, the German artist and thinker who believed that an artist’s role was to bridge the gap between the visible and the invisible to endow viewers with the ‘gift of sight.’

‘Gift of sight’ is a term Rex Butler used once to talk about Hany Armanious’ work and it goes back to that idea of not-knowingness or formlessness,” says Milledge, who wrote on the subject as part of her PhD. “Traditionally, the shaman goes into the animal world or spirit world and brings back a specific vision that’s of benefit to the community.,”she explains. “And although artists like Beuys or maybe Matthew Barney would fulfill that strictly and have positions of authority, I’m more interested in the kind of trickstery artist-shaman, like Mikala Dwyer or Hany Armanious. They bring back a vision showing people how they actually see.”

Perhaps, Milledge’s greatest achievement is the way she inspires us to challenge the reality in front of us and draw strength from the notion that things aren’t always what they seem. “When people walk into a process-based installation, it’s kind of like a forest and there’s this evidence of something happening and it heightens the audience’s ability to imagine,” she says, lighting up at the prospect. “It’s kind of like the clues in a detective novel. I want viewers to ask ‘why is that costume on the ground?’ or ‘What is that sculpture doing there?’ or ‘why why haven’t you put that painting up yet?’ My artist-shaman is dubious and ambivalent and doesn’t ask to be followed but urges you to find your own path, make your own way.”

Have the property wars become racism’s new frontier?

First published in Daily Life, June 2015

Back in 1913, C.A Jeffries and John Barr, two writers from The Bulletin, made a small but critical contribution to the diversity debate that has us scratching our heads more than a hundred years on. The pair wrote Australia Calls, a silent film directed by Raymond Longford, which cast members of Sydney’s Chinese community as “Mongolian” invaders that storm the city, set landmark buildings on fire and interrupt a horse race before taking off with an outback damsel named Beatrice who – in a move straight out of Jerry Bruckheimer – is rescued by legendary NSW aviator William E. Hart.

The film trades on the Yellow Peril, the corrosive panic that erupted in response to Chinese settlers and is a celluloid extension of The Bulletin‘s charming slogan “Australia for the white man”. And what is white Australia if not the kind of honourable place where buildings are protected from shadowy Eastern interlopers and where enjoying a horse race in peace is a God-given right?

Turn-of-the-century heroics might be hopelessly outdated but the ghosts of Jeffries and Barr are still looming large. In the last two years, the fact Chinese investors have overtaken the US as the biggest buyers of Australian property has sparked headlines that could wake the ghost of Edward Said, the thinker whose 1978 book Orientalism first suggested the West imagines itself in relation to the “Inscrutable Oriental”, a deviant Asian Other whose strange customs and shadowy intentions should be mistrusted at all costs.

In September 2014, a Fairfax column attributed the housing bubble in Sydney and Melbourne to the “influx of murky money coming from China”. A May 2014 Herald Sunarticle accused cashed-up Chinese investors of “swooping on Australian property”. And in a February 2014 article in The Guardian, Clive Hamilton lamented the secrecy surrounding Chinese investment before describing a fate dire enough to send anyone who squandered adventure and personal development to save a decent home deposit screaming into the night. “Every weekend in Sydney, young Australian couples are turning up at auctions excited at the prospect of finally owning their own home, only to find that other bidders are wealthy foreign buyers with money to burn,” he wrote.

Aspiring politician recently Nick Folkes attempted to fix this problem by launching a letterbox campaign in Sydney’s North Shore. His leaflets, which advised “Aussie battlers are being pushed to the fringes of our cities while foreign intruders are reaping the benefits of our hard-working previous generations,” might be a glittering example of idiocy. But it’s also obvious that he was desperate.

Crikey writer Bernard Keane last year exposed the relationship between Chinese foreign investment and housing affordability for the farce that it really is. Citing the Foreign Investment Review Board’s 2012-13 Annual Report, he stated the bulk of Chinese foreign investors were purchasing new dwellings, a fact that’s unlikely to impact the property bubble, and that investors from the US and Canada were only slightly behind. “Hard to get a good anecdote about white people showing up to an auction and bidding successfully for a property. “Chinese” buyers, even if their families have lived in Australia for a century, are easier to spot and complain about,” he wrote.

Marilyn Lake believes that it’s dangerous to relegate the Yellow Peril to history books or silent films. “No longer accused of augmenting the ranks of cheap labour, [Chinese] are now attacked for their apparent wealth and blamed for the difficulties experienced by young white Australians in buying their own homes, in realising the Australian dream,” she wrote in a 2010 Sydney Morning Herald article.

The prospect of shadowy invaders may be laughable but Australia Calls‘ message is alive and well. It’s easier to be racist when it’s in service of a cause that we can all believe in.

Jessica Hopper: An insider’s guide to being a female rock critic

First published in Daily Life, June 2015

Jessica Hopper knows that few things sting as much as the pain of self-erasure. In her 2005 essay “You’re Reliving All Over Me: Dinosaur Junior Reunites,” the trailblazing music journalist recounts an adolescent encounter that’s become a soul-destroying rite of passage for brilliant teenage girls.

“I’d hung out with this guy a few times, and every night was the same: as he rattled off Dinosaur Jr. minutiae, I’d nod attentively, hoping that’d charm him […] I also knew more about Dinosaur Jr. (and all his other favorite bands) than he did, but I kept that to myself,” she writes.

Hopper, who’s spent the last two decades building a career that’s a glittering antidote to a canon ruled by boy reporters chasing the ghost of Lester Bangs, no longer has patience for mansplainers or their patronising whims. Her new anthology, The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, a volume that spans everything from pre-Internet era pieces that highlight the absence of women in the emo scene and the indignity of being alone on a sticky dance floor to stories on Hole, Kendrick Lamar and Miley Cyrus written for Spin, the Chicago Reader and Rolling Stone, weaves together the personal and the political in needle-sharp prose. She writes with an energy and critical dexterity that can feel like a battle cry, making a case for the female experience in an industry that casts women as groupies, muses and interlopers.

“When I was growing up in Minneapolis in the early nineties, there was a small self-sustaining music scene there and I learned very early on that people looked down on people who were just participants,” laughs Hopper, on the phone from Chicago.. “What spurred me into action was that I was a fan of [punk band] Babes in Toyland, who were playing every week in Minneapolis when I was 14, 15 years old. But at the time, people who were writing about them in fanzines and music press were calling them shrieky, amateur and vile and I thought, “Isn’t that just what punk is supposed to be?” So I called the local papers and said, ‘So, you wrote about Babes in Toyland and you totally don’t get it. I’d like to offer my corrective because I really understand them.”

“I can’t separate my moral self from my critical self,” says Hopper, who’s currently a senior editor at Pitchfork, has worked as music editor at Rookie and started filing pieces for Spin when she was 19. “I got some of my politics from music, from underground and Riot Grrl bands such as Fugazi and Bikini Kill. Those were the sort of things that informed how I looked at the world, how I approached other people’s humanity and my own. Being a feminist shapes how I receive pop music and a lot of the things that nag at me are moral – they force me to dig in and ask ‘why is this bothering me?’ Half my career is about me asking myself ‘Why is this pissing me off?'”

The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, which was dismissed by editors unconvinced about the commercial merits of a rock anthology written by a female music critic (it’s now in its third printing), simultaneously documents the misogyny reserved for female musicians, a music industry on the verge of folding in on itself and the journey of a writer learning how to bravely inhabit her voice. “How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock,” a November 2013 essay first published in Buzzfeed exposes indie music’s basis in capitalism while “Deconstructing Lana Del Rey,” a standout Spin feature shows how we punish female musicians who don’t comply with what we consider “authentic.”

“Lana fascinated me because of the way people were freaking out about her,” explains Hopper, who hopes to finish her next book by the end of the year. “People were debating whether she was a construction because she had a fake name – because no man in music has ever had a different name! It just pointed to the fact that we still regard women as outsiders to music and refuse to see this entire canon of women in music that goes back hundreds of years. Or if we have an image at all of female musicians, it isn’t viewed as being part of their grand plan or their artistry. For instance, people think Lana del Rey is plastic, like Malibu Barbie, while we don’t question St Vincent for a second because she has a guitar. When I was writing that story, I realised that Lana’s career was entirely her vision but no one wanted that story because it didn’t serve their narrative. It’s about who gets to be real and who gets to count.”

Hopper, who believes that we’re in a new golden age of music writing from young women and regularly receives emails from readers who see themselves in her stories, believes that girls should never question their right to speak.

“In a lot of my early pieces, I was figuring out my voice and used “I” more than I needed to,” she smiles. “But I noticed that my male peers would never do this because their opinion was never up for debate. When I noticed this. I edited out anything that couched my authority. But once I got over it, everything changed.”

Pieces of Perth

In November 2013, Urban Walkabout commissioned me to spend some time in Perth – my former hometown – to research, write and edit Pieces of Perth, a definitive guide to culture, art, food and lifestyle in the West Coast capital. The guide, which was supported by local councils, unearths offbeat eateries, back alley bars an inventive retailers across neighbourhoods such as Northbridge, Subiaco, Leederville and Mount Lawley. It also incorporates historical facts to show how this former frontier town evolved into the sun-splashed metropolis it is today. Browse the publication here. 

Style Seekers Sydney Issue #6

Aimed at curious and discerning travellers, Style Seekers Sydney is a slick, biennial guide to the best design, food, fashion and culture in the Harbour City. As contributing editor for issue #6 (Autumn-Winter 2015), I shaped the publication’s editorial direction, produced features and profiles and wrote and sub-edited the copy. This issue includes my interviews with food writers Jill Dupleix and Terry Durack, Sydney Film Festival Director Nashen Moodley and fashion label Vanishing Elephant along with features on Sydney’s newfound love affair with food trucks and local produce. Read it over here.

Art collector Clinton Ng

First published in Vault magazine, April 2015 

Clinton Ng might not play favourites with his art collection but he can’t conceal his enthusiasm for the pieces that light him up. When I quiz Ng about why A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Vik Muniz’s freewheeling riff on the Manet masterpiece, currently takes centre stage in his Sydney apartment, his response is the mark of someone with unswerving faith in art’s transformative potential: “It just gives and gives and gives.”

But Ng, who has spent the last decade cultivating a 400-strong collection that includes everything from photographs and video works by Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemary Laing and Shaun Gladwell to sculpture and paintings by Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Hirschorn, Ahmed Alsoudani, Hiromi Tango and Sam Jinks, knows that a collector’s trajectory isn’t down to passion alone. By religiously attending art fairs and combing the internet with missionary zeal, the busy gastroenterologist – who sits on the board of Art Month Sydney and whose own policy of giving has sparked loans to institutions such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the University of Queensland and the Ian Potter Centre – hopes to capture the breadth, depth and virtuosity of the present moment in contemporary art.

How did you first discover collecting and what prompted you to invest in your first piece?

I was bored shitless doing my PhD on irritable bowel syndrome and I found myself surfing the net for art and visiting galleries to remain sane. I’ve been drawn to art from a young age and have always loved drawings, crafts and comics as well as books with beautiful illustrations. My parents actively encouraged this.

I view collecting in terms of a relationship and like any relationship the connection is important, whether it’s on an emotional, intellectual or some other level. The work has to have something significant to say and must say something I can relate to. I’m also strategic. The last thing any collector wants is to find out that a piece that they have paid good money for is worthless in a monetary or cultural sense. I always ask myself if the work will stand the test of time and I buy to encourage artists to make and show more.

The first piece you acquired was Study for Red Centre, by John Coburn, over ten years ago. What are the highlights of your collection and how has your focus evolved?

I’ve always collected contemporary works that reflect the experience of life today – with all its complexity, uncertainty, harshness, joy and beauty. There are also a number or artists that I’ve collected from early days, such as Daniel Boyd, Ben Quilty and Ben Zavros that I’ll continue to collect. I was touched that Daniel’s parents thanked me for donating his work to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, when I was fortunate enough to meet them at the Bulgari Awards last year. It gives me great joy to see artists careers take off. I also have a really soft spot for Patricia Piccinini. Her creations are so grotesque, cute and cuddly on one hand and mutated on the other – you’re never quite sure how to respond or whether you love them or not.

Lately, I’ve also developed an interest in the Post Internet Art (PIA) movement. The PIA movement began five years ago and spans contemporary art made in response to the Internet, Sharing art and ‘liking’ art  – much like sharing what we eat, dress or do – is now such a natural part of life. Post-Internet artists often sample stock photographs, corporate branding and logos and screen imagery in response to the Internet and social media. In many ways, I consider myself a Post-Internet collector. Although I travel to fairs, Biennales and shows, the internet helps facilitate my collecting – whether by allowing me to seek out art, research artists or connect with galleries. The Internet allows me to view works on the other side of the world and if there’s an artist on my wish list whose practice I’m familiar with and whose gallery I respect, I have the confidence to buy.

Although art fairs are sometimes criticised for their emphasis on market forces rather than the art itself, you regularly visit fairs such as Art Basel Hong Kong. What is about fairs that excite you and which do you count amongst your favorites? 

The fairs allow me to see, experience and research art in an efficient manner. I gather information, build relationships, buy or plan future purchases. These events frequently broaden my perspective. My favorite fair is Basel. I put up with the long flight, a week of appalling hotels and food just to attend. Hong Kong is much closer, has great world-class hotels, restaurants, parties, infrastructure and, over the next few years, cultural institutions worth visiting.

You also have an art space in Sydney where you’ve held an exhibition called Migration with Berlin gallerist Matthias Arndt. What do you enjoy about making the transition from collector to curator?

My collection has grown beyond the rooms in my residence in Sydney. CASSydney (Contemporary Art Space Sydney) is a building in Barangaroo Sydney, which housed an ESSO laboratory in its previous life. I hope to develop CASSydney to house and show some of my collection in the future. In some sense, most good collectors are their own curators. It’s natural for themes and threads of ideas to materialise.

Although you’ve previously embraced Chinese contemporary art, your sights have shifted to Indonesia. What is it about Indonesian contemporary art that you find compelling?

I started understanding more about Indonesian art during the Migration exhibition curated by Matthias Arndt. The Indonesian market is up-and-coming and the works are very accessible. I think that although a lot of Chinese contemporary artists produce fabulous work, the market is a little inflated. Indonesia is one of the world’s most populated nations and there’s a huge middle class, so the art scene is really interesting. Because of the country’s tumultuous history, a lot of the works incorporate layers of political commentary, slogans or dry humour, which is relevant to modern societies such as Australia as well as places like Malaysia, where I was brought up. I’ve collected works by Eko Nugroho and Entang Wiharso, who showed at the Indonesian Pavilian at the Venice Biennale. They’re both incredibly impressive.

What are your ambitions as a collector?

I want to learn and engage through art. I’d love to play a bigger role in terms of being an advocate but I think that being a collector has been a most interesting journey. I meet people from various walks of life that I might not otherwise meet, who share my passions. It’s most rewarding.

A large part of the joy of collecting is also the pleasure of sharing the work. I always tell an artist I acquire that I am happy to loan the work back when they have their survey. It might be clichéd, but at the end of the day I am only a custodian. I have the work for a short time and one day I may have the chance to leave it for future generations to enjoy.

The problem with swirling

First published in Daily Life, April 2015 

The greatest myth about progress that it’s measured rather than felt.

There’s a reason we feel joy at the prospect of using dark-skinned emoji in a text message, or a like a weight is lifted when Olivia Pope’s affair with president Fitzgerald Grant onScandal raises questions because Fitzgerald is married (not because Pope is black), but a job ad asking for diverse candidates can leave us oddly unmoved.

It’s easier to celebrate the things we can see and feel rather than the things we can count. When we imagine a post-racial world, it’s one in which skin colour means next to nothing.

Christelyn Karazin subscribes to this theory. Last year, the African-American interracial dating expert and author of Swirling: How to Date, Mate and Relate Mixing Race, Culture and Creed, launched Swirlr, a dating website and web series intent on proving that hooking up with someone who doesn’t look like you is the fastest way to assert control over your love life and expand your romantic horizons.

When Louis C.K. revealed in season four of Louie that the mother of his two blonde daughters was a blackwoman played by Susan Kelechi Watson, it was considered further proof of the show’s groundbreaking power. In a 2013 Salon essay, Roxane Gay (who recalls a bigot once spitting in her path when she strolled down a Montreal street with a white boyfriend) describes relief at watching a Cheerios ad in which a biracial girl covers her black father with cereal in a cute attempt to lower his cholesterol intake.

“It has been really comforting to see so many interracial families and families of colour being represented, being seen. That comfort rises out of seeing more evidence, on television, of the world as it really is, not hopelessly trapped in how it once was,” she writes.

We don’t have to look far to work out why tiny victories can feel so big.

In a November 2011 op-ed for The Sydney Morning Herald, Finance Minister Penny Wong highlighted the ways in which the White Australia Policy gave rise to the view that interracial partnerships were the cause of “racial contamination”. This belief was even more corrosive in the US, where miscegenation was considered a criminal offence until after 1967 – and the last ban on interracial marriages was lifted as recently as November 2000 in Alabama.

Few things are a more potent symbol that we’re slipping away from this toxic history than openness to partnering up with someone from another race. In November 2013, aUniversity of California study on online dating habits discovered racial segregation on websites such as OkCupid had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with users’ fear someone from another background wouldn’t find them attractive. In 2013 SBSreported interracial coupling rates for non-white Australians jumped 60 per cent or more by the third generation.

But although this uptake in “swirling” suggests that romantic connection is less subject to age-old prejudice (or ruled by fetish, depending on whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist), it’s more interesting to consider this from the perspective of someone nonwhite. If dating someone from your own race confirms the notion that “nonwhite culture is assumed to be rooted in instinct” but “white culture is one of intent,” as Ayesha Siddiqi puts it in her excellent essay for The New Inquiry ‘Can the white girl twerk?‘, then diverting from this can feel like a radical act.

However, “swirl” conjures images of chocolate melting into vanilla – and this is where ice cream metaphors fall horribly short. On her high-traffic dating site Beyond Black & White, Karazin (who’s happily married to a white man) makes the case for “swirling” based on statistics that are the product of systemic inequalities, such as low marriage rates between African-Americans. Swirlr, which is about as edgy as an episode of Joe Millionaire, features awkward bowling dates in which spirited women named Quintana gravitate towards brooding jocks called Rocky.

Karazin’s app might ask us to “date different” but her project still reflects a culture that uses the language of cosmopolitanism to push a version of diversity with whiteness at its heart. If the world was really post-racial, we wouldn’t celebrate interracial couples for being interracial. Love depends on feelings that occur entirely beneath the skin.

The double standards of what’s considered black beauty

First published in Daily Life, June 2015 

Diversity isn’t about ticking boxes in the manner of a joyless bank clerk; it’s about recognising that there’s a life-affirming magic in being seen.

It’s not a stretch to hope that coming across FKA Twigs, powerful and resplendent, in a bird of paradise gown at the March 2015 launch of the London exhibition ‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’ could spark a queenly courage in a mixed-race girl dealing with high-school bullies. That an ad for moisturiser featuring Chinese supermodel Liu Wen might represent a tiny affront to the notion that Asian women are either exotic or invisible, and that Lupita Nyong’o’s journey from unknown to Oscar winner is a victory for those with dark skin and outsize ambition. Or that the existence of brilliant Lebanese-British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney is an antidote to a world ruled by Jennifers and Angelinas, even as her glossy-haired perfection is out of our league.

The American lexicographer Erin McKean tells us that “prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked female”, but discounts the fact that beauty is often the truest barometer of our unequal world. When this barometer registers something beyond blonde hair and white skin, there’s a fighting chance of closing the gap.

In the last few years, the beauty ideals once embodied by all-American golden girls like Christie Brinkley and suntanned glamazons like Elle Macpherson have started changing form.

In 2014, Nairobi-born Nyong’o signed a lucrative deal to become the face of Lancome cosmetics and the Chinese supermodel Liu Wen, who rose to fame as fashion houses grudgingly acknowledged the growing Asian luxury market, earned $US 7 million, ranking fifth on Forbes list of richest models in the world. These days, non-white beauty isn’t token; it’s closer to something that approximates real power.

However, a world in which a skin-lightening cream called ‘Whitenicious’ is a legitimate product rather than something you’d read about in The Onion, and Twigs, who’s dating Robert Pattinson, regularly faces racist Tweeters seeking eternal communion with Edward Cullen guarantees that things aren’t ever this clear-cut.

In ‘The Inconsistent Acceptance of Black Beauty’, a May 2015 Huffington Post article, Lauren Dozier – a writer who’s had a lifetime of white girls use her skin colour as a door prize in an ill-fated Tanning Olympics – highlights the ways in which perceptions of racialised beauty are shaped by very specific markers and circumstances.

“Black beauty is only acceptable in certain contexts or in small doses. Keep the full lips; leave the coarse, high-maintenance hair. Cornrows are called ‘edgy’, ‘innovative’, and ‘epic’ when the braids sit above an alabaster face, but are ‘ratchet’ or ‘ghetto’ on a black girl. Only when bearing the seal of approval from high profile celebrities and style icons are these features deemed acceptable or beautiful,” she writes.

But as Buzzfeed‘s Anne Helen Petersen found out in her fascinating September 2014 Tinder experiment that aimed to replicate the dynamics of online attractiveness, our celebration of racialised beauty isn’t just down to white fashion editors or the style whims of Miley Cyrus – it’s about how we view race through the lens of factors such as class.

Petersen discovered that Yasmin, a mixed-race woman who was voted the most desirable, garnered an 89 per cent swipe-yes rate because her straight, white teeth and clear, caramel skin suggest a middle-class affluence that makes ethnicity fade into the background, while Lindsey, a 25-year old black woman, was universally rejected because bold makeup and cluttered clothing brought her difference into sharper focus.

As Rawiya Kameir points out in a May 2014 The Daily Beast article, Nyong’o might be stunning but we recognise her beauty at the expense of women like Precious star Gabourey Sidibe because her Ivy League pedigree and smooth, TransAtlantic accent speaks to class aspirations that are rooted in whiteness, one that flattens her Otherness and marks her out as “one of us.” Twigs, who taught herself to produce videos so she could engineer every aspect of her artistic persona, and Wen, who revealed the grit and determination that catapulted her to stardom in a September 2014 Vogue essay, fit neatly into the class fantasy that elevates those who are exceptional while ignoring the messy business of social change.

In her moving February 2014 speech at the ‘Black Women in Hollywood’ luncheon, Nyong’o reminded us of the importance of diversity and why rewriting old ideas of beauty means so much.

“I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I put on the TV and only saw pale skin. I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin. And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned… When I saw [supermodel Alek Wek], I inadvertently saw a reflection of myself that I could not deny. Now, I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far-away gatekeepers of beauty,” she said.

The gatekeepers of beauty might be catching up with a world that’s no longer defined by Elle Macpherson or Christie Brinkley, but whiteness still needs a way to survive. By being selective about those it deems ‘beautiful’, it gets to control who benefits from life-affirming magic.

Judy millar’s soulful and cerebral art

First published in i-D May 2015 

In the past decade, acclaimed New Zealand artist Judy Millar‘s varied work has filled a German gallery with Technicolor tidal waves and unspooled wild brushstrokes across the walls of a Renaissance church for the 53rd Venice Biennale. Always a fan of an enveloping spectacle, her latest show Reverse Cinema at Sydney’s Sullivan + Strumpf draws on painting, sculpture, and light projections to create an installation that’s both soulful and cerebral. With the show involving her most audacious work yet, i-D chatted with the artist about her allergy to categories, falling in love as an intellectual experiment, and why she dreads public art.

How has your practice evolved since you started?
It’s impossible to say because it’s a very curious process: you just fire an arrow and find out where that arrow is going to land, but it just never lands. I’m a self-taught artist because when I was at art school, we were just left to sort things out and I was always playing with many mediums. I might start with a very direct painting process but I’ve never known when one medium ends and the other begins.

Why are you fascinated by physicality?
I’m curious about the edge of the physical and the mental, and where that exists. All my work is in some way about the relationship between these two things. We live our lives constantly juggling these worlds but they can seem pretty contradictory. We have dreams all the time, we imagine things all the time, and we build a mental life for ourselves. But we never truly know what another person is thinking. All the most important moments of our lives—falling in love, losing somebody, death—are times where we encounter this edge. Falling in love is the perfect example of our physical and mental selves colliding.

You live between New Zealand and Berlin. How are you influenced by moving between these places?
I live in a very remote place in New Zealand, on the edge of the Tasman Sea about an hour outside Auckland. The shift between the two places makes me constantly reassess what I’m doing, which is why I keep doing it. I like to leave work unfinished when I leave Berlin and go back to New Zealand. It’s fascinating because when I go back, I always see it with new eyes.

Reverse Cinema is your first interactive installation. How did you dream up this work and bring it to life?
Some of the challenges really were about how to engineer aspects of it—I’m not very good at making things so I rely a lot on working with people who can translate what I’m wanting. I’m often painting on my own so I really appreciate working with different minds.

I’ve always been interested in how images circulate and shift in the culture. This work is like an exploded painting: it started as a painting and got converted into a screen print. After that I thought I would project those images onto forms and then into space. I also photographed three-dimensional forms and printed them digitally into these flat images, so the installation folds back in on itself. This seems to be the way we experience the world.

What’s next for you?
I’m working on my first public sculpture. I’m not a fan of the medium but thought I would try! The worst examples of this are large lumps of metal that are just plonked in our environment where they shouldn’t be. I’m working on a piece that in some ways is a bit of a lampooning of what public sculpture is for Christchurch, a city that’s folded down and is folding back up again. I think the best public sculptures get nicknames and that’s how I’ll know if mine works! If it hasn’t got one it hasn’t entered people’s psyches yet.

‘Reverse Cinema’ shows at Sullivan + Strumpf Gallery in Sydney from the 23 May to 13 June. 

‘Gram Ambition

First published in Renegade Collective, May 2015. 

Few job descriptions spark the same envy levels as the professional Instagrammer’s. Scrolling past another art-directed brunch taken during an all-expenses paid weekend in Paris or still life featuring a designer candle and newly procured Chanel handbag, it’s easy to believe that those who’ve turned mobile photography into a career have cracked a secret code of the digital age. Gareth Pon is interested in discipline, not excess. The Johannesburg-based filmmaker and photographer, who’s widely considered South Africa’s top Instagrammer– 219,000 followers and counting – says that freewheeling creativity is only possible when you’re strong enough to put boundaries in place.

“I always try to take a photo that you can’t Google,” laughs Gareth, sipping the morning’s first coffee from an oversized mug. “There are lot of guys out there who just shoot landscapes and although they look absolutely beautiful, I set some rules for myself. I try to avoid taking photos of sunsets and I try to avoid landscapes unless it’s under certain conditions. I’m working on a series right now where I take photos of people through windows as I’ve always loved layers. Whenever I go out, I always try to depict a different perspective and I’m drawn to things that are abstract.  I’ll try to capture an image according to very specific limitations.”

There’s something magnetic about Gareth’s commitment to originality. Tagged #gpwindowportraits, his latest photo series uses the reflections that bounce off window panes to draw out the unseen side of subjects that range from fellow photographers and local musicians to strangers he encounters on Johannesburg streets. Like all good storytellers, his work traffics in depth and contradiction. It’s safe to say that he couldn’t care less about how to nail the perfect selfie.

“It’s always about the quality of the content and the story you want to tell,” says Gareth, who’s just been elected Digital Imaging Brand Ambassador for electronics giant Samsung and who’s created images for everyone from Nike and Apple to South African beer manufacturer Flying Fish.  “Some people have gotten really big on Instagram by just taking one kind of picture but it’s not about taking pretty photos, it’s about the thinking and the creativity behind it. The first thing you need to think about is what you can capture and how you can make it different.”

Gareth, who was born in South Africa to a Chinese-Mauritian mother and Cantonese architect father, was honing his creative instinct long before Instagram bathed our mobile photography efforts in its ‘seventies glow. Although he studied fashion design and architecture, it wasn’t until he enrolled in a visual communications degree at respected art and design school The Open Window that he recognised that the craft of using images to tell stories might be his true calling.

“I started a fashion design course, got frustrated with that industry and moved on and eventually went back to study visual communications where I realised how cool it was to use camera and video and discovered that I had a passion for making films,” recalls Gareth, whose short film Oxford Circus, a cleverly edited montage that sees anonymous Londoners swing between connection and loneliness, proves that his poetic sensibility also extends to his filmmaking. “When I started using Instagram at the end of 2012, it really forced me into taking more photos. I started discovering more about Johannesburg as well as the more unusual parts of the city and the places around town that people wouldn’t visit. We have a lot of different cultures here so it’s all about branching into different places – I’d go out and explore to get the next shot that I could share and that just made me want to seek it out more. And of the back of that, in early 2013, I founded the South African Instagrammer’s Community, started organising Insta-meets and threw the net out to the entire region. I like to tell people that it was a really interesting process of making all the right mistakes. It all just snowballed from there.”

In the last 12 months, Gareth’s eye for creating compelling images might have taken him to Paris, London and Amsterdam – while sparking a newfound obsession with travel – but his Instagram account often feels like a love letter to his hometown. An image of a smiling boy leaping into the air in Soweto, a Johannesburg township known for sprawling shantytowns and struggles with apartheid, shimmers with an optimism that’s the flipside of a city often unfairly equated with racial tension and high crime rates while a shot of a woman holding an umbrella under a majestic overpass nods to the city’s soaring urban development. Unsurprisingly, it’s attracted 2602 likes.

“When I was travelling last year, I realised that European cities had so many cultures but that everyone’s really intertwined,” says Gareth, who also contributes his images to The Huffington Post. “In Joburg, everyone drives and a lot of people are really ignorant about what happens on the streets. Shooting here has given me the opportunity to merge into other cultures and just reclaim the beauty of the city. A few decades ago it was quite rough, there were a lot of abandoned buildings and squatters but today one block might be quite bad but if you go back a few blocks, it’s really beautiful. It’s opened my eyes.”

Gareth’s biggest challenge has nothing to do with the online accolades or dream client roster – it’s about the age-old artist’s conundrum where commercial success may come at the expense of using your voice.

“I used to do a lot of content and corporate stuff but about midway last year I took a step back and realised that I wasn’t honouring the medium that I studied and that was waking up in the morning with a heavy heart,” he smiles. “At the moment, I’ve got some personal projects that I’m working on and I’m looking forward to embracing the art photography space. I’m moving into an artist’s building full of painters, sculptors and creatives from South Africa at the start of April and am looking forward to exploring what Instagram can do as an art form as well as a medium. I feel like mobile photography has become like the new pencil – when the pencil was invented, it gave birth to thousands and thousands of art forms. It’s levelled the playing field in the same way.”

Making the cut

First published in Renegade Collective, April 2015. 

To sit front row at an Alice McCall runway show is to understand that those who dismiss fashion as frivolous radically underestimate the power of fantasy. During Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia (MBFWA) last year, the London-born designer, who got her start when Kate Moss started championing her range of one-off silk tops and who designed for Sass & Bide before launching her own label in 2004, outfitted models in everything from lemon-yellow jumpsuits that could have been lifted from the wardrobe of a ‘seventies heiress to swing dresses featuring signature details such as perforated bodices and scalloped hems. The collection, which played out against a cloud-like installation by theatre maestro Alice Babidge, might have commemorated Alice’s tenth year in the business but it also proved that the designer owes her staying power to our ability to buy into her vision – one where femininity isn’t complete without a rock n’ roll edge.

If this looks effortless, it’s just another fashion world illusion. Although Alice, who’s in the process of finalising her SS 15/16 collection, is one of the few working Australian designers who enjoys icon status she’s quick to admit that she was once almost a casualty of her own success.

“I learnt so much two or three years into the business where I felt like I really lost control,” says Alice, whose CV includes stints styling for cult magazines like I-D and The Face in the nineties and whose popularity with celebrities like Moss, Chloe Sevigny and Diane Kruger, sparked unprecedented demand for her brand during its formative years. “Writing a solid business plan is really key. It’s really important to focus on projected growth in terms of both the number of styles you present and the amount of stockists you have. If you grow too quickly, it can really be detrimental to your business.”

These days, Alice, who oversees four flagship boutiques in Sydney and Melbourne and supplies to David Jones, ASOS, Harvey Nichols and Japanese department store Beams, relies on a trusted team of advisors and pours her energy into designing pieces that achieve the blend of versatility and inventiveness that her customers want.

“I’ve learnt that you can’t think about your own ego or do something just for the sake of doing it – understanding the margins on a product and doing costings on everything you make at an early stage is critical,” she explains. “Although I’m the creative director, I have a general manager who’s amazing as well as a great financial team to take care of the paperwork and the invoices. There’s so much that happens across the back end of the business and that just isn’t my strength. Employing staff who are professionally experienced is one of the best things that I’ve done.”

Becky Cooper and Bridget Yorsen relate to this sentiment. The design duo, who met while studying fashion at the University of Technology Sydney in 2000, launched their label Bec and Bridge at the New Generation show at MBFWA in 2004 and attracted over 40 US stockists within one year of operating in the states, thanks to their knack for designing pieces that combine classic silhouettes with breezy sophistication, believe that it’s essential to build a team that believes in what you do.

“It’s all about nurturing your team,” says Bridge. “Keeping them motivated and passionate about your brand is really important. You have to employ people who share your vision,” says Bridge. For Bec, this extends to cultivating strong ties with everyone from stockists and suppliers to more experienced industry peers. “Be really respectful of everybody no matter what your working relationship is with them,” she adds. “A simple premise like respecting your elders and showing that respect from the top really does impact your whole company.”

Bec and Bridge, who supply pieces to over 250 boutiques and online stores in the US and count Bloomingdales, Sak’s Fifth Avenue and David Jones as part of their stockist stable, attribute their growth to business acumen and entrepreneurial instinct just as much as design nous.

“Because our brand has always treaded that fine line between aspirational and commercial fashion, we have to plan our shows really carefully and make sure we make our pieces accessible to our customer even if we’re pushing boundaries,” says Bridge, adding that ideas for some of the pair’s most innovative pieces come the night before a show. “We try to not ever become complacent – there’s so much information at our fingertips these days with social media so there’s no excuse to not stay on top of it. You can’t get too precious with your business. If you risk being precious about things, you don’t open yourself up to what the market may want. Don’t be too hard on yourself when you have to follow a certain formula.”

For Aje, a Sydney label that’s an amalgam of the names of it’s founders, ex-Russh magazine stylist Edwina Robinson and Adrian Norris, who studied Fine Art in Venice, creativity and commerce go hand-in-hand. Edwina says that her label’s emphasis on laid-back glamour – the kind that often calls for luxurious fabrics, careful embellishment and organic fibres – means that prioritising factors such as production cost and logistics is more important than ever.

“The designs have to be commercially viable,” explains Edwina, who launched Aje with Norris in 2007 and has since swapped a wholesale focus to launch four standalone retail stores and a fifth slated for Sydney’s Strand Arcade. “I think when you start out as creatives, you have so many amazing ideas and pieces that you want to make but not everything is versatile, wearable or able to be worn effortlessly. Being careful with every dollar is a good thing – when you start succeeding, there’s a lot of money coming in but there’s also a lot of money going out and you need to watch that.”

Edwina says that MBFWA is an opportunity to engage with customers while telling the story behind her brand. “We always make sure that those watching our show enter an Aje world and we offer the audience the chance to buy direct from the runway if we have products in store,” she says. “It’s also lets us show consistency as well as innovation in very collection. Your brand needs to be constantly evolving but there should also be a certain essence that people recognise as yours.”

As the industry grapples with fallout from a tough retail climate and the rise of new technology, this ability to articulate your distinctive vision in a way that resonates with your customer may be your best chance at staying the course.

“The quality has to be high, the fit has to be impeccable and customers need to know your point of difference,” smiles Alice. “We have 11 years of history and there’s a lot of longevity in that. People can recognise an Alice McCall product and the business has just grown stronger and stronger.”

Kaye Donachie

First published in Vault magazine, April 2015. 

To be a painter at the start of the 21^st century is to find yourself in thrall to the technical overtures of those that have come before you but Kaye Donachie prefers the kinetic to the aesthetic. When the Glasgow-born artist talks about her process, it’s with an effervescence that befits someone whose paintings of ghostly heroines and twilight gatherings feel like they’ve been plucked from the viewer’s subconscious or, at the very least, magicked out of thin air.

“I’ve always been interested in paintings having energy and I like things that feel like they’ve been made in one breath,” Donachie tells me from her home in South London, transformed, courtesy of Skype, into one of her own smiling apparitions.

“When I think of Manet, Velazquez and Matisse, I’m drawn to their sense of immediacy and how their last touches give their paintings a certain feeling and flourish. There’s almost a detachment of the brushstrokes from the actual image and an openness to the way they painted, which isn’t about the surface of the painting but about the way something is described through the application of paint. It’s almost like erotic frisson.”

Donachie has spent the last decade proving the idea that frisson isn’t seen, but felt. In 2004’s Epiphany, she created a series of small-scale oil paintings in which long-haired youth frolic in settings that move between shadow and light. Featuring titles such as “Can’t find nothing I can put my heart and soul into” and “Every mornin’ our love is reborn”, verbal fragments lifted from poems and song lyrics, the paintings glow with the incandescence of a Ryan McGinley photograph but her sickly palette proves that hedonism is the flipside of despair. Walpurgis Night, a 2009 show at Berlin’s Peres Projects, recasts modernist rebels such as poet Emmy Hennings and psychologist Otto Gross – citizens of Monte Verita, an early utopian community in Switzerland that plays a recurring role in Donachie’s paintings – as fleeting keepers of a world outside time and place. Figures blur into backdrops to evoke the ways in which the blaze of progress is snuffed out by the lassitude of individual lives. And in Malady of Death, a 2013 solo show at Donachie’s London gallery Maureen Paley, ethereal green-and-blue faces are unmoored from the pages of a Marguerite Duras novella via painterly alchemy, swapping the logic of representation for the language of mood. It’s little surprise that Donachie’s work makes a regular appearance on Tumblr dashboards.

“I’m drawn to the idea that painting is more sensorial than any other medium, it has a physicality that I’m really attracted to and it’s almost about how atmospheric or visceral it can be,” says Donachie, who’s currently preparing for an upcoming British Council group survey featuring the work of the country’s contemporary painters. “My pieces are deeply romantic and almost rooted in absence. I’m fascinated with the world that exists between reality and dream and I’ve always loved Man Ray’s photography because his work has this strange ability to make things exist in darkness and light. You can access that world in a painting. That’s very interesting to me.”

Donachie, who was born in Glasgow and grew up in seaside East Anglia in the seventies, came to painting early.  “My parents were quite liberal and I was always surrounded by art,” she recalls. “My mum always encouraged me to become an artist so I grew up thinking that was an actual path.” Although Donachie went on to study Fine Art at the University of Central England in Birmingham, it wasn’t until she started working towards her MA at London’s Royal College of Art in the late nineties – at a moment during which the Young British Artists’ dizzying output had fixed the world’s gaze on the London art scene – that her trajectory as a painter started taking shape. “At the Royal College of Art, I started to formalise what I wanted to achieve,” she says. “Peter Doig was teaching there, John Stezakar was teaching us theory. Other artists were reaching a point where they were becoming really ambitious and were taking off in different directions. They became real role models for me.” Was she swayed by the market’s love affair with the conceptual swagger symbolised by pieces such as Tracy Emin’s  My Bed, which was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999. “No, I never identified with the YBAs,” she grins. “But it was an intense period of time in British art that proved that you could show your work and be entrepreneurial within your own career. Towards the end of that YBA period, a lot of galleries attended MA shows to see what was coming out.” She met the gallerist Maureen Paley at her own MA show. Paley’s Bethnal Green gallery hosted her first solo exhibition a year later.

“Meeting Maureen Paley has been the defining point of my career,” says Donachie, whose paintings have appeared everywhere from the Prague Biennale and New York’s fabled Marianne Boesky gallery to the Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity and British Art, a major group exhibition at Tate St. Ives. “I’ve worked with her a long time and she has always been very supportive of what I wanted in the work. Since I started with her, I’ve had great opportunities and she opened my eyes to the idea that you could curate your own exhibitions, rather than just put paintings up. I’ve evolved so much in terms of how the works in the space can relate to each other during a show. Having that gallery behind me has been a big thing.”

Donachie’s delight in the power of reference isn’t just limited to her own body of work, it also extends to a universe of ciphers, subtexts and signs. She says that the paintings she produced for The Malady of Death don’t dwell on the Marguerite Duras novella as much as they capture the book’s strange ability to show how one space can dissolve into another in the manner of an elliptical poem. “The references within my own work, from literature to filmmaking to photography, have always made me feel an affinity with different disciplines,” says Donachie, who maintains an archive of images and colour scraps that call up historical periods and moments in time. “I’ve always felt that although I paint, the research behind it is linked to so many other things that I almost feel like a filmmaker. You can have one singular image but that triggers off many. It’s all about how you visualise an idea.”

But Donachie, who spends early mornings mixing colours in her studio, doesn’t distinguish between the electricity of her process and that of her work. “I always work up to the deadline and am jealous of people who work at a more even pace,” she laughs. “But I make a lot of drawings and paintings and a lot of them get chucked. I’m looking for that particular moment of energy or emotion that allows me to produce things in one breath. But when I have too much time to think or fiddle with a painting, it just becomes stale for me. It’s much too dogmatic.”

In defense of teenage diaries

First published in Daily Life April 8, 2015

There are few more satisfying payoffs in the Internet age than the practice of judging the self-obsessed. As intolerable as it is to witness a Facebook update narrating a friend’s new promotion when your career is flatlining or a real-time Instagram montage of your classmate’s wedding when you’re freshly heartbroken, the idea that those narcissistic enough to recount their lives in minute detail are stuck in an extended adolescence can quell even the worst case of online anxiety. The great crime of digital culture isn’t that it invites oversharing, it’s that it risks turning grown-ups into 16-year-old girls. The one-liners that tumble down our social media dashboards might as well be fugitives madly fleeing the diaries that we kept as teenagers.

The Internet may have alerted us to the mind-numbing lows of first-person observation, but the urge to diarise one’s experiences has always been fraught. In her February 2015Rookie essay ‘Life Writing’, Zadie Smith describes her attempts to channel literary idols like Joe Orton and Virginia Woolf by keeping a journal, only to find that the diary “devolved into a banal account of fake crushes and imagined romance”. Disgusted, she put it aside. “The dishonesty of diary writing—this voice you put on for supposedly no one but yourself—I found that idea so depressing,” Smith writes. “I feel that life has too much artifice in it anyway without making a pretty pattern of your own most intimate thoughts.”

But Smith is just echoing a widely-held cultural belief. The act of frenetically jotting down your hopes, dreams and feelings is often considered the height of solipsism, the province of teenage girls who may have once papered the inside of their locker with Luke Perry posters, anointed binders with boys’ initials and seen no problem with skipping homework to conduct wildly unnecessary hair dying experiments at their best friend’s place. The notion that girls are casualties of their own impulses and emotions does more than discredit their perspective as silly, frivolous and self-interested and their adolescent diaries as proof of an artless inability to separate dross from substance; it casts women as pathologically introspective, unable even to serve as reliable narrators of their own lives.

“Of course, there’s a very good argument to be made that there are too many people, young women especially, writing about their personal experiences these days and not enough willing to report from the battle lines that exist outside their own heads,” writes the confessional essayist Meghan Daum, in her deliciously meta profile of Lena Dunham, published in The New York Times in September 2014. For famous diarists like Woolf and Sylvia Plath, a teenage journaling habit is part of a fatal chain reaction that ends in sinking, coat laden with stones, too deep into the ocean of the self.

My own old diaries are shoved in the back of a drawer at my parents’ house across the country, sparing me the shame of accidentally stumbling across my former self. When I summoned the courage to rifle through them, I was struck less by the lengthy analyses of adolescent mood swings, references to ill-fated relationships or stock-standard high school dramas but how my endlessly optimistic rhapsodising hadn’t caught up with the fact that the life I dreamed of living wasn’t designed for me. In a March 2015 essay in Buzzfeed, Durga Chew-Bose describes watching a scene in the movie Girlhood and feeling a longing for her own adolescence: “I was young and, in my naive construction of self, felt invincible,” she writes. I might have been a teenage narcissist but it may also be the freest that I’ve felt.

Is the agony aunt revival good news for women?

First published in Daily Life March 2015

Last month, Haruki Murakami pulled off what may be his strangest-ever plot twist without resorting to a single brooding protagonist, sewer-dwelling monster or disappearing cat. In January 2015, the reclusive Japanese novelist, who commands a fan base frenzied enough to queue outside bookstores at midnight, relinquished the authorial mystique that’s helped make his career to launch ‘Mr Murakami’s Place’, a temporary website where he solves his readers’ dilemmas via an online advice column.

“‘Adult’ is nothing more than an empty form,” he reassures a woman paralysed at the idea of turning 30; “In the bed with someone I love,” he tells a student curious about the place he spends the most time; and “I suspect that either you or your cat is very sensitive,” he warns a girl whose feline scampers away every time she cries. The responses are less a study in Murakami’s trademark mix of oddness and economy than they are a series of clues about the confusing business of everyday living – in all its banal and heartbreaking glory.

But the Nobel favourite can’t take credit for recognising the literary value in dishing up advice. In the last few years, the schoolmarmish figures that once haunted women’s magazines have given way to a new kind of agony aunt that swaps finger-wagging missives designed to police female behaviour for responses that weave stories of personal failure with insights that address conflicting truths.

From ‘Dear Sugar’, a cult The Rumpus advice column that showcases Cheryl Strayed’s talent for turning promiscuity into poetry, to ‘Savage Love’, gay activist Dan Savage’s attempt at questioning sexual norms, to The Cut‘s ‘Ask Polly’, where Heather Havrilesky draws from her past as a beer-swilling ingrate to inspire readers to take charge of their lives, these modern-day advice columnists are an Internet-era corrective to a world where we google our heartbreaks and air career problems on Reddit – even if the decisions we face are more complex than ever.

Luckily, the agony aunt’s history offers sweet relief for those who long for simpler times.

Although London’s Athenian Mercury published the first-ever advice column in 1693, it was sister paper The Ladies Mercury, home of ‘Love, Etc’ – a section that promised to help 17th century women solve relationship dramas and brush up their etiquette while preserving the “Zeal and Softness becoming to the Sex” – that truly cemented the genre. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ladies Home Journal, whose famous advice column ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ urged its middle-class, educated readers to abstain from “cooking hash for dinner” and “padlock [their] tongues” until it was stormed by feminists in 1970, took up this mission with aplomb. And ‘Dear Abby’, Pauline Esther Phillips’ much-loved newspaper feature, might have dropped its no-divorce stance when women’s liberation kicked in but it still casts the agony aunt as the sage gatekeeper of female-specific wisdom that assumes there’s only one way to be a woman.

As Lily Roth points out in a February 2013 article in The Atlantic, “Though a lot changed between those medieval how-tos and the first letter to Dear Abby, the basic point remained the same. This, the columnists told us, is how a good woman would act.”

Matt Petonzia believes that openness rather than prescriptiveness is at the heart of the modern-day agony aunt’s appeal. “Today’s columnists aren’t trying to be experts; in fact, they’re transparent about their flaws. At the end of the day, that might be their greatest qualification,” he writes in a January 2015 article in Mashable.

Savage draws on his history of being bullied to help his audience combat homophobia, Heather Havrilesky uses her own past romantic delusions to motivate readers to leave unhealthy relationships, and Cheryl Strayed – despite her fondness for terms such as “sweatpea” and “tortured rising star glowbug” – offers her fans glittering insights by recounting experiences like heroin use and assault with bravery and grace. For the modern-day agony aunt, vulnerability is the antidote to sexist platitudes and women’s problems aren’t partial or specific – they’re just part of the messiness of being alive.

In “Write Like a Motherfucker,” a 2010 ‘Dear Sugar’ column that’s since been immortalised on thousands of coffee cups, Cheryl Strayed offers advice to Elisa Bassist, a struggling writer who believes she writes like a girl. “How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of ‘I could have been better than this’ and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be,” she says.

Women are still subject to the patronising whims of pop psychology but the modern-day agony aunt suggests that the weaknesses we’re regularly chastised for might actually be our strengths. It’s the kind of strange plot twist that’s out of something by Murakami.

Brooding Ambition

First published in Renegade Collective March 2015

Stardom isn’t without its occupational hazards. For Georgia Nott, one half of brother-sister indie pop duo Broods, these are less about staying afloat in an industry known for spitting out its next big things than they are about keeping your composure when you’re ambushed by your own emotions.

“In September we were playing a show at a sit-down theatre in Vancouver as support for Sam Smith and we played a song called ‘Four Walls’,” says Georgia, toying with a piece of toast. “The crowd was applauding for a solid three minutes and it blew me away to the point where I almost cried on stage. I never expected people to love it so much.”

Sitting at Universal Music’s Sydney headquarters, a concrete-and-glass space dotted with egg-shaped couches and flickering flat screens, it’s impossible not to worry that this charming earnestness is destined to become a casualty of the high corridors of hit making. But in the last 18 months, 20-year-old Georgia’s crystalline voice, which ducks and weaves between multi-instrumentalist brother Caleb’s lush synths, has already helped catapult the pair beyond their wildest dreams.

“It hit home in December 2013 when we were sitting on a plane together realising that we were actually off to LA to sign a record deal and that’s it, this is going to be our career,” says Georgia who, minus her hypnotic onstage persona, could pass for the best friend at uni who convinced you to skip class and sneak out to a gig. “And although we’ve been working our arses off all year, winning Breakthrough Artist [at the New Zealand Music Awards] and gaining the respect of other musicians, it’s just nuts. I feel really old, but I’m only 20. I don’t think we’ll ever be prepared for an acceptance speech in our lives.”

Nelson, an idyllic town on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island, is miles away from the world of acceptance speeches and record deals. But for Georgia and Caleb, living in a family that saw music as religion and growing up blissfully unaware of industry influences would shape who they were to become as artists.

“We’ve always played music because our parents are musical and we grew up with instruments around the house,” says Georgia. “When we were younger, we were listening to The Eagles and a lot of classic rock, then as we grew we kind of found different kinds of music – indie rock and indie pop and electronic. Growing up somewhere so beautiful and calm keeps you grounded and our family is like Nelson in a way, really chilled out. But music has always been the focal point of our lives. We’ve always had ambitions of being musicians full-time.”

The Notts’ ambition also sparked a chain reaction. In 2011, Georgia caught the eye of Joel Little, the fabled music producer responsible for Lorde’s album “Pure Heroine”, when she won national competition Rockquest with her high-school band. Their working relationship was born two years later when he polished Broods’ ‘Bridges’ demo into a sublime piece of electro pop and produced the self-titled EP that skated into the world’s music press – and the boardroom of Capitol Records.

“We kind of had no idea what we were doing when we started,” confesses Caleb, who’s fighting a combination of jetlag and exhaustion for our interview (the legacy of sold-out shows in Sydney and flights to the US where they supported the likes of Haim and played a headline tour to promote their chart-topping 2014 debut album, “Evergreen”). “We worked with Joel all through 2013, whenever we could get away with uni and work but it wasn’t until the time we actually wrote ‘Bridges’ that we thought that a track might be good enough to put out.”

Since then the single has been streamed on Soundcloud more than 2.7 million times. The pair is quick to credit Joel, whose brand of shimmering electronica has made him one of the world’s most sought-after producers, with helping them realise their vision. And they’re equally grateful that Lorde, who ranks among their biggest supporters, has helped blaze trails for New Zealand artists on a world stage.

“Joel Little has been a massive influence for both of us,” says Georgia. “We’ve known him for a while now and seen him blow up and grow as a producer and to have him give so much to us is amazing. He’s not just a great producer, he’s a great person. And Lorde is awesome. She may be biased because she works with Joel and is Kiwi but she’s been such a massive support for us. She’s so mature and she’s only just turned 18. She deserves everything she gets.”

But chemistry is as much a catalyst in Broods’ success as a knack for attracting high-profile collaborators. Channelling long-suffering siblings everywhere, the Notts, who share an Auckland apartment, go from playful teasing to finishing each other’s sentences in the space of a minute and say this closeness is the heart of their creative process.

“When I came up with the lyrics for Bridges in a really crappy demo, Caleb called me straight away and told me that it was the best song I’d ever written,” says Georgia, who grew up idolising New Zealand singer Brooke Fraser and would give a limb to see magnetic British musician Bat for Lashes live. “When I write by myself, I don’t know if it works but Caleb is so good at musical arrangements that I find it easier to be super open in a studio situation. We take different approaches to music, but there’s just as much passion in what we’re doing. That’s why we work so well together.”

“Georgia is a completely emotional musician,” adds Caleb, with an affectionate laugh. “For me, music is more of an intellectual activity and I really admire artists like Thom Yorke and Danger Mouse. In the next year we’re looking forward to working on fresh material, more touring, writing, collaborating and experimenting with new stuff. We’re not very serious and we don’t have a brand image or anything that we’re trying to stick to. All we think about is writing the music and performing it well.”

Are spiritual quests only for the privileged?

First published in Daily Life, February 2015

Cheryl Strayed knows that self-discovery is less about giving into endless pleasure than it is about tackling the thing that’s getting in your way. Near the start of Wild – the much-loved memoir that sees the 26-year-old Strayed hike America’s 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail to absolve herself of a grief spiral brought on by her mother’s death and marked by one-night stands, heroin and a marriage breakdown – she’s faced with an obstacle both benign and brutal: a tree that had fallen across her path, too low to pass under but too high to climb. She hoists her gargantuan backpack over the trunk and tears open old wounds while clambering over the other side. “The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do […] I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go,” she writes.

Issued to coincide with the book’s widely-hyped Hollywood adaptation, the new Wildpaperback is strangely at odds with the ordinariness of this sentiment, thanks to its image of a still-comely Reese Witherspoon and overblown publishing-house caption, “A journey from lost to found.” Wild is often mentioned in the same breath as Eat Pray Love – the Elizabeth Gilbert bestseller that also features a white woman’s attempt to heal herself by abandoning the familiar – and lays claim to the same glowing endorsement from Oprah’s Book Club, but it swaps hard-won epiphanies in Italian trattorias and tearful goodbyes in Indian ashrams for moments of quiet decisiveness.

So, how does a book whose protagonist’s spiritual journey is marked by missing toenails sell nearly two million copies and inspire a wave of solo hikes on the edge of a continent? Strayed’s prose has a quicksilver quality, but phenomenons aren’t built on talent alone.

In a December 2014 article in Salon,Andrew O’Heir attempts to find out why journeys of self-discovery in literature tend to inspire legions of imitators – whether it’s turtleneck-clad Jack Kerouac wannabes using drug-heavy road trips to cure twentysomething angst, newly-divorced women splashing out on a Gilbert-style Balinese odyssey complete with overpriced witchdoctor, or Strayed acolytes whose pick ‘n’ mix afflictions ranging from burnout to depression are best served by a grueling walking trail known for sprawling desert and icy peaks.

The answer has almost nothing to do with the writer’s emotional context and everything to do with the fact that quest narratives belong to a Western literary tradition in which “finding yourself” hinges on the presence of a far-flung Other, whose authenticity brings your own truth sharply into focus. The scenery might switch between Kerouac’s heady African-American jazz clubs, Gilbert’s technicolour Indian wedding and Strayed’s snow-covered High Sierras, but it’s the process that makes it easy to emulate – as O’Heir writes, “the problem with all self-help or inspirational literature is always the same: People want to take it literally, and we have a tendency to mistake the map for the journey.”

Mistaking the map for the journey might give rise to life-changing realisations, but it’s not as innocent as it may seem. In an August 2014 Storyacious article on trailblazing female explorers, Julie Kirk writes about how 19th century women such as Isabella Bird and Gertrude Bell took solo sojourns through Africa, the Middle East and Japan to achieve the freedom that eluded them in stuffy English sitting rooms, only to find that their empowerment stemmed as much from “feeling like an intelligent, educated and mannered person amidst the natives” than it did from the voyage itself. For Sandip Roy, it’s precisely the way quest narratives are rooted in class and race privilege that make them insufferable to nonwhite readers. “Where do those people in Indonesia and India go away to when they lose their passion, spark and faith? I don’t think they come to Manhattan,” he wonders in his 2010 Salon essay ‘The New Colonialism of Eat Pray Love‘. When history treats you as something to be explored, mapped and mastered, chances are you won’t find solace in the wilderness either.

But although the tradition that Wild is part of is problematic, we shouldn’t dismiss its success. In December 2014, Strayed – who grew up in a house without indoor plumbing and whose single mother worked long hours waiting tables – told Vulture that when she was writing the novel she “made no attempt to be the authority” and that “the authoritative voice that white men of privilege have assumed, and have also been granted – that is the difference between their voice and mine.” Wild owes its beauty to the way it uses one woman’s story to mine the universal nature of pain, destructiveness and grief. “It was my life, like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred,” Strayed realises at the end of her hike. And no matter what brand of spiritual quest appeals to you, all lives deserve the chance to be redeemed.

Wear to next?

First published in Renegade Collective, February 2015

The fashion world reserves an unwritten code for those it deems the Next Big Thing. Show the kind of obsession with your craft that precludes sleep, outside interests or time for family and friends. Be gracious enough to bask in the glory but know that the forces that allowed your star to rise are the same ones that could see it fall. When I meet Leroy Nguyen at Three Williams, a sprawling Redfern cafe a short walk from his studio, it’s clear that he has no interest in playing someone else’s game. The young designer might punctuate his responses with infectious bursts of laughter but he talks about his achievements with a quiet autonomy that equally applies to his short but sparkling career.

“I’ve always had a really strong idea of what I want and what I don’t want so design and fabrication has always come really easily to me,” says Leroy, who enrolled in TAFE’s Fashion Design Studio on a whim while helping a friend with her own application. “But before I started studying fashion I didn’t know how to sew a button. The practical side of things was very slow and it took me a long time to get things done which was frustrating. The first year was awful and I’ve burnt it from my memory. But in the second year, I thought that maybe I could do this as a career. I eventually found my feet.”

If you’ve been lucky enough to witness a Leroy Nguyen fashion show, it’s difficult to believe that the designer didn’t burst into the industry with a fully-formed vision. During Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week 2014 , he sent models down the runway in swirls of violet and ink blue, a palette plucked from the cult Bowie classic Pan’s Labyrinth, a favourite from the film studies classes he took during an arts degree at the University of Sydney. The previous year, Leroy, who won the Fashion Design Graduate of the Year award in 2012, opened the Innovators show with The Candy Shop, a spring-summer collection that blended fluid silks and sleek neoprene with shapes inspired by Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. But it was his 2012 graduate collection Natural Born Killer that’s defined his trajectory so far – the parade of white-mesh cocktail dresses, sharply tailored shorts and digitally-printed bomber jackets that recall a modern-day Bond girl sparked a fateful phone call that saw Leroy hold a private showing with the editors of Vogue.

“The day after my graduate show, I got a call from Vogue Australia who wanted to have a personal meeting with myself an the collection and it was such an awesome thing to happen when you’re still a student,” says Leroy, who is about to launch an e-store and whose pieces have since featured everywhere from Harper’s Bazaar to US indie bible Nylon. “I’ve been surprised by the amount of support I’ve received from local media and that people want to nurture the latest thing. I think the biggest obstacle is often training your brain to work like a business, which is what your label is at the end of the day. To maintain longevity, you need to juggle wearability and profitability. It’s an exciting learning curve but it’s also really rewarding.”

Margaret Zhang, the high-profile blogger behind Shine by Three attributes Leroy’s success to this combination of creativity and commercial acumen. “Leroy’s graduate collection was a breath of fresh air – other designers explored print, structure and colour but don’t share his understanding of the female form,” says Zhang, who was one of the designer’s earliest advocates. “He’s had a lot of industry support from the outset which I think has helped him have a more holistic view of the business of fashion beyond the creative process. It’s something that a lot of designers easily overlook but it’s imperative to building a brand.”

Leroy is comfortable with the relationship between creating and brand-building. The designer is just as quick to credit his PR team Zoe and Sam, who he says are his “biggest support” with helping him achieve his goals as his rollcall of influences, which range from the late Alexander McQueen to worlds immortalised on film.

“When I was studying McQueen was really in his heyday – he passed away in second year but his stuff was amazing and his productions so thematic that it always inspires me every time I develop my collections,” says Leroy, who is planning a series of new collaborations and hopes to capitalise on growing interest in the US and Asian markets in the coming year. “At the same time, the visual strength of film fascinates me. I’m so new but throughout my retrospective of work, I’ve fed into films and stories – whether it’s James Bond, Swan Lake or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Film is such a strong way of ingraining colours and emotions in your head. If you love a movie, you’ll never forget that one character that really hit home.”

Even if you’re unsure if art really does imitate life, it’s clear that Leroy’s own story is one worth chronicling. The designer, whose siblings Luke and Pauline Nguyen run Surry Hills eatery Red Lantern, grew up the son of refugees that escaped the war in Vietnam to put down roots in Sydney’s Cabramatta, a chequered history his sister documented in her memoir The Secrets of the Red Lantern.

But Leroy, who originally studied physiotherapy, believes that this difficult upbringing has helped his siblings find the courage, determination and work ethic to chase who they really are.

“Having older siblings such as Luke and Pauline have helped me develop my self-confidence and self-respect,” he smiles. “Luke has always told me that it’s my life and I should do whatever makes me happy. And Pauline always tells me that I’ve got the goods so there’s no point stressing – just belief in yourself, knuckle down and get it done.”

He sips his flat white and stops speaking for a moment, as if to consider how much of his approach he owes to his mentors. “You have to meet deadlines but I’m a quick fast decision maker. Before a show – either the day of or the day before – I never seem to panic. I’m always calm. And I’m always zen.”

The curse of the lovable grouch

First published on Daily Life, January 2015

Few instruments convey anger’s many shades as eloquently as Bill Murray’s face. In St Vincent, a new film that sees Murray play Vin – a hard-living Vietnam war vet forced to babysit Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), the son of his next door neighbour (Melissa McCarthy), only to realise that his wide-eyed charge happens to hold the keys to his blackened heart – the 64-year-old actor’s sagging jowls and wrinkled forehead contort to reflect any number of emotional challenges: fury when his neighbour’s moving van backs into his fence and disrupts his booze-fuelled nap, belligerence when the bartender at the dive he frequents cuts him off, mild irritation when he’s rejected for withdrawing money to service his gambling debt, apathy when Oliver makes a speech at his school assembly explaining why his tantrums are a front for a goodness that qualifies him as a living saint.

But the talent for facial gymnastics that’s made Murray the most universally-adored actor of his generation has nothing to do with what might be his most convincing trick. The more dangerously unhinged his character is, the more pleasure we take in watching him on-screen.

Hollywood can’t get enough of the lovable grouch. Whether it’s Jack Nicholson’s acerbic novelist in As Good As It Gets, Clint Eastwood’s racist vigilante in Gran Torino or Murray’s curmudgeonly drifter in St Vincent, these leathery anti-heroes – by combining behaviour that’s borderline abusive with the flashes of kindness you just know are a sign of the good men they are inside – manage to pull at our heartstrings. It’s irrelevant that Nicholson’s Melvin Udall tells a fan he writes female characters by “taking away reason and accountability,” Eastwood’s Walt Kowalksi shoos his South Asian neighbours off his lawn with rifle in between slurs like “swamp rat” and “egg roll”, and Murray’s Vin spends babysitting dates gambling at the racetrack while Oliver’s single mother works double-shifts. Although the lovable grouch redeems himself eventually, he owes his power to the fact that his contemptible behaviour passes as endearing quirk.

This might feel like a modern-day phenomenon, but it’s easy to blame it on Dickens. The Christmas Carol‘s Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser who changes his crotchety ways thanks to a wake-up call from Tiny Tim, isn’t just the blueprint for every lovable grouch in modern cinema – it’s also a reason we crave watching broken men morph into people worth loving.The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis attributes the trope’s appeal to the rewards of watching a character curb damaging tendencies to become the man he was all along. “The scrooge is a particularly durable type, because his struggle is with his own self, and because his transformation has the feeling of a revelation even as it’s also hard won,” she writes.

But sometimes revelation and manipulation can go hand-in-hand. Witnessing Melvin declare his love for Caroll (Helen Hunt) the waitress he once terrorised, Walt take on the violent gang that threaten the neigbours he’s shown venom mixed with grudging acceptance, and a post-stroke Vin surrender to the affection of those around him is rewarding because it makes a self-destructive history feel worthwhile. The lovable grouch reflects a culture in which men are rewarded for shaking off dysfunctional behaviour rather than being kind and empathetic from the start. It’s nice to know that the number of times you cross the line is proportional to the extent to which you’re loved, accepted and celebrated.

In August 2013, author Claire Messud ran into trouble when she wrote a female version of the lovable grouch. “How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that,” spits Nora Eldridge, the 42-year-old protagonist of The Women Upstairs, a novel concerned with the way one women’s simmering fury spills over every part of her life. When asked by a reporter from Publisher’s Weekly if she’d ever want to be friends with a character with such a grim outlook, she retorted with “The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?”‘.

Women who fall apart at the seams in a way that affects everyone around them are still more likely to be seen as hysterical shrews than likable oddballs with hearts of gold. But in a film starring a cantankerous grandmother who hurls insults at the neighbours in between booze-fuelled naps? That would be truly pleasurable to watch.

So what if Mindy dates mostly white guys on her show?

First published in Daily Life, January 2014 

We’ve all been faced with the kind of question that’s designed not to find out what we really want but to tell us what we already know. For Mindy Kaling, the writer, creator and star of The Mindy Project, a sweet if occasionally patchy sitcom based on her alter-ego Mindy Lahiri, an Indian-American obstetrician trying to square a lifelong addiction to Meg Ryan movies with a real-world litany of romantic disappointment, this question – posed by a red-carpet reporter at the Oscars last March – confirmed that the payoffs of being a non-white female showrunner with your own network comedy don’t exempt you from well-meaning queries about your racial preferences. “Who’s my type? Good-looking,” Kaling shot back, channeling the comic timing that landed her in The Office’s writer’s room at age 24. The reporter had the same response as critics who wonder why the winsome Dr Lahiri spends three-and-a-half seasons bedding run-of-the-mill white guys: “So, any colour?”

E. Alex Jung is one of these critics. In “Mindy Kaling is Not Your Pioneer,” an Al Jazeera America essay published earlier this week, Jung argues that Kaling, who once watched Bollywood actresses audition for a role she’d written but wasn’t deemed attractive enough to star in, depicts a short-sighted view of relationships that negates The Mindy Project’srevolutionary potential. “It is no accident that Dr. Mindy Lahiri, the character Kaling plays on the show, dates white, upper-middle-class men — Wall Street bankers, NYU Latin professors, lawyers and Web designers. This recurrence is not a question of fate running into you but the perpetuation of the great lie of romance, which suggests that love and marriage are not somehow informed by class, race and gender conventions,” he writes.

To me, however, Kaling does actively constructs a world that toys with class, race and gender conventions.  Dr Lahiri might make cringe-worthy jokes about her figure and hook up with an obnoxious skateboarder (Timothy Olyphant) when she wants to prove that she isn’t picky about who she dates but she’s also a lovable narcissist who’s an advocate ofKeeping Up With the Kardashians and the thrills of casual sex.

In “A Mindy Project Roundtable”, an April 2014 feature for Buzzfeed, writer Ayesha Siddiqi makes a compelling case for why the show’s wins don’t counteract the ways it fails. Siddiqi believes that The Mindy Project buys into the “racial economics of desirability” and that the show’s interest in unremarkable white men and quirky rom-com meet-cutes “feel like engaging in a fantasy that shouldn’t have appeared fantastic in the first place.” She also argues that The Mindy Project’s curiously apolitical landscape matches the lack of solidarity Kaling shows with women of colour in real life. “Kaling  always bristles at people responding to her as a woman of colour instead of a just a [white] woman. She acts as if race is something that doesn’t exist in whiteness and can therefore be diluted through it,” she says.

But solidarity and vision aren’t always mutually exclusive. From Seinfeld’s proclivity for pretty Manhattan brunettes to Woody Allen’s disturbing fixation with Hollywood starlets, popular culture is ruled by show-runners who aren’t forced to defend the world they create or the implications of their fantasies, no matter how limited. Kaling says that she doesn’t “see herself as an outsider despite looking like one to a lot of people” and that  sherefuses “to view herself in such terms,” in an October 2014 with NPR. The fact that The Mindy Project is fixated on whiteness can feel disappointing in a world in which minorities struggle to establish their personhood. But using this to discredit the achievements of its creator is another problem altogether.

Neighbourhood: Newtown

First published in Open Skies magazine, January 2015 

It only takes a moment for a place’s contradictions make perfect sense. In Sydney’s Newtown, this is on weekend mornings when the light bounces between the punks sipping espresso outside faded terrace houses, the long-haired stallholders brushing dust off well-loved vinyl and a mural that superimposes a Martin Luther King quote against the Aboriginal Australian flag. Newtown’s bohemian swagger can feel like a Martian houseguest in a city obsessed with Harbour vistas and sky-high real estate but here the words “I have a dream” aren’t a historical catchcry – they’re a worldview that’s lived on a daily basis.

Newtown has always been a place for dreamers. In the last century, low rents and a proximity to Sydney University have lured artists, migrants and activists who’ve shaped the shoebox cafes, moody drinkeries and offbeat bookshops that line its main thoroughfare, King Street. And despite signs of gentrification, the area is still known for counterculture, community and open-minded clientele. The fact that nearby Enmore Road has fast become a canvas for creative and culinary experiments is proof that the neighbourhood’s most interesting chapter is the one that’s currently being written.

Gould’s Book Arcade

Stepping inside this labyrinthine bookstore, which was established in 1988 by the late Bob Gould – a Sydney intellectual famous for anti-censorship protests in the sixties – feels like entering a universe that’s blissfully free of Amazon’s clutches. At this split-level space, floor-to-ceiling shelves heave with everything from leatherbound first editions and volumes on Australian politics to vintage issues of Vanity Fair and pulp novels featuring original 1930s dust jackets, evidence of its founder’s famously voracious reading habits. Although the store’s cryptic organisational system can make navigating its one million titles feel impossible, it’s best to give in to its shambolic charm. The world might be hooked on product ratings and online recommendations but Gould’s recreates the classic bookstore pleasure of getting lost in the printed word.

32 King St
Tel: +612 9519 8947
www.gouldsbooks.com.au

Osteria Di Russo and Russo

You won’t find overcooked spaghetti at this low-lit osteria, which – despite blending gauze curtains, flickering candles and framed pictures in the manner of a Fellini film – turns every Italian dining trope on its head. Co-owned by Pino and Marc Russo, a father-and-son team intent on combining the ambience of a 1970s Italian eatery with progressive dishes that reference classic flavours, it’s the kind of place that proves that tradition and imagination go hand-in-hand. Skip the a la carte menu for the well-priced six-course offer, where dishes like squid ink risotto crowned with prawns and mussel butter and charred octopus with sheep’s feta and heirloom tomatoes have put chef Jason Saxby, whose CV includes Michelin-starred Sydney eatery Quay, on Australia’s culinary map.

158 Enmore Rd
Tel: +612 8068 5202
www.russoandrusso.net.au

Earl’s Juke Joint

Named for Earl Palmer, a legendary New Orleans session drummer who played with Fats Domino and Tom Waits, Earl’s Juke Joint is owner Pasan Wijesena’s love letter to his neighbourhood as well as an homage to musical greats. Housed in a former Newtown butcher shop, the bar – ranked among Sydney’s best by Gourmet Traveller – features Art Deco lampshades, mahogany panelling and black-and-white images of jazz icons, a backdrop tailor-made for savouring cocktails spun from ingredients like Campari and fresh grapefruit juice. Its interior might be textbook-perfect but the soundtrack is less interested in authenticity than it is capturing the freewheeling local vibe. If you slide into a wooden booth any night of the week, you’re bound to hear anything from Johnny Cash to nineties hip-hop.

407 King St
www.facebook.com/pages/Earls-Juke-Joint/1388771614674590

Black Star Pastry

Christopher Thé believes that pastry is an art form, in the most inclusive way possible. When the former fine dining chef opened Black Star Pastry, a pint-sized shopfront consisting of nothing more than a glass counter and makeshift pavement seating in 2008, he couldn’t have predicted that locals would gladly spend Saturday mornings lining up for his strawberry and  watermelon cake, a feather-light blend of watermelon, rose petals and Iranian pistachios or lamb shank and red wine pie, where meat is slow-cooked overnight and encased in a buttery crust. Thé may have added a second outpost in nearby Rosebery with plans to add expanded seating to his Newtown site to house fans interested in enjoying his creations alongside a cup of locally roasted Little Marionette coffee but Black Star’s cult following – and commitment to honest produce and sustainable values – shows no sign of losing its edge.

277 Australia St
Tel: +612  9557 8656
blackstarpastry.com.au

The Enmore Theatre

Featuring sweeping staircases, gold chandeliers and a lavish, red-velvet auditorium, the Enmore Theatre would feel like an Art Deco history lesson – if it wasn’t also a living testament to Newtown’s music scene. Built in 1912, the heritage-listed theatre is the oldest continuously operating music hall in the state and has played host to everyone from The Rolling Stones, The White Stripes and Kraftwerk to homegrown bands like The Temper Trap, Chet Faker and Something for Kate. But the Enmore, which is one of the city’s two surviving Art Deco theatres and narrowly escaped demolition in the 1980s, isn’t focused on music alone. The 1-600 capacity venue is also a backdrop for major performing arts events such as the much-loved Sydney Comedy Festival.

118-132 Enmore Road
Tel: +612 9519 9231
www.enmoretheatre.com.au

The Stinking Bishops

It’s no accident that The Stinking Bishops, a white-tiled space punctuated with dangling light globes, oversized cheese wheels and communal tables that evoke a midcentury schoolyard, feels like it’s been lifted from a European backstreet. The cheesemonger-come-wine shop started life when founders Jamie Nimmo and Kieran Day, whose backgrounds span film effects, music and hospitality, started yearning for the providores that dot neighbourhoods in London and Paris, the type of place you could convene with a friend over a glass of red or stock up on charcuterie and triple-cream brie. Nimmo says that the duo work closely with local importers to offer Australian and foreign cheeses like Holy Goat, a creamy goat’s curd covered in ash and Trebbione, a rich Tuscan pecorino that comes wrapped in hay. And judging from the stream of loyalists sipping Sangiovese over cheese boards on weeknights, the pair are doing something right.

5/63-71 Enmore Rd, Newtown
Tel: +614 2 9007 7754
www.thestinkingbishops.com

Defiance Gallery

The rollcall of artists that have shown at this long-running Newtown gallery reads like a who’s who of of Australian sculpture. In the last two decades, the elegant space, which was established by prominent local sculptor Campbell Robertson-Swann and co-run by manager Lauren Harvey, has served as a backdrop for steel structures by Michael Buzzacott, still lives wrought in copper from Paul Hopmeier and pieces by Anita Larkin which weave together elements such as electrical wire, found objects and shipping crates. Robertson-Swann and Harvey, who house a sprawling collection of art and artefacts an in an apartment above the gallery, take a curatorial approach that’s more interested in artist’s long-term trajectories than they are in unearthing the next big thing. But the space still lays claim to a crowded calendar where solo shows, group exhibitions and one-off projects are scheduled every three and a half weeks.

47 Enmore Road
Tel: +612 9557 8483
www.defiancegallery.com

Brewtown Newtown

Whether you consider Brewtown a temple to third wave coffee, a moody second office or a high-wattage all-day eatery, there’s no doubt that Newtown’s favourite industrial chic hangout, founded by Sydney coffee veterans Charles Cameron and Simon Triggs in 2013, is also its most multitasking. Linger over Belgian waffles with orange ricotta and caramelised figs or sit at the bar and sample a pour-over – a type of filter coffee made from beans expertly roasted on-site. Alternatively, just make a beeline for the well-edited upstairs retail space for striped T-shirts, a flaky cronut assortment and a brand-new in-house record shop.

6-8 O’Connell St
Tel: +612 9519 2920
www.brewtownnewtown.com

Five female artists you should invest in now

First published in Daily Life, November 2014. 

Australian art history has an alarming tendency to conflate notoriety and originality. The shiny allure that inspires cult biographies and mass hysteria among collectors, like in the case of Adam Cullen or Brett Whitely, isn’t just down to talent – it’s also about the ways in which the figure of the self-destructive artist squares up with a white, male tradition.

It’s a good thing that tradition has never been the best recipe for potential greatness. With practices that span everything from painting, sculpture and portraiture to installation, collage and assemblage, these five young female artists are expanding the possibilities of their respective mediums and rewriting dated art-world myths in the process.

Emily Hunt

Gnarled faces. Dismembered limbs. Creepy grins. If Emily Hunt’s intricate sculptures, wrought in glazed porcelain and stoneware, feel like dispatches from the kiln of a deranged potter, it’s because she believes that dread isn’t the stuff of nightmare but the natural consequence of our cultural moment. For the Sydney-based artist, who’s completed several residencies in Berlin and whose pieces appear as part of the MCA’s Primavera exhibition this year, carvings and artworks from the Middle Ages inform her intriguing take on modern-day vice and darkness. “I look back to the historical period between 1490 and 1550 A.D. because during this time grotesque caricature and woodcuts were totally gnarly and rude,” explains Hunt, who’s also inspired by sci-fi, drinking, long conversations and hard work. “Humans are pathetic and my work is motivated by the desire to cultivate a mode of catharsis by forcing viewers to grapple with the vulgar, the profane and the intemperate.”

Hiromi Tango

Hiromi Tango – quite literally – weaves art out of emotion. Five years ago, Tango, who relocated from regional Japan to Australia at 21, suffered a series of blows: a bout of post-natal depression sparked by the birth of her daughter Kimiyo, carpel tunnel syndrome caused by the demands of her practice and a mental state that saw friendships fall by the wayside. Dust Storm (2014), an installation that blends diary entries, tangled fabric forms and neon with photographs taken during Queensland’s 2009 dust storm, represents Tango’s attempt to work through this trauma and her belief that art can help you come to terms with the past. But Tango’s colourful pieces, which resemble flotsam washed up from an imaginary ocean, aren’t just avenues for her own healing – they’re also designed to help viewers make peace with long-buried pain. “When I make sculptures, I aim to engage all the senses and ask for fabric donations, diaries and letters that contain intense memories,” says Tango, who is also involved in a community arts project that sees her help people with disability and mental illness in Western Australia. “I am interested in the connections between the arts, science and mental health – and the process and power of listening.”

hiromitango.com

Textaqueen

Arlene Textaqueen has lofty ambitions for the humble texta. Fifteen years ago, the Perth-born artist used the felt-tip marker – a relic from primary-school drawing frenzies – to create playful alternatives to the salon nudes that hang in fabled art institutions.  “I fell into drawing nude portraits serendipitously when asked to come up with content for a pay-per-view illustrated nude website,” says Textaqueen, whose work is held at the National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank and private collections across the UK and USA. “It prompted me to start on a twelve year series of ‘Textanudes’ where I asked women to pose naked in their bedrooms in props and poses of their choosing. When Textaqueen isn’t putting a pin in the male gaze, she’s using portraits to take on identity and race – her latest solo show Coconut Legacy used tigers, coconuts and Allen’s chocolate chico babies to map the conflict between white supremacy and her Goan-Indian heritage.

textaqueen.com

Sarah Contos

There’s something satisfying about seeing touchstones of Australian masculinity receive a feminine makeover. For Never-Never Land, a recent group show at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley Gallery, artist Sarah Contos transformed images of Holden muscle cars, ripped from old issues of Australasian Post magazine, by printing them on sparkly, quilted fabric – the latest phase in a series of work that has seen her recast moulds of Shakespeare and Beethoven with fluro paint and embroider sequined masks on old Kamahl and Olivia Newton-John album covers. Contos, who blurs the line between painting, sculpture, textile and collage, says that taking part in this year’s Future Primitive exhibition at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art has been her defining moment so far. “I like to make installations that explore identity, myth and memory and use elements from popular culture to mix the familiar and uncanny,” she explains. “Being confident about what you are making is incredibly important as an artist and that experience made me trust my instincts and vision.”

www.sarahcontos.com.au/portfolio.html

Minna Gilligan

If your love affair with psychedelia is limited to your old hypercolour T-shirt fetish you might want to get acquainted with Minna Gilligan. The young Melbourne artist’s technicolour dreamscapes – created via found fabric, acrylic paint and collage – combine the euphoria and promise of the ‘seventies art movement with a Tumblr-era sense of loss and longing. Gilligan, who is a staff illustrator for Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie magazine and created an otherworldly installation in a hotel suite for Melbourne’s Spring 1883 Art Fair, says that her obsession with collecting often shapes her work. “I religiously scour op shops for fabrics, objects and ephemera and my book collection, where I source my collage images, is enormous,” says Gilligan, whose own book Time After Time will be released by Hardie Grant in September next year. “I also gain much inspiration from my collection of found photographs.”

www.minnagilligan.com

Colourbursts by Sydney Ball

First published in Broadsheet, November 2014 

Infinex III, a new exhibition by iconic Australian painter Sydney Ball, is the work of a colourist at the top of his game.

Jelena Telecki

First published in Vault magazine, Issue #8 November 2014 

Jelena Telecki knows that formative influences only reveal themselves in retrospect. When the Sydney-based artist was growing up in Communist-era Yugoslavia in the eighties, she couldn’t have predicted that Gustav, a Hungarian cartoon whose grey-clad protagonist skitters between optimism and fatalism, would become an unlikely mascot for her own body of work.

“There’s one episode where Gustav is trying to fix things by painting over them in black,” laughs Telecki, who’s working on a series of pieces inspired by the character for an upcoming show at the Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN). “Gustav is a loser, he’s anxious, he’s a pessimist, he’s a nihilist – he will sit next to a woman on the bench and imagine having a child with her, who grows up to be a criminal. A few of my friends from Belgrade were recently discussing him and we were like ‘wow, that’s so dark!’ But it was normal to me. I recognise myself in Gustav. It’s quite funny.”

We’re sitting in a sun-splashed cafe in Sydney’s inner west on the kind of spring morning that makes the city feel wildly incompatible with darkness. A couple of days earlier, I received an email from Telecki, apologetically declining my request to meet at her Leichhardt studio, a tiny space whose chaos she links to a painting routine that’s “completely random.” She sums up her process with the description “scraping, erasing, scraping, erasing,”  but you get the feeling that there’s a rift between her levels of self-deprecation and the force of a practice that sees technical precision swiftly unmasked by buried heads, blurred features and facelessness.

“Although I admire artists who can do it, I don’t like polished, complete paintings,” she says, placing her motorcycle helmet aside to take a sip of the morning’s second coffee. “I change my mind so many times and often end up with something that isn’t what I started. I’m very open-ended. At uni, people would often ask me if my paintings were finished but there are a lot of ways to make a painting! To me, it feels finished. That’s the thing in art – you want to feel convinced as an artist. What I search for in painting is something different.”

This search started early. Born in Split, which was then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Telecki was enamoured with her mother’s art history book as a child. She started making work as an eleven-year-old in the lead-up to the Yugoslav Wars, an era that saw the reign of Communist dictator Josip Tito give way to a bloody civil conflict marked by war crimes and genocide.

“My mum had this amazing book that I would just look through for hours,” she recalls. “I thought it was so interesting that art was always a reaction to what had come before and when I was eleven, I became quite serious about it, which was a bit strange. I always wanted to be an artist but wanted to be a scientist as well and because of the things that happened to us as a family when we escaped from the war, I couldn’t focus academically and started drawing all the time. I felt like history could help me understand art. By the time we moved to Belgrade when I was 13, I felt like I’d become an adult.”

Telecki, who trained at the National Art School and Sydney College of Art – an institution she says afforded the freedom to chase her artistic missives – is quick to clarify that her preoccupation with personal history is an attempt to illuminate the universal. She shudders at the idea that her practice could be misread as an avenue for addressing trauma and maintains that her involvement in projects such as Terminal 00’s 2009 survey of Balkan contemporary artists in London – in which a thickly rendered portrait of a nurse  smoking personifies the fugue-state occupied by many of her subjects – was motivated less by a sense of imaginary kinship than it was by a genuine curiosity.

“The curator Piera Ravnikar invited artists from the Balkans to make work around ‘Obsession,” say Telecki, who cites influences that range from Goya and nineteenth century Utopian painter Wenzel Hablik to figurative artists Victor Man, Luc Tuymans and Peter Doig. “There were different mediums in the show and it was interesting to see the parallels but also to see how you make work when you live there or when you don’t. People like to pigeonhole you if you find that history interesting but I think that whatever art you make, whether it’s a painting, video or installation, who you are will always come through. I never wanted my art to be a way of processing, I want to experience it in a way that’s universal. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. It’s too narrow.”

Narrow isn’t a word you’d associate with Telecki. Although her oil paintings belong to a medium that’s an unfortunate casualty of a love affair with conceptualism, works such as a portrait of Tito petting a leopard obscured by a mountain of faeces, part of her absurdist takedown of state art at 2014 ACCA survey NEW and Papa (2012), which was created for 2013 solo show Roland’s Mother and pairs a white figure with his head erased with the kind of smiling sailor that haunts old war photos, feel plucked from some long-buried collective memory. If the paintings are nightmarish, it’s because you’ve dreamt them before.

“We felt like what happened in our country couldn’t happen in the middle of Europe but then realised that it could, that people are the same everywhere,” she explains. “There were many of us that had their whole lives and families destroyed and even though I’ve tried before, I can’t use colour. It just doesn’t feel natural to me.”

Her palette may be sombre but, unlike Gustav, she isn’t a nihilist. Her ‘Slippery People’ series, which show figures dangling between intent and disaster inverts an age-old physics premise: that what goes down must come back up. “I’m drawn to that falling. But it’s almost like I want to press pause before I hit the ground,” she says.

Telecki is less interested in representation than she is in evocation. Although her prolific output – 13 solo shows and 16 group exhibitions over a seven year period – is remarkable for someone who balks at the idea of ambition – she says when she feels like she’s illustrating something, it’s a cue to destroy it.

“I think the reason why I blur the faces is that sometimes I’ll do a really good portrait that’s resolved and technically good but that’s not the point,” she says with a wry smile. “Even when I’m painting people, it’s not about a certain person, it’s about a story. I don’t see painting as illustration, I don’t like to describe anything. It’s a hard medium, but it really gives me the opportunity to look for something through it. And I never know what I will see at the end.”

4 Underlying lessons from Lena Dunham’s ‘Not That Kind of Girl’

First published in The Vine October 2014 

It’s difficult to describe the point at which a personal essay devolves into the sort of platitude you might find on a fridge magnet, or worse, a self-help book. For every Joan Didion, whose elegant one-liners put a pin in the delusion that women’s writing can’t impart universal value (while also serving as an instant formula for Tumblr cred), there’s an aspiring author turning post-breakup diary entries into a relationship blog or passing off a Gchat transcript as high art.

Lena Dunham’s status as postergirl for millennial ambition has sparked a thousand thinkpieces, but they rarely address how her work makes a conscious effort to ignore this distinction. Girls’ Brooklyn milieu offers some of the best realism seen outside a Dickens novel, but its crash and burn scenarios sometimes feel like a warning about how not to navigate one’s twenties; while Dunham’s new personal essay collection, Not That Kind of Girl, packages disarming first-person writing in a jacket that could be mistaken for the post-divorce manual sitting on your great-aunt’s nightstand.

Like most of Dunham’s choices, this feels deliberate. Divided into chapters such as ‘Love & Sex’, ‘Work’ and ‘The Big Picture’, Not That Kind of Girl–which comes with back-cover endorsements from the likes of David Sedaris and Miranda July–exposes Dunham’s twofold agenda: a winking recognition of the misogyny that aims the self-help tradition squarely at the sisterhood, and a no-holds-barred desire to tell her stories in a world where it’s no less urgent that women to connect with other women’s experiences. Here are four things we can learn from Not That Kind of Girl.

Don’t discount the years before you get famous

Little Leather Gloves, an essay that explores Dunham’s time selling baby accessories to hip-hop moguls at at a high-end children’s store, is proof that there’s nothing as liberating as the years before the media endlessly dissects your million-dollar book deal and you land your own show on HBO. The piece is an ode to her friendship with co-workers Joana and Isabel as well as weekends spent “tripping up the West Side Highway in red dresses, sloshing beer, ready to fuck and fight and fall asleep on each other,” a restlessness that inspired Dunham to make her first webseries Delusional Downtown Divas.

—

Your sibling holds clues to who you’ve grown up to be

Sometimes Dunham’s self-deprecation reads like an unwillingness to own her talent. A chapter that outlines a list of unlikely things she’s said flirtatiously (“Sorry if my breath is really metallic. It’s my medication”) feels she’s confirming readers’ suspicions that she shares Hannah Horvath’s neuroses rather than an attempt to glean poetry from a verbal hangover.

When Dunham writes about her sister Grace, a “beautiful, unibrowed mystery just out of our family’s grasp,” Dunham proves that when it comes to emotional impact, tenderness always outpaces schtick.  An account of growing up “compulsively free of secrets” while Grace “simply existed full of wisdom and wonder,” the way in which her sister’s coming out as gay helped her acknowledge her own limits, and jealousy that her sibling “creates for her own pleasure rather than to make herself known” evokes the envy and love that exists in most families–and shows that this same contradiction can help you grow.

—

Never trust a Republican

In ‘Barry’, Dunham describes being high on Xanax and stumbling into a murky hookup with a moustachioed Republican, kicking him out when she spots the discarded condom in a tree. The essay has been met with cursory outrage from conservative critics – the National Review’s Kevin Williamson called it “gutless and passive aggressive” – but Dunham’s take on her emotional fallout is a gift to anyone who’s suffered the consequences of a blurry sexual encounter and a win for the debate on affirmative consent.

—

Steer clear of the sunshine stealers

When Dunham describes the “sunshine stealers” – the sleazy directors who dismissed her during her first year in Hollywood, she unwittingly comes up with a foolproof defence against her haters as well as a mission statement for any woman intent on emulating her path. Dunham vows to steer clear of men who believe that “girls are there to be your props and that anyone else’s artistry is a mere distraction from the Lord’s Grand Plan to promote your agenda” and writes, “I will never be vengeful. I will never be threatened by the old or by the new. I’ll open wide like a daisy every morning. I will make my work.”

—

Houzz proud

First published in the December issue of Renegade Collective magazine 

There are three things that Adi Tatarko believes in. The co-founder of Houzz, the explosive online platform credited with disrupting the US$300 billion home remodelling industry, knows that reconciling the needs of a six-month old baby and two young children with those of an online business that commands a 20 million-strong monthly user base means giving up dinner parties and hiring someone to do the cooking. Adi’s certain that swapping group meetings for one-on-ones is the most productive way to steer a fast-growing global team based in California, London, Berlin and Sydney, where she’s about to launch an Australian office. And she believes that emotion, a quality that rarely figures in the tech industry lexicon, is at least as important as data and analytics when it comes to growing a company intent on streamlining the painful home renovation process and capturing users’ hearts.

“The home renovation process is highly emotional,” she tells me, in an accent that’s an even split between Palo Alto, New York and Tel Aviv. “It’s the left side of your brain that connects you to where you live. It tells you that this is where I get up in the morning, this is how I feel about myself and this is how I want other people who visit my house to think about me. All these things are so emotional and important that they demand working with the right professionals. This won’t come from just seeing an ad in a random directory. It will come from being part of an amazing community and having the transparency and technology to access thousands of professionals around you.”

It’s taken firsthand experience to glean this wisdom. In 2009, Adi and her husband Alon Cohen, set out to remodel their Palo Alto ranch to better accommodate their growing family only to find their vision threatened by countless obstacles.

“Alon and I had big dreams – it was our first real home together and we thought that it would be so wonderful to renovate it and make it ours but the whole process was really broken,” says Adi, who had just thrown in a gruelling sixteen-hours-a-day job in high technology to work in a boutique investment firm. “We’re not designers or architects so finding the right inspiration and materials, the people who would help us build what we wanted and educating ourselves about how we would translate the home in our minds into a reality was very difficult. You invite strangers to renovate your home and spend so much money and energy just to overpay and end up with something you didn’t want from the beginning. We felt like the expectations weren’t right and the educational pieces weren’t there and that this frustration was the common ground.”

For most couples, a family holiday might be enough to vent this frustration but in the case of Adi, whose rapid-fire dialogue hints at razor-sharp intelligence and Cohen, who helped develop eBay’s revolutionary API, you get the feeling that inaction was never an option. The duo enlisted Bay Area designers and architects and rallied together a group of 20 homeowners – mostly parents from their children’s school – to build an online platform that would match users with the right experts.

“It was our pet project and we were sweating – working on weekends, whenever we had the time while raising our kids,” she recalls. “From the early days, we knew that it was never about making money or building a big business but about using the the best technology to innovate and create a product that people would love to use.”

Adi didn’t bank on how quickly people would want to use it. Soon, her inbox was flooded with emails from architects, designers, lighting consultants and landscapers, whose firsthand experience with the downsides of the remodelling industry made them readymade members of the Houzz community. In 2010, the company attracted a $US 2 million investment from venture capitalist Oren Zeev, the first in a series of funding rounds that included an $US11.6 million injection from Sequoia Capital and a recent US$150 million raise that put its market valuation at $US2.3 billion.

This trajectory might read like the stuff of startup fantasies, but it wasn’t something Adi had bargained on from the outset. Ironically, her insistence on bootstrapping the business by incorporating feedback from the community and operating on a shoestring was precisely what made Houzz  attractive to investors.

“When we started out, we had no resources but this was actually okay because it taught us to focus on  the product,” she explains. “We worked very closely with our community to get  feedback on what’s working and what wasn’t. For a long time we felt like it was our thing and that we wanted to do it all by ourselves but at some point somebody convinced us that it was okay to accept investment. The fact that we could take the money and bring more people on board to help us grow it was meaningful. But I think that because we kept things really lean and tailored the product to the industry, we we were able to grow from 20 people to 20 million people. Both of us could do every single thing in the company and this really helped us along the way.”

In 2012, CNN famously named Houzz the Wikipedia of interior design but speaking about the platform purely in terms of the catch-all online encyclopaedia   risks overlooks its specificity. Although the site lists 400,000 professionals based everywhere from Cape Town to Seattle and plays host to over 4 million home design photos uploaded by users, it also features articles on how to transform a lacklustre residence into a Parisian apartment, tips on making the most of a small wardrobe and ideabooks that explore the art of decorating with vintage industrial. Houzz’s appeal stems from an ability to combine the practical nature of a directory with the glossy promise of a design magazine.

“You can click on a picture you like,  discover the materials you want to use, browse a person’s portfolio and collaborate with them,” says Adi, who’s employed a team of PHD researchers to fine-tune the platform’s impressive personalisation. “It’s been amazing to help experts find home owners and vice versa and we have many professionals from all over the world who are flying overseas and providing their services. Now, that we’re opening international offices and have people on the ground working with the community, it’s so exciting to see the data that’s coming from different parts of the world.”

Adi, who reveals that Houzz had over 10,000 Australian service providers and 700,000 users before launch, says that the possibilities that come from marrying the local with the global represents the platform’s thrilling next phase.

“We’ve been getting these emails from around the world about how much Houzz has changed the way businesses work with clients and about how everyone’s so happy and educated,” she says with a laugh. “People overseas would love to see Australian houses decorated for Christmas in summer and although users want to see products in the local currency, they can access millions of images from different countries at the same time. This transparency when it comes to service providers, people and ideas is an amazing thing that we’re not going to block.”

The heightened senses of Pipilotti Rist

First published in Museum magazine September 2014

Pipilotti Rist is an advocate for the power of selective memory. When I ask the Swiss-born artist, who creates hallucinatory wonderlands that leave a permanent mark on your consciousness, about her failed projects she admits – fittingly, for a video art wunderkind – to simply editing them out.

“Ja! I absolutely have failed projects but we human beings tend to forget them don’t we?” she says, with a conspiratorial wink. “I guess it’s just a survival tactic. Recently, I told a friend of mine that I’d never met a boy who didn’t want me, but clearly that’s not true!”

If it seems incongruous to quiz Rist – whose 25-year career spans starring roles in the Venice, Sao Paulo and Sydney Biennales and solo shows everywhere from New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Hayward Gallery to the Centre Pompidou in Paris – on failure, it’s because it’s a last hope at keeping authorial distance. Prone to sweeping hand gestures and sudden onomatopoeia, Rist possesses the same liquid energy as her lush installations, an exuberance – that if you’re not careful – just may swallow you whole.

At first, Rist’s interest in energy was anything but abstract. “I started studying physics and transferred to graphic design as a joke because I always wanted to explain the world in pattern and movement,” she recalls. “When we dance, when we move, there’s a connection between all our molecules. Movement can highlight a common truth.”

But movement does more than highlight a common truth – it can also see real and imaginary boundaries bleed seamlessly together and grant landscapes and objects all the possibilities of a second life. In Ever is Over All (1997), a pair of overlapping slow-motion projections pits a field of dancing orange flowers against a blue-clad woman skipping down a street – but the blooms are recast as a weapon when she starts smashing car windows, an interplay of grace and violence that nods to the power of the benign. Pour Your Body Out (2008), a 25-foot high video work screened on the walls of MoMA’s Marron Atrium, sees wobbling apples and undulating tulips rule an amniotic universe of sound and colour, where viewers are invited to swap the limits of their bodies for an untold world of sensual pleasure. And I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, Rist’s 2011 survey at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, features pillowy lips that float cloud-like over a Venice cityscape steeped in saturated pink, hinting at the ways in which our external reality is transformed by the richness of our interior world.

“Our outsides may be rigid but inside we’re all blood,” she laughs, slurping an imaginary fluid to illustrate her point. “We tend to live in cities that are the opposite of what our bodies are. I would like to melt the inner and outer together again.”

Born Elisabeth Charlotte, Rist – who owes her moniker to Astrid Lindgren’s flame-haired heroine Pippi Longstocking – can can claim an artistic trajectory that mirrors the evolution of video art. In the mid-eighties, she started cobbling together Super-8 movies before making single-channel videos for her punk-pop band Les Reines Procaines, inspired by everything from seventies performance artists Joan Jonas and Yoko Ono to Michel Gondry and the scuzzy, alternative programming on MTV’s 120 minutes. Made when she was still a student at the School of Design in Basel, her first video work, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much, shows a bare-breasted Rist singing a shrill, sped-up version of the Beatles’ classic Happiness is a Warm Gun, the blurry footage doubling as a playful takedown of the male gaze.

“I hope to sharpen and expand the senses and my work is feminist in the sense that I think that every human being should be able to expand,” says Rist, who believes that artists provide a service and owe it to their audiences to spread beyond insular creative capitals such as London, Paris and New York. Her political agenda is equally egalitarian: “When I meet nice people, I don’t have to be a feminist, but if I encounter an asshole, of course I become one.”

Although Rist might owe her practice to a legacy of feminist performance artists, her version of revolution hinges on the universalising of the feminine perspective, the ability to inspire viewers to shed bodily trappings and swim in an amorphous world. “It wasn’t so long that we were forced to consider our life possibilities according to gender,” she says. “We are divided by our skin all the time – even when we have sex. Our imagination is the only place we can really meet.”

Rist makes it easy to believe that galleries are less cultural institutions than they are portals to our deepest desires. On the ground floor of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a cool, dark space sees solo viewers, curious toddlers and couples sprawled on people-shaped cushions in various phases of hypnosis while close-ups of skin, blades of grass and foaming waves glide across the screen. In one sequence, a tongue morphs into a rolling mountain and a penis drifts listlessly in the ocean current to the rhythm of Chris Isaac’s Wicked Games.

“Every work is different. Sometimes I have a clear idea and I’m just hunting down the images and sometime I collect images I use only ten years later,” explains Rist, who also says that Mercy Garden Retour Skin, the installation she created for the 19th Biennale of Sydney, is an exploration of the tenderness of being male.  “I have a big bank of material but the most time-consuming thing is actually taking the garbage away.”

In 2010, The New Yorker’s art critic Peter Schjeldahl crowned Rist the evangelist of happiness but as much as her work can spark euphoria, it’s also an education in the magic of darkness, light and shade. “I’m always seeing the sinister in the bright as well as the opposite but I also believe that beauty is of evolutionary importance,” she says. “If we didn’t have it, we’d go crazy.”

But for now Rist – fresh from a one-year sabbatical that saw her swap her studio on Zurich for the South of England – is eager to spend a few months focusing on the kinds of boundaries she plans on erasing next.

“I finally have time to develop new work but I have too many wishes,” she says, eyes twinkling. “The question is what sort of project will allow me to bring something necessary.”

Akin to greatness

First published in Broadsheet, Spring print issue, September 2014 

You may not know it, but if you’ve got even a passing interest in fashion in this country, you’ve experienced Kelvin Ho’s work. From Dion Lee’s first store in the Strand Arcade, to A.P.C.’s Melbourne outpost and dozens of spaces between, Ho has shaped the way we interact with our favourite brands. For the cover of our spring print issue, we sit down with the fashion industry’s premier retail architect.

Kelvin Ho isn’t one to let a ruthless work schedule dampen his enthusiasm for it. The founder of Akin Creative, the Sydney design practice responsible for translating the visions of the country’s most renowned fashion brands into retail spaces, is recovering from a cold. It’s the curse of a devotion to his craft that can keep him up until 2am, but it’s done nothing to dissolve an energy that’s at once insistent and laid-back. Like many people who love their work, Ho is inspired by others with the same dedication. “I work with a blacksmith who’s just the most positive guy,” he tells us. “He only deals with this one metal and he’s devoted his life to it. These days, you get so used to people doing a bit of everything. I get so excited when I work with amazing people who are obsessed with one craft.”

Ho, who graduated from the University of Sydney in 2003, has spent the last decade perfecting his. In 2005, the architect collaborated with retail pioneer Belinda Seper to conceive the second outpost of The Corner Shop in the Strand Arcade. It’s a space where pendant lighting, unfinished-timber cabinets and gallery- style racks sum up the modern-day fashion legend while serving as a canvas for Chloe handbags and Kenzo bomber jackets. In November last year, Ho designed an installation that resembled a tree trunk that unfurls across Sass & Bide’s New York flagship, speaking to his client’s love affair with driftwood and the site’s legacy as a carpentry store. Then, earlier this year, he brought Dion Lee’s space-age fashion aesthetic to a bricks-and-mortar shop, using neon light boxes, mirrored fixtures and high-gloss floors for Lee’s first boutique in The Strand Arcade.

“I knew New York was a really important place for Sass & Bide, so I wanted to do something out of the box,” explains Ho, whose passion for unusual materials such as untreated and raw pine and wrought iron play a starring role in the 21 stores he’s designed for the label. “It was really about how we could take a space with a classic iron facade, and the detail of a Soho heritage building, and use an organic concept that makes people question whether it’s a sculpture or a retail space. I’ve always been interested in why people are drawn to certain brands. I think more than ever, designers want the physical format of their retail business to be defined as an extension of their brand. There’s an opportunity in every brief to really push an idea.”

Akin Creative’s client base includes A.P.C., Willow, Lover, Bassike, Incu andVanishing Elephant, but its headquarters – filled with grey surfaces, angular workspaces and a loft-like meeting area that could have been lifted from a Tokyo apartment – seems less inspired by the fashion world than by the no-frills discipline of industrial design. At any given time, Ho and his 10 staff – whose jokey exchanges belie the intensity and breadth of their output – may be liaising with metal suppliers, drafting floor plans for luxury tree houses in the Maldives or masterminding a Merivale fit-out.

Although the firm is better known for retail, its partnership with the hospitality giant spans venues such as Ms.G’s, Palmer & Co, Papi Chulo and the newly openedCoogee Pavilion. Ho, who sometimes works on residential projects, is reluctant to acknowledge his hand in conceiving the city’s most well-known interior spaces. Instead, he tells us he owes his career to opportunities spun out of early creative experiments.

“When I graduated there was a lot happening in the fashion industry in Australia. Brands such as Sass & Bide and Ksubi were just starting to take off,” Ho recalls. “It was the GFC and there was no work, but a lot of creative stuff was happening and a lot of versatility and resourcefulness. I was working full-time on big projects at a large firm, but I was tucked into that scene through friends and acquaintances, and I became part of the culture I was interested in.”

The scene Ho is referring to was instantly noticed during the 2001 Fashion Week when Ksubi – then an unknown denim label – sent 169 rats down the catwalk. Ho, who was friends with founders Dan Single and George Gorrow, took part in the show, which fixed the industry’s gaze firmly on Sydney, and marked the city as an incubator for rule-breaking fashion and art. Ho says his own lucky break came in the form of a recommendation by stylist friend Emily McGuire, who was working atBelinda Seper’s The Corner Shop. That connection led to Ho’s first retail-design project. Seper’s reputation as a tastemaker doubled as a seal of approval, attracting the client base that would pave the way for Akin Creative.

“Belinda wanted to work with someone young who didn’t necessarily have a retail background, but had good ideas and an eye. What I presented was super conceptual and unorthodox, which she really responds to,” says Ho. “You know how you have some figures in your career that aren’t necessarily connected to what you do, but nurture you from the beginning? She’s become like a mentor. A lot of brands thought; if he’s good enough to be working with Belinda, he’s good enough to be working for us.”

It’s easy to be cynical about brands whose marketing promises individuality, but who then share a single design talent to create their stores. Ho’s approach is not uniform. His work can go from moody and layered, to light- washed and expansive, depending on his client. But it’s tempting to put his trajectory down to a city that conflates professional currency with insider status.

Huw Bennett has a different theory. The Vanishing Elephant co-founder says that Akin Creative’s devotion to simplicity is a welcome relief in an industry prone to complication. “We didn’t work with Kelvin on our first shop and we regretted it,” says Bennett. “When we opened our second store in Bondi Junction, we knew what we needed in terms of fabrication, but didn’t know how to achieve the architectural and building aspects. Kelvin’s a great communicator. He understands how things work and can bring a vision to life.” Dion Lee shares Bennett’s sentiment. “Kelvin has an ability to elevate retail concepts and create an experience for customers,” he says. “Partnering with Akin has been great for my brand.”

Ho showed his purist leanings early. Growing up with an engineer father on Sydney’s North Shore, drawing and building were part of his earliest vocabulary, along with the belief that ideas didn’t matter unless, when they left your head, they had a place in real life. “We were always building stuff and I loved seeing how things fit together. I knew that you could be creative, but if you couldn’t build it, there was no point.” Despite this practicality, there’s a poetry that marks out Ho’s vision.

“Drawing has always been a massive part of how I communicated. As a kid I was always drawing houses and dinosaurs,” says Ho, who admits he’s yet to work on his defining project.

“When I was studying, I wrote a thesis that paralleled architecture with literature,” he says. “It compared the way an author writes a story and creates texture in a novel, to the way an architect works with materials and space. In a way, what I do is just like storytelling.”

akincreative.com

Daily Drill

First published in Museum magazine Issue 1 September 2014

In a hip-hop landscape packed with commercial appropriations of ghetto life, Chicago’s trigger-fingered drill scene – which emerged somewhere near 2010 and exploded into the mainstream shortly after – still strikes a deathly chord.

Drill rattled through my bones before it reached my ears, hijacking the well-tuned frequency of an ordinary Friday night with a rhythm that sounded like doomsday. The source of this rhythm was Chief Keef, an 18-year-old rapper from Chicago’s troubled South Side, whose ability to blend sunless synths, a scattershot flow and violent storytelling evoked a world that was both undeniably gripping and utterly leached of colour. Turns out that I was two years too late. By the time I came across ‘Love Sosa’, a YouTube video that’s a grainy play on that age-old hip-hop trifecta ⎯ blunts, guns and dollars ⎯ Keef had already worked with Kanye West, landed a deal with Interscope Records and fixed the music industry’s sights on Chicago’s explosive drill scene; all on his way to combusting.

Named after a prominent African American activist and located in Bronzeville, a South Side neighbourhood that feels a world away from the gleaming skyscrapers that line Midtown, the Robert Taylor Homes housing project was once the USA’s largest public housing initiative. The cluster of dirt-brown high-rises, which has seen up to 300 gang-related shootings in a single weekend and $45,000 in daily drug deals (according to the Chicago Housing Authority), is also where DGainz ⎯ the director and producer responsible for many of Keef’s videos, as well as rising drill stars like King Louie, Sasha Go Hard and Lil Durk ⎯ grew up.

“It wasn’t originally called drill, it was just hardcore hip-hop,” D Gainz tells me, speaking over the phone from Chicago. “I’ve been producing since I was about 15 and directing videos since I was 18. We had already been putting out the music for a while and we gave it a name after that.”

DGainz (born Duan Gaines) purchased his first video camera with a relief check collected when his basement flooded. His father, K-1, was a co-founder of juke music, an addictive strand of Chicago house. In the last five years, DGainz has directed more than 240 videos, attracted over 115 million views on YouTube and woven montages of crumbling neighbourhoods, unhinged party scenes and shots of street crews in action into the grimy visual language that put drill  ⎯  a term that’s slang for shooting someone  ⎯  on the map.

“What you see is real,” he explains. “A lot of drill artists are actually committing the crimes that they say they are and the majority of what they rap about is what they’re actually doing. That’s what makes it believable.”

But if you reduce drill to a social document, you also misunderstand its potential.  The form, which sees deadpan recollections of murders, violence and life on the streets filtered through Autotune and laced with synthesizers and 808 kick-drums, uses nihilism as its narrative platform – a departure from rap’s obsession with hyperbole or the earnest moralising of conscious hip-hop.

Lil Herb, an East Side rapper whose mastery of “spitting” ⎯  a regional rapping style that pairs complex double-time word patterns with thunderous beats  ⎯  has attracted praise from the likes of Common and Drake, believes that drill owes its power to its roots in lived experience; something far from the shiny appropriations that flicker across MTV videos.

“For me, my music is a true story, not some made up movie,” says Herb, who is linked with No Limit EBK, a gang that runs a patch of Chicago known as Terror Town. “A lot of people might rap about what they heard or what they saw on TV but I’m actually rappin’ about growin’ up and livin’ on the Eastside of Chicago. In my songs you get a transparent view of the city.  I’m not tryin’ to sugar coat nothing or make it sound pretty. They named the city Chiraq because that’s the only thing you can compare our hood to. People dyin’ every day and lookin’ over they shoulders like it’s a war zone.”

If Keef, who makes the kind of hedonistic party music that could soundtrack the apocalypse and is regularly arrested for weapons charges, represents the tension between authenticity and bankability that’s as old as hip-hop itself, then Herb, whose acclaimed recent mixtape Welcome to Fazoland ⎯ named for a dead friend ⎯ tempers bleak portraits of urban warfare with a rare technical artistry, demonstrates the form’s ability to spin hopeless circumstances into a vehicle for redemption and joy. Herb’s real-world tales of street violence give voice to metaphorical struggles too, proof that hip-hop can be a talisman for triumph over adversity, a legacy that found its apex in Biggie and Tupac.

Much of Herb’s history lies in the city of Chicago. His grandfather Victor Gaston was a member of 1960s R&B group The Radiants and great-grandfather Leonard ‘Baby Doo’ Gaston was a respected Mississippi blues musician. He believes the windy city ⎯  which saw 500 homicides in 2012 according to The New York Times ⎯ is his creative lifeblood.

“I feel like the city is my music,” says Herb, who pays lyrical homage to Terror Town’s geography in the track ‘Gangway’. “Every line in my song has some type of meaning that stems from Chicago. A lot of people hear about the Eastside, but it’s a totally different story actually growin’ up on the Eastside. When we say ‘EastSide Crazy’ that’s what it really is. Aint no fairytales on the Eastside, everybody just tryin’ to make a way and live another day.”

Although drill’s place in the spotlight has seen imitators cash in (with varying degrees of success), DGainz’s combination of work ethic and hustle is finally bearing fruit. The self-taught 24-year-old, who debuted his single ‘Me Against the World’ last year, hopes his current trajectory will set the stage for a media empire that includes short films and movies.

“I didn’t have anything at the beginning and now I run my own company, DGainz Productions, along with my own label, Distinguished Gorillaz,” he tells me. “I’ve also been directing movies and pushing my music as artist. Basically, I want to be a trendsetter and a mogul. I want to do stuff that you’ve never seen people do.”

He also believes the drill scene encapsulates hip-hop’s current moment and that the city offers lessons in creating possibilities out of despair. “I feel like we could be like Hollywood and get a big Chicago sign somewhere in the city,” he laughs. “I know that we’ve already made our mark on the history of rap music.”

Why don’t cool, young filmmakers create ethnically diverse movies?

First published in Daily Life, August 21, 2014 

The only thing worse than being jolted out of a dream is the moment you realise that it’s devolved into a nightmare.

In Palo Alto – a movie where washed-out colours, fleeting moments and a bittersweet soundtrack by Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes conjure a sense of teenage listlessness that feels as if director Gia Coppola has plucked your memories out of the air and bottled them on film – the moment comes when April, Fred and Teddy, the movie’s protagonists, abandon the predictable thrills of a high school party to dissect the suicide of a former classmate in a way that’s both oddly familiar and shockingly cavalier. “His parents pressured the shit out of him because he was Asian,” deadpans Fred, whose habit of driving cars into walls for kicks hints that he could do with some parental pressure. And when he’s met with a confused glance from April, he ends the debate with a powerful declaration: “I don’t think you’d know any better than me.”

This telling piece of dialogue, which will either see you nod knowingly or have the heart-stabbing impact of hearing a friend talk about you behind your back, is absent from the glowing response to Palo Alto, thanks to the fact that the film is both a light-years improvement on the James Franco short-story collection from which it’s adapted and the way it’s a textbook narrative of wasted youth. As The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis points out, Palo Alto’s characters “aren’t the tireless achievers cramming for tests and preparing for college”  but “the anxious children who have – since the likes of Holden Caulfield and James Dean’s rebel – defined American adolescence as a state of poetic confusion.”

Brett Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction. Larry Clark’s Kids. Almost everything by Sofia Coppola or Gus Van Sant. The shape of this poetic confusion – whether it concerns debauched undergrads with morality issues, drug-addled nineties’ skateboarders or millennial narcissists with rich-kid problems – is less important than its message: that losing your way is the necessary consequence of being young. It also implies that veering off the path – even if your suburban foibles didn’t involve college orgies, a heroin addiction or falling for a creepy older man (Franco) as April does in Palo Alto – can help you learn the difference between a good and bad decision and acquire the wisdom that’s central to becoming a functioning adult.

The wasted youth narrative doesn’t capture the messiness of being young as much as it shows us what being young is for. Stories of adolescent confusion inspire countless retellings (Clark is making another Kids, set in Paris) and resonate not because they’re wildly original but because we need popular culture to tell us, as Dargis writes, that “this incompleteness will give way to a sense of wholeness” and that the mistakes that we make on the way to finding ourselves are actually okay.

In a July 2014 review in The Rumpus, Joe Sacksteder linked the success of Palo Alto – whose characters chain-smoke, use sex as a means for finding love and drink-drive before retreating to their childhood bedrooms – to this thrill of recognition. “There might be imperfections in Coppola’s execution, but what comes from the vigorous spontaneity of her attack is probably the closest we upper-class, white, MFA students will get to really remembering those weird years before we became smart and responsible and tightly edited,” he writes.

But you don’t have to be white to remember those weird years before you became smart and responsible and tightly edited. The pain and pleasures of taking wrong turns, being self-destructive in order to create something and doing things that aren’t you to find out who you are aren’t specific to race – they’re just a consequence of being young. If the nameless Asian kid in Palo Alto – a film that, like every instance of the trope, features all-white characters – was given a chance to be more than a teenage prodigy who crumbled under the weight of parental pressure, he’d be at the same party as April, Fred and Teddy, making every effort to lose himself so that one day he might be found.

Nonwhite people get their own wasted youth narratives although they tend to involve a lot more caricature and much less poetry. They include films such as coming-of-age classics like Dangerous Minds and Poetic Justice, or gritty realist portraits such asKidulthood, where characters’ journeys are obscured by the struggles that come with being born with a certain skin colour in a particular time and place. Or they’re nerdy narrative foils for white characters’ dilemmas, a pathology – called out by Ayesha Siddiqi in a Vice essay on MIA – that trades on “just happy-to-be-here spelling bee champions and accented sidekicks.”

In an essay in The Rumpus, critic Roxane Gay elevates the case for on-screen diversity beyond tired conversations about quotas and political correctness and makes a case for why it’s urgent that nonwhite people see the full spectrum of our experiences captured on screen.

“We want, and rightly so, to believe our lives deserve to be new, relatable, and important. We want to see more complex, nuanced depictions of what it really means to be whoever we are or were or hope to be,” she writes.

When it comes to wasted youth narratives, it’s hard to tell how long we’ll be waiting.

Is ‘The Lunchbox’ the perfect indie love story?

First published in Daily Life, August 20, 2014 

Even the best indie love stories show an inversely proportional relationship between the scale of their ambition and the narrowness of their worldview.

Before Sunrise, the first installment of Richard Linklater’s much-loved Before trilogy, might feature the kind of concentric all-night conversations that could have been lifted from the journal of an earnest twenty-something but its premise – two lovers escaping from their lives against a twinkling Vienna backdrop – hints at a depressingly limited understanding of what it means to be young and free.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has scenes that are harrowing enough to work as filmic shock therapy for anyone going through a breakup, but its characters Joel and Clementine – one unbearably neurotic, the other a blue-haired bookstore employee – are a study in manufactured quirk.

And in the less convincing 500 Days of Summer, being jilted might see Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Tom leapfrog towards his dreams of becoming an architect but the winsome Summer’s indifference to anything beyond The Smiths could convince the most optimistic viewer to put stock in her textbook-perfect vintage wardrobe and abandon hopes that a female protagonist may have any kind of inner life.

Michael Newman believes that we’re victims of this very optimism. In an interview with Columbia University Press, the author of Indie suggests that this type of film exists as a sign of an elite taste culture that marks the viewer out as a cultural connoisseur rather than a reflection of an emotional universe glossed over by sugary rom-coms.

“Many of the films we would call indie are not really far from Hollywood; they’re marketed by Fox Searchlight and similar companies, which are subsidiaries of major conglomerates. I argue that calling these films indie rather than independent is a mystification. It takes attention away from economics and industry and refocuses it on sensibility, hipness, cool,” he says.

It’s safe to say that The Lunchbox, a quiet love story set in modern-day Mumbai, won’t grapple with this problem or benefit from its inevitable cachet – despite being distributed by Sony Classics and celebrated everywhere from Cannes to Telluride.

Although the film – which uses a glitch in the city’s 120-year-old lunchbox delivery system to explore a love affair between Saajan, an aging widower on the brink of retirement and Ila, a middle-class Hindu housewife saddled with a cheating husband – is described as “poignant” by The New York Times, critics have been too busy marvelling at how a country consumed with all-dancing-all-singing Bollywood could produce something subtle to bother with analysing the real reason we watch indie romance: to work out what it can teach us about ourselves.

In her brilliant New Yorker essay ‘The Scourge of Relatability’, Rebecca Mead has an explanation for why characters that aren’t “relatable” – whether or not that’s because conceiving that brown-skinned characters could share an emotional trajectory with white audiences requires a quantum leap in logic – are unreliable narrators of universal truth.

“If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognise himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work serves as a selfie: a flattering confirmation of the individual’s solipsism,” she writes.

But the dangers of gravitating towards films that double as vanity projects run deeper than we think. For instance, the indie love story – a genre populated by a boring parade of self-involved white writers and faux-bohemian settings that speak to audience aspirations – relatability is often falsely conflated with progressiveness. This also means that viewers enamoured with seeing themselves on-screen tend to overlook gaping flaws. As Mead points out, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is being hailed as a masterpiece not because of its mundane plot or cutting-edge characterisation but because the life it depicts so closely matches ours.

Unless you happen to live in India, The Lunchbox accomplishes none of these things. Instead, the notes Ila slips into Saajan’s lunchbox – which he pores over in an office that’s dustily exempt from technology – prove the ways in which sharing fears and anxieties with someone can set the stage for true intimacy.

The scenes of Mumbai are less interested in technicolour weddings than they are with crumbling apartments and the way it feels to stand alone in a packed commuter train. It captures the rhythms a of a single city while maintaining that finding an emotional connection when you’re surrounded by strangers is remarkable anywhere. And Ila’s decision to leave her joyless marriage is the mark of a film that doesn’t treat her as a cipher or a way to advance the plot. She might exist in a world where you wash laundry by hand and making an aromatic lunch is a form of self-expression but that doesn’t make her choices less feminist.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, The Lunchbox’s director Ritesh Batra – who splits his time between Mumbai and New York and, like Linklater, dropped out of film school – says he’s determined to tell more stories with universal appeal. Let’s hope that by then our definition of “relatability” extends beyond characters that make us feel like we’re catching our reflection in a mirror to those who – despite surface differences – have inner worlds that resonate with our own.

In the raw with G-Star’s Shubhankar Ray

First published in Vault issue 7, August 2014 

New York Fashion Week, an event that owes its existence to the power of spectacle, is the last place you’d expect to see the ghost of Guy Debord. But when Dennis Hopper recited Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” during a 2008 show by Dutch denim label G-Star RAW, the French visionary – whose belief in the value of dissolving boundaries between disciplines has shaped everything from punk acts like the Sex Pistols to anti-consumerist organisations such as Adbusters – announced his presence in the status-crazed world of high fashion.

“G-Star wanted a celebrity on the catwalk and I thought, instead of going with a young, hot Hollywood star we should choose Dennis Hopper, a 72-year old actor who is a legend,” laughs Shubhankar Ray, whose 2006 appointment as G-Star’s global brand director saw the label, which was founded in Amsterdam in 1989, leapfrog from obscurity into the cultural consciousness.  “Dennis and I constructed an idea that was about an art hijack in the middle of a fashion show, which is no-one had done before.  I got lucky in because he invited me to his house to make the idea and we decided that it would focus on poetry.”

At G-Star’s Sydney headquarters, a gleaming white-and-steel space that could have been lifted from the Jetsons, it’s impossible to tell whether or not you’re being swallowed by one of the interventions that made Ray an unlikely posterboy for anti-fashion. Stylists, photographers and publicists orbit around taxidermic jeans displays and grainy footage of the brand’s latest campaign flickers across a far wall. As the supermodel Lily Cole, who stars in the campaign alongside chess great Magnus Carlsen, strides towards the elevator, retracting doors confirm that she isn’t, in fact, a hologram. At one point Ray, who manages the difficult feat of making double denim look like a style triumph, hands me a notebook plastered with sketches and polaroids.  “Denim is a universal fabric but we want to elevate it to art level. That’s why we train our designers to look outside the world of fashion.”

Ray’s introduction to this world came in the form of an early brush with a defining cultural moment – the post-punk scene in mid-eighties Manchester. “I was studying chemistry at university in Manchester during a time where the city was producing a lot of pop culture,” Ray recalls. “This was the time of New Order, the Smiths, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays. I started writing music reviews for the local newspaper, mainly because I could get into gigs for free. I then started working for New Order, collecting glases in their nightclub.”

It wasn’t long before Ray’s creative awakening clashed with his career plans. “When you come from a very traditional academic Indian family, you only have the choice of doing medicine or science,” says Ray, who was born in Calcutta in the late sixties. “So I went off to become a research scientist but became disillusioned – they didn’t want me to quit so they offered me an MBA. The science facility was funded by Nestle and I found myself on secondment in a marketing function, where we made 45 TV commercials with the world’s best agencies. I fell into a marketing job at Levi’s by accident.”

Although Ray went on to channel a love of street photography into a long-running campaign for Caterpillar, it was his six-year stint as creative director of Camper – a family-run footwear brand established in Majorca, Spain in 1877 – that saw him hone his distinctive aesthetic. “With Camper, I was able to use interventions to create a more socially progressive brand,” explains Ray, who enlisted Stefan Ruiz, the creative director of Benetton’s legendary Colors magazine, to create hyper-saturated images of Mediterranean farm life with slogans that urged audiences to reject the rat race and slow down. Ray, whose work has been shown at London’s Design Museum, the Venice Biennale and Barcelona’s Centre for Contemporary Culture, also created The Walking Society, a publication that helped attract the 2004 Cannes Cyber Lion award and shares DNA with the work of Colors creators Olivier Toscani and Tibor Kalman. “I cast old people and things that weren’t considered cool,” Ray explains. “This wasn’t about New York, London or Paris, it was about a world that had never been seen before. It was very much about taking the ordinary and showing the ways in which it is extraordinary.”

At G-Star, Ray is less in the business of advertising than he is in exploring the ways in which democracy can galvanise a brand. In 2010, he launched RAW Nights, a virtual nightclub in Tokyo that saw Japanese photographer Hiromix play reggae while Mark Newson rolled rice mochi on stage. Ray, who positions G-Star in the utilitarian realm of industrial design rather than the fickle world of fashion, has also conceived a range of hoodies with Newson, collaborated with Leica and worked with Swiss manufacturer Vitra to reinterpret classic pieces by Modernist furniture icon Jean Prouvé.

“Our crossovers are about mishmashing high and low culture and stripping away hierarchies,” he says. “It’s about making products with a high life expectancy and in that sense, denim has more in common with products such as furniture. The objects that Mark Newson makes are expensive but the pieces we created with him are accessible and feature minimised seams rather than heavy construction. We work with people with a similar mindset – maniacal dedication to product innovation, technology and quality.”

Unsurprisingly, it was Anton Corbijn, whose stark images transplanted bands such as Joy Division and Depeche Mode into the collective memory, who best vocalised G-Star’s visual language. Ray attributes the success of the four-year collaboration – which saw Corbijn shoot Liv Tyler, Benecio Del Toro and Vincent Gallo in G-Star denim – to the photographer’s talent for transforming celebrities into characters and allowing the product to take centre stage.

Ray owes his own trajectory to an ability to mine the power of suggestion and forge partnerships that combine relevance with surprise. For Spring 2014, the brand asked Lily Cole – a multi-hyphenate model who holds a double-first from Cambridge– to front a chess-inspired print and TV campaign alongside Magnus Carlsen. “Lily matches our Brand DNA – she’s an actress, model and activist,” says Ray. “She fits the idea of raw elegance which is part of the feminine side of a brand and she’s an unusual commodity as she’s doing stuff you don’t expect a model to do.”

It’s a descriptor that equally befits Ray. Although G-Star, which generates revenue upwards of $US1 billion and created the Elwood, the world’s second biggest-selling pair of jeans after Levi’s 501, it’s also a study in the surprising symbiosis between commerce, creativity and sustainability.

“We started making sustainable products in 2008 after working with the United Nations to amplify millennium-related goals,” says Ray, who recently partnered with Pharell William’s company Bionic Yarn, as part of a plan to produce jeans out of recycled bottles. “We were manufacturing with organic cotton, nettle  and recycled materials but in 2010, we aggregated all of our fabrics and started using sustainable materials across all our biggest selling jeans and shirt styles. We produce in low-labour cost countries such as China and India so we have to make sustainability a condition of doing business rather than a byproduct.”

He pauses for a moment as if to reassess his own motives. “If we really are a brand driven by innovation, we have to make the right choices while having the biggest impact on the market.”

Monkey see, monkey do

First published in Renegade Collective, issue 13, August 2014

In Silicon Valley, success is a byword for sacrifice.  The Northern Californian postcode might be home to technology companies that have toppled entire industries but it owes its mythical status to the way it fosters an extreme brand of ambition, where achieving an entrepreneurial vision comes at the expense of everything else in your life.

For those who don’t buy into Silicon Valley fables, there’s always David Goldberg. The CEO of SurveyMonkey – an online survey tool that anticipated the role data would play in shaping businesses back in 1999 that Forbes values at $US1.35 billion – is proof that investing in the world outside work may see you hurtle faster towards your professional dreams.

“When I was running my first startup, I never took a day off but found that you’re not necessarily that productive when you’re going to spend all that time at work,” laughs David, with a warmth that speaks more of his Minnesota upbringing than the steely corridors of high technology. We’re in a plush Sydney hotel, where David, who insists I take an elaborate crab sandwich, decamped a few hours earlier to launch SurveyMonkey’s first Asia Pacific office. “A lot of people think that I’ll just eat and sleep when I get to my destination but we evaluate performance on what our staff members actually do, not how many hours they work and let them take as much vacation as possible as long as they deliver.  Our company is nearly 15 and we’ve been really successful but it’s a marathon. We’re growing really nicely but we need to pace ourselves.”

When David says his entrepreneurial instincts came late, it’s clear that humility is reframing his life story. He has openly credited his mother, a Minneapolis kindergarten teacher who established a centre for children with disabilities, with opening his eyes to the ways in which entrepreneurship could change the course of people’s lives.

“I was really motivated by having a big impact,” says David, who studied at Harvard and briefly worked on Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign before becoming disenchanted with politics. “For my first business, I was working with my best friend from high school and we started the company in my apartment, borrowed money on credit and ran out of funds several times. It wasn’t easy but we were having fun and changing the way people discovered and listened to music. When we started out, no one thought anyone would ever listen to music on a computer but as an entrepreneur you have to say ‘nope – I hear these people and they’re much smarter than I am but they’re wrong and I’m going to keep going anyway’.”

The business David is referring to is Launch Media, a digital music trailblazer that paved the way for current spinoffs such as Rdio and Spotify, and was acquired by Yahoo Music for US$12 million when he was just 26. But although David, who grew Yahoo Music into the world’s most visited music destination and was ranked one of Billboard magazine’s top digital music power players, it was his 2009 acquisition of SurveyMonkey, a humble web survey development tool designed by software engineer Ryan Finley, that would define his future path.

“You make better arguments with data,” David explains. “We had fifth-graders who wanted to improve their lunches at school run a survey telling teachers what they liked and didn’t like and they ended up changing the menu. When Ryan founded SurveyMonkey, he made the product really easy to use and he didn’t have any money for marketing so he had to make the product do the marketing – it became a viral tool. The more people take surveys, the more they learn about SurveyMonkey and they come back to create their own. That’s how we’ve always grown.”

SurveyMonkey might appeal to fifth-graders but it’s also revolutionised the way businesses gather and analyse information, creating an entire market in the process. The online platform, which receives 2 million survey responses a day, boasts a client base that includes 99 per cent of Fortune 500 companies, a list that includes the likes of General Motors, Apple and Chevron, as well as academic institutions and small businesses around the world. And in Australia, SurveyMonkey’s third-largest market, the tool is embraced by everyone from Qantas to BHP Billiton –  a user base that explains why establishing a local office is the company’s largest investment outside the US and Europe.

“I think in terms of the technology sector, Australia has seen more success on a relative basis than a lot of other countries,” says David, who spent a short stint living in Sydney’s Paddington in his twenties. “There are a lot of Australian companies that have done really well on a global level. The country is our best market on a per capita basis and as we add new products and services, it made a lot of sense to be here. It’s a great place.”

David, who raised US$800 million in debt and equity for SurveyMonkey in 2013, is slow to attribute the company’s success to his own talent and experience. Instead, he says that the company’s unusual model – where the benefits of big business collide with the scalability promised by startups – allowed him to hire the right people and create the perfect conditions for swift growth. “I’m more of a generalist than I’m good at one specific thing,” he laughs. “When I’m building a team, I want to find people who are better than me at certain things – everyone’s happier and doing a better job when they’re doing things that they’re good at. SurveyMonkey offered me the opportunity to act like a startup but with the resources of an existing business – so I could hire great people and build a team that would allow us to scale.”

Missing from David’s official bio is the fact that marrying Sheryl Sandberg – Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer and author of feminist bible Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead – rates among his formative career decisions. David met Sheryl, who was voted one of the most powerful women in business by Forbes this year, when they were both working in Los Angeles in 1996, and has admitted to falling for her when she fell asleep on his shoulder during a movie. Unsurprisingly, Lean In’s idea that career success stems from the ability to articulate your needs is the blueprint for David’s own business, sparking a company culture that sees employees thrive.

“I think my wife says it best – men and women need to speak out about what they want and what works for them,” says David, who famously hired Selina Tobaccowala, SurveyMonkey’s Chief Technology Officer when she was four months pregnant. “We don’t expect men to take time off to take their kids to the doctor or spend time with their family and we need to change our perceptions. It’s still too far out of balance.”

I quiz David about how SurveyMonkey’s clients can use data to empower themselves but his response equally applies to decoding messy businesses of juggling career and relationships. “Information itself doesn’t make great decisions. It’s all about learning to ask the right questions.”

Tackling the Taboo

Published in Broadsheet July 2014

Sydney artist Meg Minkley hopes to change the conversation about sexual violence, one drawing at a time.

For Meg Minkley, drawing is as much spiritual lifeline as it is a form of self-expression. When this Sydney artist and illustrator was raped by a hostel owner while travelling in Mexico a year ago, she responded the best way she knew how – by seeking refuge in her Copic markers.

“I’d been drugged and was left on my own and when I returned home there was no one I knew with a similar experience that I could talk to,” says Minkley. “Drawing a picture a day became my way of focussing again. I’ve always been happy-go-lucky but this was something I couldn’t process, so I would just put it on paper and that would allow me to let it go. I’ve drawn since I knew how to use my hands, but now it’s become my salvation.”

This body of work is the basis of One Drawing a Day, an online showcase that follows Minkley’s yearlong journey via arch observations, vivid colour and allusions to darkness and light. It’s also the subject of a Pozible campaign and upcoming exhibition through which Minkley – who has partnered with domestic violence support charity White Ribbon – hopes to change a cultural conversation that silences victims and prevents them from finding tools to help them survive.

“It took me a long time to go out and socialise because people didn’t know what to say to me,” says Minkley, who’s received more than 20 emails a day from women with similar stories since launching the campaign. “I’d had this perception of myself as a broken women. I felt worthless and when society reinforces that, you think it’s real. We need to stop that re-victimisation.”

Minkley, who says she’s been floored by the positive response to the campaign, hopes to establish a drawing-a-day gallery or workshop – initiatives that would speak to the redemptive power of art while offering survivors the resources she lacked.

“At the start I had a freak-out because it was my face attached to the story,” she admits. “But every day the response I’ve received, and the number of men who’ve contacted me and donated, has been incredible. It’s reassured me that most people are awesome. The exhibition will be a chance to celebrate with everybody.”

The Kids Today in Palo Alto

Haunting, dreamlike and evocative, Palo Alto is a wasted-youth narrative for the Tumblr generation. We speak with filmmaker Gia Coppola about fate, family pressure and finding an artistic outlet for teenage angst.

In the creative challenge stakes, finding your voice and mustering the courage to use it is up there with practicing your craft while paying the rent. But if your grandfather produced The Godfathertrilogy and your aunt writes the kind of Oscar-winning screenplays responsible for giving ennui its own cinematic language, gaining credibility as an artist can be even more complicated.

“I think that’s maybe why I’d never really considered filmmaking as a career,” Gia Coppola tells me over the phone, her drawn-out syllables the legacy of a childhood split between Los Angeles, Europe and her grandparents’ Napa Valley winery. “But when I met James [Franco] it all just fell into place. It felt just like I was making a small project with my friends and I forgot about what you actually have to do to get a movie out there. I learnt so much from my family and they’re so supportive so now it never really feels like a problem.”

Coppola is talking about Palo Alto, a film that was adapted from a short-story collection written by James Franco. The stories observe a group of Californian teenagers who float between listlessness and self-destruction in a way that feels universal and specific at once. The movie features the cursory empty-sex scenes, hellish party sequences and drug-fuelled parking-lot montages – tropes of wasted youth that owe their lineage to Brett Easton Ellis, and that are enacted with precision by Emma Roberts, Jack Kilmer and Nat Wolff. The film shows bleached skies and sugary bedroom shrines and feels tailor-made for the Tumblr generation. This gives it its power and prevents it from devolving into cliche.

Coppola’s own Tumblr splices together Instagram images from the film, enviably casual selfies and shots of artful clutter that could have been lifted from a gallery. And Palo Alto’s sense of the unexpected has roots in real experience.

“I met James in a really random way after I’d just finished college for photography in Upstate New York,” says Coppola. “I was just figuring out what to next. I was working a bartending job but I wanted to try something that I was creatively interested in. I saw James in a deli and then ran into him again and it was this serendipitous thing. We started talking about photography and how much I loved his show Freaks and Geeks. I showed him my photos and he really responded to them, told me that he’d just written a book and was looking for a director and asked if I was interested. I was excited by the challenge.”

Coppola – who is named after her late father Giancarlo Coppola, a filmmaker who died in a speedboating accident when he was 22 – says the book’s authenticity was the basis for her attraction.

“When I started making the film, I was at a good age because I was personally reflecting on my own teenage years and could understand them better because they weren’t so far away,” says Coppola, who’s admitted to weaving incidents from her own teenage years through the film. “It was such a collaborative experience and I was working with people I was really comfortable with. I felt really safe.”

Coppola’s casting decisions included appointing Julia Roberts’ niece Emma to play April, a semi-studious teenager seduced by predatory soccer coach Mr B (played by Franco). She also cast Val Kilmer’s son Jack in the role of Teddy, a boy who drives cars into walls for kicks.

“Everything kind of felt like fate,” she says. “I knew Emma from Los Angeles and had this gut instinct that she was the right person. I kept bumping into her, we got along really well and I knew she was someone who I could take care of as a first-time director. And I’ve known Jack since he was a little boy. I’ve seen a lot of young actors but was captivated by him. He’s a real teenager, which is interesting enough, but he has a quality that makes you just want to watch him.”

But despite Coppola’s birthright she’s learning that committing to life as a artist means that roadblocks are part of the process.

“I didn’t realise how heartbreaking it could be to get financing. I didn’t think this film was going to happen for the longest time but I kept holding on because it was hard to let go.”

Stories of War

For award-winning war photographer Benjamin Lowy, the stories most worth documenting are the ones that unfold beyond the frame.

Benjamin Lowy thinks that the things you don’t see are often more powerful than the things you do. The acclaimed photojournalist and war photographer, who made his name covering the Iraq War as a 23-year-old in 2003 and has since seen his gripping images, which shed light on everything from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya to the aftermaths of the Asian tsunami and Haiti earthquake, believes that photography can alter perceptions by hinting at what lies just beyond the frame.

“When we grow up, we all watch those Michael Bay action movies and in those films you always see and hear explosions at the same time,” says Lowy, who has attracted awards from World Press Photo and Photo District News 30 and whose images have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker and on the cover of Time magazine. “But in real life you see an explosion with your eyes and you hear it much later. And whether it’s being among groups of men who are openly weeping, what the wind feels like after an explosion or what blood looks like pumping out of someone who’s just been killed, there are some things about the reality of war that you can just never translate.”

Interestingly, some of Lowy’s most iconic work – including a series on Hurricane Sandy, shot via iPhone for Time and Blue Man,  an image of an Iraqi man catapulting himself off a lamppost against a haunting blue backdrop – owes its narrative impact to both a faith in the medium’s potential as well as a willingness to view the limitations of the craft as strengths.

“I started out as an illustrator and picked up photography so I could trace images and learn how to create more realistic drawings,” he says. “I came across a book on photography and I was enthralled. I taught myself photojournalism and when I started covering the war I was pretty naive but it taught me about what photography could achieve and the kinds of questions that my work could ask.”

In 2011, Lowy released Iraq Perspectives, a book that uses photographs shot through night-vision goggles and the windows of Humvee military vehicles, to give voice to soldiers’ experiences. The volume, which was awarded the Honickman First Book Prize in Photography by William Eggleston, is Lowy’s personal takedown of the tyranny of repetition – an attack on the way our around-the-clock news culture can drain subjects of their humanity.

“News aggregation sites were showing thousands of images of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007 to 2008, but because the coverage was so repetitive, the average person couldn’t put a face to it – even though 30 people were being killed every day,” he explains. “I wanted to do this book with pictures that showed Iraq in a different way so that people can see that Iraq isn’t just about one more death – it’s an actual place that exists out there and that things are being done in my name, so I should probably know about them.”

Despite backlash from purists, Lowy – who will give workshops on iPhone photography as part of the Head on Photo Festival as well as a keynote speech at Semi-Permanent in Sydney later this month – says that the democratisation of technology helps conflict photographers achieve their mission.

“I started using the iPhone to take photos to connect with my audience – so that a person could be scrolling through Tumblr looking at images of cats and brunch and they could see someone in Afghanistan  uploading pictures of a warzone on the same platform,” says Lowy, whose status as an iPhone traiblazer sparked the Ben Lowy filter on Instagram prequel,  Hipstamatic.

“I was able to take pictures, upload them to blogs and social media and live-stream from the front lines. There’s something visceral about conflict photography because you can’t take the time to rethink what you’re doing. You’re just reacting to the intense situations that you find yourself in.”

Head On Photo Festival May 12–June 8.
headon.com.au

Semi Permanent Sydney May 22–24.
semipermanent.com/sydney-2014

The Pen is Mightier than the Sword

First published in Vault Issue 6, April 2014 

For Romanian artist and activist Dan Perjovschi, drawing engenders freedom.

Dan Perjovschi is in the grip of post-travel euphoria. The Romanian artist and activist, best known for covering museum walls with urgent sketches that double as witty political takedowns, has just returned from a week at a little-known, artist-run initiative in the Greek city of Thessaloniki – an exercise that has renewed his belief in the revolutionary possibilities of artistic serendipity.

“Last year, I met a pair of Greek and French artists and they invited me to visit them in Thessaloniki, where they’ve started an artist-run space with some musicians,” he tells me, his grin almost audible over the crackling cross-hemisphere phone connection. “It’s the only art space in that part of Greece and although they don’t have any money because the situation in that country is very tough, they’re not afraid of dreaming big. I went for six days and it was super-good. Sometimes you can have experiences that change your practice and the way you understand it and it’s not always at a big museum or gallery.”

If it seems a little unimaginable that Perjovschi – whose recent career trajectory includes celebrated appearances across some of the art world’s most prominent biennales and audacious drawing installations at MoMA and Tate Modern – could happily scupper worldly reward for the chance to effect change through art, it’s because doing so is his defining missive.

“I don’t associate art with money, glamour or fashion,” he says. “I associate it with knowledge, understanding and ideas, which are essential platforms for contemporary life.”

For Perjovschi, who has spent the last 13 years illustrating Revista 22, a weekly political journal assembled by an insurgent group of writers, philosophers and artists in the wake of the 1989 Romanian Revolution, ideas are both currency and salvation. In 1990, he moved into the art museum in Timișoara, a city that served as the backdrop for the bloody ousting of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, attacking the walls with a three-day visual diatribe that railed against the homogenising forces of totalitarian rule. He banded with a group of Hungarian colleagues to stage happenings on the outskirts of the city, an act where blindness to the history of performance art worked as a vehicle for transformative impact. And during the 1999 Venice Biennale, Perjovschi covered the floors of the Romanian Pavilion with slogans, wordplay and ideograms that riffed on the contradictions of post-communist life – a move that introduced him to the power of temporality while sealing his place on the international art circuit.

“In Romania, my art education stopped somewhere before Picasso,” laughs Perjovschi, who studied painting at a Soviet-era art academy before trading still lifes for drawing. “But the Venice Biennale was a turning point in my career. I used the floor for my drawings because I was originally supposed to illustrate 100 booklets, but my country didn’t provide the funds in time. I had some markers with me but I didn’t realise that they weren’t permanent. When people stepped on my drawings, they were instantly erased. This possibility excited me. I felt like I was free.”

It’s precisely this invocation of freedom as a catalyst for artistic merit, rather than a by-product of vocational privilege, that causes some critics to dismiss Perjovschi as inauthentic – a kind of Keith Haring lite. In June 2007, the New York Times’ Andrea Mitchell likened What Happened to Us?, a site-specific installation that saw Perjovschi mount a cherry-picker to plaster MoMA’s walls with hastily scrawled observations of US society, as an instance of agitprop – a style of agenda-laden art that elides nuance in favour of simple reductions. But if you look closer, it’s clear that simplicity is exactly the point. A stick figure, when bisected mid-air, shares a perforated upper body with boldly rendered legs, the gaps in its outline mimicking the way the promise of immigration is premised on an erosion of the self. Elsewhere, a moving car crowned with a galleon’s flags foregrounds the neo-colonial quest for oil that drives the war in Iraq while the letters “M” and “E” crushing a diminutive “you” highlight the solipsism at the heart of the country’s popular culture.

“My art is a reduced vocabulary and I like to keep my drawings as simple as possible,” he explains. “Sometimes, I can define my drawings in two words. If you define something in two words, why do you have to draw it? In those cases, I denounce the drawing and make the text.”

To misread Perjovschi’s work is to underestimate how it represents the triumph of expression over form. It also misunderstands how this formlessness allows an artist to stand outside history – a position that’s critical if you want to draw yourself into existence. “When I grew up as an artist in Communist times, there was no market, no private galleries,” he recalls. “I learned how to make money and survive by illustrating a book here, a poster there – I didn’t sell my work, I sold my knowledge. I was not close to the market and built my living outside of it, so I didn’t depend on the market when it finally came to me.”

If Perjovschi is disinterested in the market, he’s even more sceptical about its curatorial limitations. He despises art fairs and refuses to make works for gallery display, choosing projects such as White Chalk, Dark Issues (2003), where he transferred his drawings onto the crumbling walls of a Ruhr Valley coking factory, or Japan’s 2013 Aichi Triennale, where consumerist critiques sketched on glass windows proved a striking interruption to city panoramas. And his insistence on obsessively maintaining a notebook is less the act of an artist than it is a journalist – proof of his belief that the value of ideas lie not in permanence but in weightlessness.

“My notebook is my studio – everything I draw on walls, I record here first,” he says. “When I travel to take part in a project, I collect everything I see and hear and when something strikes me when I’m flying across the ocean, it allows me to simply draw it.”

Listening to Perjovschi speak is a lesson in kinetic energy. In his drawings, a segue may show up as a downwards arrow that deflates the “o” in “hope” – an interjection than can move from denoting a country’s singular vision to highlighting the divide between the rich and the poor.

Perjovschi’s dismissal of performance art does nothing to quell the power of movement that is alive in his work – his practice is less installation than it is a visual incantation, a seamless extension of the artist’s world.

“I stopped performance art when it felt too artificial, but a lot of my work is composed of performative drawings,” he says. “Even if you don’t see me drawing, you see my movements in the character of the drawings… It’s a medium that I’ve come to associate with freedom.”

perjovschi.ro
lombard-freid.com

Cinema Paradiso

First published in Open Skies magazine, May 2014.

Neha Kale meets the people running historic independent movie theatres in Sydney, San Francisco, Paris, Rio De Janeiro, Bangkok, London and Mumbai, who all believe that movies are best enjoyed on the big screen. 

Thomas Edison was the original overachiever. In 1894, the fabled inventor, best known for conceiving the electric light-bulb, patented the Kinetoscope – a device that allowed viewers to experience moving images through a peep-hole – before showing travel scenes and celebrity footage to spellbound audiences at a music hall in New York.

Over 200 years later, the words “Picturehouse” – spelled out in cool blue neon – mark out an unassuming facade on a sun-dappled Sydney street. The sign may lure passers-by into the former Paramount Pictures building but it also signals the power of celluloid magic, a force that’s grown beyond Edison’s makeshift cinema to overcome the limits of technology, distance and place.

“These days, you can watch whatever you want very cheap or free from your home,” says Barrie Barton, the co-owner of the Golden Age Cinema, the velvet-lined theatrette housed in the building’s basement that in every way lives up to the promise of the sign. “But what’s missing is the experiences that exist around watching a movie. Film has always been about so much more than what’s happening on the screen.”

Barton isn’t alone in this theory. The Golden Age, which invites patrons to sip flawless Americanos while watching everything from sixties thrillers to Sophia Coppola’s newest offering, is only one example of the global resurgence of the old-fashioned picturehouse. It’s also evidence that the enduring pleasures of a night at the movies could be enough to surrender our Netflix addiction – 44 million subscriptions and rising at last count.

Social researcher Mark McCrindle believes that independent cinemas increase the chances of stumbling upon a film that speaks to you, much like unearthing hard-to-find vinyl at a record store or a dusty paperback that goes on to become a personal classic. “Independent and arthouse theatres allow people to “discover” a movie and share their recommendation with friends, an approach that’s different from the mass distribution associated with watching movies online,” he explains.

For Dr Lisa Ethridge, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at RMIT University, sitting with a laptop in the dark can’t compete with the joys of being part of an audience. “Independent theatres continue the tradition of the cinema as gathering place where people can meet to talk over ideas relating to the film,” she explains. “They let viewers share a space together, laugh, wonder, form a collective mind and share a collective dream.”

Dotted everywhere from the backstreets of Paris to Bangkok’s electric Siam Square, these one-of-a-kind picturehouses prove that this collective dream is alive and well.

Golden Age Cinema, Sydney 

If there’s a fine line between the sentimental and nostalgic, then the Golden Age navigates it with aplomb. The 55-seat basement cinema might be based in a heritage-listed building that was once the epicentre of Australia’s film industry but it’s less interested in recreating the past than is in showing Sydney cinephiles how old-fashioned rituals can deepen modern-day film appreciation. “We wanted to create something for a modern audience that stayed true to historical DNA while avoiding cliches,” says Barton, who established the Golden Age in 2013 and whose previous ventures have included Rooftop Cinema, a venue that combines open-air movies with 360-degree views of the Melbourne skyline. “We knew that it was something we had to tackle through design.”

Together with his brother Robert and a local cast of interior designers and furniture makers, Barton set about re-imagining the theatrette, a dusty space that hadn’t been used since 1971, by installing antique theatre chairs from Zurich and building a moody, thirties-inspired bar that’s the perfect backdrop for an anticipatory cocktail or post-film discussion. Barton maintains that the bar – which offers buttery leather banquettes and salted caramel sundaes – was the element of the Golden Age that was hardest to get right. “The bar is really beautiful and brand new but feels like it was always part of the building. That was the hardest thing to achieve creatively,” he says.

However, the Golden Age’s focus on reacquainting audiences with the thrills of an evening at the pictures isn’t limited to the pleasures of a pre-movie drink – it also invites viewers to buy tickets to classics such as American Graffiti and Creature from the Black Lagoon at original, pre-inflation prices.

Address: Paramount House, 80 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills, Sydney

Roxie Theater, San Francisco 

Most of us have the kind of friend with a knack for unearthing obscure, mind-bending movies but for those of us that don’t, there’s always the Roxie. A longtime fixture of San Francisco’s graffiti-etched Mission District, the freewheeling picturehouse, which was founded by a disgraced watchmaker in 1909 and screened adult films in the late sixties, is a lesson in the art of cult. “We like to screen the coolest, weirdest stuff from the past, present and future,” laughs Mike Keegan, the Roxie’s programming director. “Since every movie you’ve ever wanted to see is basically available for free online, we want to make you feel like you’re going to the house of a friend who knows you and wants to show you something cool that they think you will like.”

Although the Roxie’s shoestring selection of cinema treats is limited to candy, soda and popcorn, when it comes to audacious programming, the theatre punches above its weight. The cinema, which regularly hosts discussion panels and Q&A sessions with filmmakers, screened the world’s first film noir retrospective and early work by indie wunderkinds Joe Swanberg and Alex Ross Perry along with arthouse gems such as Danish crime drama Drive.

Keegan, who’s a fan of old films that reflect a certain time and place, says that inventive cinema is only one element of a memorable Roxie screening. The theatre is equally notorious for parties and events that bring the city’s film community together and speak to the zeitgeist.

“In a couple of weeks we’re showing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 35 mm, a documentary about outlaw motorcyclists in Baltimore and some Wes Anderson movies, with all-you-can-eat pizza,” Keegan says. “We once Skyped Roman Polanski from Paris during a screening. Ten years from now, there may only be a couple of cinemas in every city – an old movie palace, a nice multiplex and hopefully a scrappy, seat-of-our-pants organisation like us.”

Address: 3117 16th St, San Francisco, California

La Pagode, Paris 

Unfolding on the banks of the River Gauche and lined with candlelit bistros, pocket-sized florists and Eiffel Tower vistas, Paris’ seventh arrondissement is an exercise in Gallic fantasy. However, nothing sums up the neighbourhood’s ability to transport you to another realm quite like La Pagode, a Japanese-inspired cinema that was built by the director of the city’s Bon Marche department store as a gift for his wife in 1895. The movie theatre, which features gilt dragon sculptures, intricate ceiling frescos and red velvet seating, also represents an Asian spin on the typical Parisian arthouse – although it screened early works by French New Wave masters such as Jean Cocteau in the sixties it also host premieres by directors visiting from Japan.

“We regularly feature Japanese cinema along with films by arthouse directors such as Pedro Almodóvar and David Cronenberg,” explains Marie Durand, director of events and partnerships at Etoile Cinemas, La Pagode’s operator. “And we also premiere local films such as Les garçons et Guillaume, à table!, which stars French theatre actor Guillaume Gallienne.”

But a history of championing some of the world’s most celebrated filmmakers is only one explanation for La Pagode’s role in Paris screen culture – Durand says that the cinema regularly holds masterclasses with directors such as Robert Bresson along with a cinema club that includes movies and debates based on important cultural moments. Tired of the intellectual stimulation? You can always sip rose tea in the theatre’s miniature Oriental garden.

For Durand, La Pagode’s silver screen credentials come second to the sense of escape promised by the cinema’s Japanese Room – an otherworldly viewing space adorned with chandeliers, stained glass windows and tapestries.

“Every time you visit the Japanese Room, you can’t help but marvel at a new detail – whether it’s a new animal on a painting on the wall or a sculpture near the door,” Durand offers. “Even if you’ve been visiting the cinema for ten years, it takes you by surprise every time.”

Address:  57 Bis Rue de Babylone, Paris, France

Cine Joia, Rio De Janeiro 

On Rio’s Copacabana beach, where an endless expanse of white sand has given way to faceless hotel chains and a rainbow of sun-worshippers, tourism risks eroding the precinct’s status as hub for the city’s cultural life. Luckily, Cine Joia, a rebellious picturehouse intent on celebrating the city’s film culture, has made it its business to keep the beachfront’s creative energy alive.

Although Raphael Aguinaga – the filmmaker and entrepreneur responsible for restoring the colourful 1960s cinema in 2011 –  is passionate about screening Brazilian and international independent films, opening the 87-seat theatre up to other kinds of performances is also part of his mission.

“As the oldest operating street theater in activity in Rio and we are known for high quality in our programming but we also believe in hosting other forms of artistic expression such as poetry, music and drama in our space,” he says.

This means that a typical week at Cine Joia could include a  free screening of the De Niro classic Taxi Driver, the premiere of Brazilian documentary Trampolin du Fort or a night of slam poetry. The theatre also champions Rio’s cultural events – in 2013, it aired a series of films exploring inner-city graffiti culture to coincide with the city’s annual Urban Art Fair and  it plans to acquaint Brazilian audiences with the work of eight Middle Eastern filmmakers by hosting the Arab Film Festival this year.

Cine Joia, which involves its audiences in a bi-monthly fanzine that celebrates local film culture, is equally intent on shaping the next generation of film enthusiasts.

“Education is a really big issue in Brazil. We believe that movie theatres can also serve as classrooms and we often screen documentaries to student groups in the morning,” Aguinaga says. “We’re a small theatre with big ambitions.”

Address: Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana, 680 Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro

Scala Cinema, Bangkok 

Navigating the five-minute journey between the Siam BTS station and the Scala, a lavish picturehouse that was established in 1969, calls for an aversion to everything that makes Bangkok intoxicating: throngs of people, bustling street vendors and an endless sea of neon. But stepping inside the marble foyer, a space characterised by soaring ceilings, giant bronze flowers and a staircase that seems to float in mid-air, is proof of the Thai capital’s tranquil second face.

“The Scala’s architecture is a combination between East and West and represents a harmony between two different worlds,” says Suchart Vudthivichai, the cinema’s long-time creative consultant. Vudthivichai works closely with proprietor Nanta Tansacha, whose stage actor father Pisit Tansacha built the 1,000-seat picturehouse – a perfect union of Thai modernism and tropical art deco – during the cinema construction boom that swept the country during the sixties.

Although it’s been nearly half a century since Tansacha doled out ice-cream to Friday night moviegoers, the Scala’s original spirit has remained intact – an attendant manning a wood-panelled booth jots down your seat number on a ticket stub and a grinning usher, wearing a lemon-yellow tuxedo, makes sure you find your seat. The fact that you can purchase a ticket and box of popcorn for around 130 baht nods to a pricing approach that’s as insistently retro as the decor.

However, the Scala, which swapped its 35mm projector for a state-of-the-art digital system in 2013, is fiercely committed to pleasing modern-day audiences.

“We screen a wide variety of movies and relentlessly search for good art films and fine documentaries along with first-run studio films, Oscar and Golden Globe winners,” explains Vudthivichai.

For Tansacha, the threat that this silver screen oasis may be demolished, is no match for the faith in her family’s legacy or the loyalty of her staff many of whom have worked with her since the seventies.

“Our family has been in the entertainment business since my birth and movies are our heart and soul,” she says.

Address: Soi 1, Rama I Road, Siam Square Bangkok

The Phoenix, London 

Perched on an unremarkable high street in northwest London, the Phoenix Cinema is a real-world testament to British film history. The elegant single-screen cinema, which also happens to be the United Kingdom’s oldest purpose-built movie theatre, has played host to everything from silent films set to live music and 1920s jazz movies to cult seventies films such as Easy Rider, screened via a hulking two-reel projector. It’s 255-seat auditorium also doubled as a refuge for locals during the London Blitz.

“The Phoenix was built in 1910 and in 2010, we completed a major centenary restoration project where everything was restored to its original beauty,” says Elizabeth Taylor-Mead, the cinema’s executive director. “The walls display incredible murals and instead of wide seats with cupholders, we have old-fashioned seating in keeping with the style of the cinema. That’s what makes it unique.”

However, that’s not the Phoenix’s only unusual feature. The cinema steers clear of the surly customer service that’s sometimes associated with multiplexes and prides itself on employing staff with a personal investment in the picturehouse’s future.

“Our staff are all artists passionate about the part independent cinema plays in the community,” she explains. “If you’re standing in line to buy your ticket, they’re happy to talk to you about the film. It makes for a warm and intimate atmosphere.”

The Phoenix also extends its focus beyond its regular attendees, working with local schools, holding special workshops and running a program for people with autism.

“We really believe that film is the most democratic of all the arts,” she says. “If you look at the history of cinema, it brought together people who didn’t speak the language, who were in a difficult economic situation or were trying to figure out what they were doing with their lives. It was a way reflecting the reality of the life they were living.”

Address: 52 High Rd, East Finchley, London

Regal Cinema, Mumbai 

In Mumbai’s sepia-toned Colaba Causeway, where crumbling architecture shares sidewalk space with billboards advertising the latest broadband plan, it’s difficult to distinguish signs of modernity from the faded grandeur of a colonial past. But the Regal Cinema – an art deco picturehouse that attracted British aristocrats in the thirties and whose clientele includes the expats, students and artists that make up Mumbai’s rising creative class – signals the ways in which the city’s history has paved the way for its current evolution.

“The Regal Cinema was the first air-conditioned theatre in Asia and also one of the first places you could watch English-language films,” says Rafique Bagdhadi, a well-known Mumbai film critic and local historian. “You booked your ticket a week in advance and when you visited it was like you were going see Hamlet at the theatre. It felt like it was an event.”

However, this sense of occasion was sparked just as much by the Regal’s refreshments as it was by the movie hall’s opulent interior, which includes a mirror-lined lobby and a main auditorium accented with orange and jade sunbursts courtesy of Czech artist Karl Schara. “There were soda fountains, vendors selling samosas, sandwiches and chai and there would always be music playing in the background,” Baghdadi recalls. “You paid your money and you always felt like it was worth going there.”

These days, the Regal – which aired the first Laurel and Hardy film in 1933 – shows a mix of English and Hindi films, from large first-run features to Bollywood fare but Baghdadi fears that this isn’t enough for local audiences.

“Once upon a time, a single-screen cinema would run a film for one or two weeks but multiplexes changed the whole way of looking at cinema,” he says. “The Regal still stands but it’s not quite what it used to be.”

Address: Cecil Court, Colaba Causeway, Apollo pier, Colaba, Mumbai,

Painting the town yellow

First published in Broadsheet, Autumn print issue, March 2014

Yellow, an imaginative Potts Point bistro from Brent Savage and Nick Hildebrandt, combines culinary inventiveness with artistic legacy.

In the 1930s, a hungry Picasso traded brushstrokes for bread at La Colombe d’Or in the South of France – these days diners feast on technicolour abstractions in between lobster bisque and bites of foie gras. Last year, London’s Pied a Tierre commissioned a series of artists who turned the Michelin-starred restaurant into a gallery space, creating everything from sculptures spun out of quail bones to paintings that unfold on porcelain plates. And when a modern-day bistro took shape inside Potts Point’s historic Yellow House, it was Sydney’s turn to reap the magic that’s sparked when good food collides with contemporary art.

“We’re really proud of the history behind Yellow House,” says Brent Savage, who established Yellow, an inventive restaurant that takes cues from French bistronomy, with sommelier Nick Hildebrandt in October last year.  “It has a special place in the hearts of locals and they feel a real sense of ownership towards it.”

Although Yellow House – an elegant, mustard-coloured terrace designed by 19^th century architect Maurice Halligan and corseted by Roman arches and striking gables – has always been part of Macleay Street’s fabric, this sense of ownership stems from the way it marked Potts Point out as a nexus of creativity. The house, which served as an exhibition space and haven for icons such as Robert Hughes, John Olsen and Robert Klippel, played host to a series of electrifying live art shows during the seventies and helped shape the careers of art stars like Albie Thomas, Brett Whitely, Bruce Goold and Martin Sharp.

For Savage, who also operates white-hatted CBD eatery The Bentley and Monopole, a moody wine bar a few blocks down, Yellow presented an opportunity to create a restaurant that could serve as a neighbourhood focal point. It also afforded him the chance to experiment with bistronomy, a Parisian culinary movement that aimed to tackle elitism in the French dining world by serving up thoughtful, gastronomic food in a laid-back setting.

“Nick and I felt that there was real need for a local bistro with a modern offering,” Savage says. “I was inspired by the trips that I’ve taken to Paris – I was driven to offer a market-driven menu that changes frequently and appeals to locals at an affordable price point.”

Savage might be onto something. At Yellow, dishes such as crisped-to-perfection pork belly topped with Cavalo Nero, Italy’s nod to kale, are a study in flavour and texture while left-field creations such as fall-apart lamb’s tongue crowned with raisins and puffed rice is a dangerously addictive tribute to Savage’s commitment to discarded cuts of meat. Here, the wine list includes a well-curated lineup of small producers including South Australia’s Lucy Margeaux.

“I’m really passionate about using simple ingredients that have almost been forgotten about,” Savage explains. “Things like Kohlrabi, which is a large type of radish as well as secondary cuts. To me, that’s what a bistro is all about – using cuts you wouldn’t necessarily get the chance to taste. But we also try to mix it up with classic dishes such as snapper and beef sirloin.”

Unsurprisingly, seasonality plays a starring role in Savage’s culinary mission while creating the sense of the unexpected that’s a legacy of the space.

“A lot of the menu is driven by what I see on a Saturday morning at Eveleigh Markets,” Savage says. “During the week I drive to the market an have a look around. We see new things every fortnight or so and jump on them.”

Yellow’s spontaneity extends to its fitout. Designer Pascal Gomes-McNabb’s talent for artful lighting sees sleek pendant lamps and exposed globes create an ambient dance of glow and shadow. Elsewhere, hardwood chairs and concrete tabletops combine bistro tradition and modern flair while the narrow front terrace offers a sun-dappled setting for weekend breakfast.

“We really want to keep people interested in what we serve and make sure that it’s surprising,” says Savage. “We’re well aware of the space’s history and conscious of what we’re doing with it. It’s really important that Yellow is part of the Potts Point community, somewhere that locals can enjoy at any time.”

The Cafe Modern

First published in Broadsheet Autumn print issue, March 2014

We’re almost used to it now, but it feels like queuing for your morning coffee, or a table for breakfast, was something that happened overnight in Sydney. We take a look at the radical progression of our local cafe scene and coffee culture, and chat to some of the players responsible for it.

Hazel Des Los Reyes knows it pays to trust your instincts. A decade ago, when the champion barista and micro-roaster first poured her lifelong passion into a neighbourhood cafe in leafy Dulwich Hill, drinking coffee in the Harbour City was a means to an end (that end being simply to wake up), not the end in itself it has become.

“I needed to attract customers with banana bread and sandwiches to get them interested in staying for coffee,” laughs Des Los Reyes. “Eventually I sold the space and started a new roastery on a premises in Addison Road. I started delivering 250gram bags of beans to local residences and studied for a certificate in workplace training so I could supplement my roasting pocket money. Slowly, slowly more people became interested. They started trickling in one by one.”

Unfolding in a spacious garage, Coffee Alchemy is as much a part of Marrickville’s industrial streetscape as the hulking factories that surround it – until you step inside. Here, concrete floors and a trio of inverted canisters – filled with beans named after famous alchemists – are a front for what feels like a makeshift lounge room, complete with people tapping away on computers, flipping through magazines and newspapers and generally settling down into the comfortable space for their morning coffees.

“We roast everything in-house each day and use contrasting approaches to get different results each time,” says Des Los Reyes, whose adventurousness is also reflected in Coffee Alchemy’s dizzying spectrum of coffee mediums – three single origins, six filters, a house blend, a pour-over and a cold drip. “Brewing methods that were rubbished when I started are now becoming more popular,” she says. “Back then, nobody anticipated the diversity in brewing methods or the quality of the coffee we were going to get hold of. I’m glad that all of us in the specialty coffee industry have followed this path.”

But this revolution does not belong to industry alone. Anyone who’s witnessed the endless queues or hour-long waits that tend to mark Sydney’s new wave of cafes would know that industry obsession is only half the equation. In the last few years, spending a sun- dappled Saturday over baked eggs and a short macchiato or convening with friends at the latest artfully restored coffee warehouse have rivaled cliff-top walks and beachside jaunts as this city’s most seductive pleasures.

Des Los Reyes’ latest project, Gumption – a slick, shoebox-sized operation housed in the CBD’s historic Strand Arcade – is a direct result of this citywide infatuation not just with coffee, but also with the experience surrounding it. “When customers come and like it, word spreads like wildfire,” says Des Los Reyes. “We built Coffee Alchemy from quiet to busy, but Gumption was busy from the beginning.”

For Des Los Reyes, every great expectation has its own set of downsides. “I’ve found that we’ve spoiled our customers. We’ve always bought beans from different climates, regions and countries, but because we started out with a lot of variety, customers expect that level of choice week in and week out.”

“It’s funny, because our palates have obviously changed,” agrees Russell Beard, who converted a Surry Hills printing factory intoReuben Hills, a sleek coffee house and roastery in 2011. “The coffees we used to enjoy five, six years ago are very different from the coffees we enjoy now.”

Beard would know. In 2007, the barista and roaster – who’s worked in the industry since 2000– opened The Source, a Mosman cafe that blazed early trails courtesy of a meticulous sourcing processes and his in-house Clover – an American coffee machine designed for cup-by-cup drip coffee brewing. The Source also schooled Beard in the challenges and prerogatives of direct trade, the model that sees cafe operators establish relationships with farmers in coffee growing climes across Africa and Central America.

However, it was Reuben Hills – which doubles as a shrine to polished minimalism thanks to concrete floors and cutouts offering glimpses of the upstairs roastery – that would define Beard’s trajectory. And more importantly, it was this imaginative space – along with the likes of sprawling, permaculture-heavy caffeine haven The Grounds of Alexandria – that would help alter the course of cafe culture in Sydney.

A typical Saturday morning scene at Reuben Hills sees couples and families snake outside the cafe, the pavement heaving with groups of friends retelling last night’s anecdotes and soaking up the scene. Inside, waiters balance plates piled with Central American breakfast baleadas, while a Synesso machine distilling single-origin beans sourced from three different countries is a purring counterpoint to the hip-hop soundtrack. It’s a buzzing, slick operation that’s executed with absolute precision and attention to detail, which is why people keep returning day after day. Like many new-wave cafes, the experience of Reuben Hills – food, space and coffee – is a package deal. One element is not sacrificed for the sake of another.

“When we started Reuben Hills, things exploded,” Beard recalls. “I think social media was a big part of it, customers were checking- in and using Instagram. I think it’s great but the hype can be really problematic – when you’re packed all of a sudden, you have to make sure the coffee always tastes great and the food is always good. When I started The Source, it was 12 months of hard slog and every week you’d see your customer base grow by a few more people. These days, cafes can be an overnight success. It’s scary from a business perspective – you ask yourself, ‘will these people still be here tomorrow?’ I guess it’s interesting how things have shifted.”

This shift has been geographical as well as cultural. Five years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find a flawless flat white outside Surry Hills or the Inner West, but these days operators such as Parramatta’s Circa, Ashfield’s Excelsior Jones and White Horse Coffee in Cronulla are toppling the city’s tired coffee hierarchies. And Bondi, an area once associated with lukewarm cappuccinos, serves as the beachside backdrop for the St ALi Sensory Lab, where copper piping and elaborate Hario syphons could see it serve as the lair of a fastidious chemist – if it wasn’t for the heady scent of roasting beans.

Along with geographical expansion and a considered approach to design, new technology has added to our appreciation of brewing and serving coffee. Beard says it’s no coincidence that Sydney’s cafe explosion correlates with a new appreciation of single- origin beans and the revival of brewing techniques such as filter, pour-over and siphon that make it impossible to hide the sins often disguised by espresso.

“In the States, the medium is all filter and in Australia it’s always been espresso because the Italians brought it here in the ’50s and ’60s,” he explains. “Now we want to serve filter because it’s a great medium for expressing flavour and taste. Filter is coffee served in its simplest form. You can manipulate the flavour depending on how you extract it – you can’t hide anything. The palate becomes very aware of roast and flavour.” The new wave of cafe customers is more aware of what’s available now, more interested in trying new things, and more informed about what they’re buying and drinking.

A few blocks away from Reuben Hills, a group of friends huddle around a communal table at Paramount Coffee Project, swapping stories in between cups of filtered Ethiopian Michiti. An aproned barista pulls caramel liquid from a gleaming Strada espresso machine while a trio of glass chambers, lined up with Spartan precision, lures curious onlookers with pour-overs on ice.

When the striking, white-tiled Paramount Coffee Project opened in the foyer of Surry Hills’ Paramount House late last year, its stripped-back elegance made it easy to overlook its audacious ambitions. The cafe serves up local interpretations of single-origin beans, features a filter bar where visitors can exchange tasting notes with the person brewing their short black and hosts month-long residencies staffed by cult roasters from overseas.

“I was approached to open a cafe in the Paramount Building and I really wanted it to be something interesting that took a new approach,” says Mark Dundon, who established the Paramount Coffee Project along with Beard. “I wanted to explore coffee from around the world as well as the way Australian roasters could offer different interpretations of a particular single-estate coffee. It’s something that really hasn’t been done before.”

Dundon is well versed in boundary breaking. The entrepreneur and micro-roaster, who opened much-loved South Melbourne cafe St ALi before launching inner-city coffee temples Seven Seeds and Brother Baba Budan, is credited with helping spearhead Melbourne’s third wave – a school of coffee consumption that diverges from the second wave’s espresso obsession by focusing on ethically sourced beans from single estates and left-field extraction techniques such as filter, syphon and cold-drip. But by inviting local operators to present espresso and filter versions of single-origin blends and collaborating with the likes of Danish specialty coffee maestros Coffee Collective and downtown LA’s G&B Coffee, Dundon’s Sydney venture has taken his third-wave missive to a new level. Still, Dundon admits the city’s response has taken him by surprise. “Our concepts have been fairly adventurous but they’ve also been a real hit,” he says. “We didn’t expect people to be so welcoming.”

Dundon is forgetting that like most frontier towns, risk-taking is part of Sydney’s DNA – even if it takes a while to be rewarded for it. In the 1950s, coffeehouses such as The Strand Arcade’s American Coffee Lounge and Galleria Espresso seduced a city of tea drinkers with oversized chrome espresso machines, inviting interiors and soulful, dark roasts. More than 40 years later, specialty-coffee mavericks such as Campos and Toby’s Estatecountered the blandness of second-wave coffee chains by buying beans directly from growers, roasting them in alleys and garages and cultivating flavours such as toffee, blueberry and chocolate. And in the last decade, boutique operators such as The Golden Cobra, The Little Marionette and Coffee Alchemy started experimenting with roasting styles, temperatures and ratios, creating light, silky brews that reflect our evolving palate.

For Russell Beard back at Paramount Coffee Project, Sydney’s cafe evolution owes less to industry missives than it does to customers’ readiness to make these spaces their own. “In the last few years, customers have become clearer about what they like and they’d prefer to steer away from franchises and instead support independent [cafes],” he says. “It’s become a lot easier to find good cafes in Sydney because of the way the community we serve has responded.”

Baking New Ground

First published in Renegade Collective, March 2014 

In a world that often equates work with drudgery, it’s easy to overlook the things that feel like play. But for Johnny Earle, the founder and CEO of Johnny Cupcakes – a left-field T-shirt empire that matches its obsession with pop culture with a reverence for baked goods – real success starts when you begin to pay attention to the moments that light you up.

“When I was nineteen and working in a record shop in Massachusetts, Newbury Comics, I was given all these nicknames by my co-workers,” Earle laughs. “When I was late for work, they called me Johnny Come Lately. And then, out of nowhere they called me Johnny Cupcakes. In response, I made up a couple of T-shirts with cupcakes printed on them as a joke and wore them to work. Strangers would come into the store and ask where they could get those shirts. It made them smile.”

When I meet Earle in the lobby of the Four Seasons, near Sydney’s Circular Quay, it’s clear that his dizzying trajectory has done nothing to dampen this trademark irreverence. Earle’s $US5.2 million dollar company may have attracted a Young Entrepreneur of the Year title from industry bible BusinessWeek but his outfit – jeans and a black hoodie emblazoned with his brand’s signature cupcakes-and-crossbones logo – recalls an ex-metal musician who hoards vintage comics and offbeat product packaging, not someone caught up in the trappings of striking entrepreneurial gold.

But, then, entrepreneurial gold was never the point. “I was just printing T-shirts that poked fun at popular culture, whether it was replacing the Statue of Liberty’s torch with a cupcake or a plane dropping cupcakes instead of bombs.” Earle says. “The brand kept growing, word-of-mouth kept spreading and while my friends were out partying Thursday to Saturday and recovering on Sunday, I spent that time putting 110 percent into my company.”

Earle’s efforts paid off. Although the fledgling business owner had been selling his creations to fans of his metal band from his battered Camry, customer demand meant that it was time to change tack – he set up an online store and transformed his parents’ house into a makeshift stockroom and his loyalists followed suit. Copyrighting his designs and scraping together the funds to attend a Las Vegas trade show saw his market presence grow in leaps and bounds – Earle was inundated with orders from the United Kingdom, Australia and Italy and started taking meetings with dream suppliers such as Macy’s and Urban Outfitters.

“I stopped watching TV, I made the choice not to party or drink,” he says. “It saved me so much time and money – things that you can never get back.”

Earle’s single-mindedness is a childhood affliction. In elementary school, the serial prankster doled out whoopee cushions and candy in between classes and graduated to lemonade stands and yard sales before selling drinks on the beach.

“I would see my parents come home upset from their day jobs and in the back of my head, I told myself that I was going to work for myself and support them one day,” he says. “I grew up with a lot of troublemakers. When my friends sold drugs, I sold candy.”

Newbury Street, a moneyed Boston avenue lined with elegant 19^th century townhouses, seems half a world away from Hull, the hometown that accommodated Earle’s early endeavours. But in 2006, the entrepreneur, armed with a $90,000 bank loan and unshakable faith in his product, made the glossy thoroughfare the site of his second flagship store.

“I had opened my first store in a boat garage down the street from my parents and then I opened in the city of Boston,” he recalls. “It was crazy because the rent was insanely high and I had no investors. It was a big risk.”

Earle shouldn’t have worried. The store’s grand opening was met by a 500-strong crowd of fans desperate for limited edition T-shirts that remixed slogans and reinvented images with cartoonish flair – Johnny Cupcakes made 300 percent of his rent in just 24 hours.

“I created all my early designs on my computer,” admits Earle, who’s since opened stores on LA’s Melrose Avenue and London’s Carnaby Street. “I had no formal design training, no business or marketing training – just a lot of things that I was really passionate about.”

Earle’s talent for risk-taking goes beyond the financial. He transforms his stores into vintage bakeries, complete with industrial ovens, baking racks and vanilla-scented air-freshener, seducing customers and toppling retail paradigms in the process. He cut ties with department stores and suppliers, swapping money for exclusivity and control over his brand – he was rewarded with deeper relationships and a worldwide following of fans. And he stuffs his T-shirts in cake mix boxes accompanied with batteries, trading cards or hand-written notes, an investment in customer experience that makes every customer feel like it’s their birthday.

“We’ll put random surprises in every order – so if someone buys a shirt from our website, you might get a Ninja Turtle trading card or maybe an action figure,” he grins, confessing that he’s also been known to treat his fans to ice-cream, via meet-ups organised via social media. “Retailers think that by saving money on that stuff it costs them more in the long run but if I take my advertising budget and invest it into building a one-of-a-kind experience, I won’t even have to advertise – because everyone’s talking about it.”

So, what happens when your addictive brand of playfulness sparks cupcake tattoos across your legions of fans? “Although I was disturbed when I saw the first one, I found out that customers were inspired to quit unhealthy lifestyles or start their own businesses,” he says. “I started listening to people’s stories and realised that there’s meaning behind everything.”

Paul Allam is a Baker

Sometimes, a small encounter can moor you when you feel like you’ve been cast adrift. Bourke Street Bakery is that kind of place. The pocket-sized space may be heavy with delicious aromas, thanks to fall-apart lemon tarts encased in buttery pastry and heaven-sent rosemary sourdough, but its power lies less in baking prowess than in the way it replicates the thrill of coming home.

When I arrive to meet Paul Allam, who co-founded the business in 2004 and now oversees the Bread and Butter Project, a wholesale bakery dedicated to employing and empowering new refugees, it’s impossible not to recall that sensation. Conceived when Allam and his wife Jess took a trip to the Thai-Burmese border—where they taught Karen women how to bake bread and supply local businesses—the Bread and Butter Project is proof that homecomings can coincide with new beginnings. It also marks Allam’s transformation from soulful baker to social entrepreneur.

When you first stumbled on the original Bourke Street Bakery site did you have a strong vision for what you wanted it to be?

Bourke Street Bakery started when David [McGuinness] and I found that corner in Surry Hills and it grew organically from there. One thing we did know was that we wanted it to be about community. It’s the thing that made the original bakery successful. It’s a tiny community hub—people come in and we always know who they are.

Before that, I was a chef.  I started when I left school and then moved to Prague and baked in cafes. It’s always been about food for me. The Bread and Butter Project is just another connection with food but in a way that I’d never experienced before.

In 2011, you took a trip to the Thai/Burmese border and taught Karen refugees to bake. How did that come about?

I received a random phone call from my uncle, whose friend was in contact with an orphanage in Mae Sot and asked whether I wanted to come over, set up a micro-bakery and teach women from the refugee camps how to bake and sell those goods in a nearby town. I went over with Jess, stayed for ten days, and taught fifteen women the stages of baking. Three of them went on to be employed at the orphanage.

That was the catalyst for the Bread and Butter Project. I thought to myself, “I’m not going to be able to run that from the other side of the world.” But when I returned, I wrote a few drafts about how I could replicate that concept in Sydney. And when I showed that to a lawyer friend, Sally McGeough, she said, “That’s social enterprise idiot!” [laughs].

How do you decide who you work with?

Right now, the Migrant Resources Centre is our main pool of employment, but before that, we spoke to almost every agency in New South Wales. Then the Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations gave us a grant, which allowed us to bring on a trainee support manager whose job it is to look after issues that arise with refugees. At the moment, we’ve got five trainees, from Burma, Thailand and Sierra Leone.

They’ve all said that our project has given them a sense of purpose. They’re incredibly good at what they do. For some people a job is just a job, but at Bourke Street a job is not just a job and at Bread and Butter, the money that they receive impacts their families.

Currently, it’s a yearlong traineeship after which we aim to find them sustainable employment, make sure they’re happy and help them navigate the Australian workplace. We also have tutors that come in once a week to improve literacy and numeracy. Mae and Som will be the first to finish and we’d love to see them come back as baker-trainees with the skills to understand cross-cultural communication.

And how has it helped you evolve?

The whole process has been an amazing learning curve for me as well as the five founding members. There’s also the challenge of understanding refugees and piecing together how trauma affects people. It’s very humbling to come into a workplace and see people who haven’t had a job before come into a workplace and really try.

What are your plans for the Bread and Butter Project?
At the moment, we have over 70 stockists across Sydney and we’re growing. The more bread we sell, the more trainees we can put on—all profits go back to the business and the public plays a role in expanding it. Jess and I also wrote a book, which combines trainee stories and baking recipes.

There’s something about bread that’s so universal, isn’t there?
There’s bread in every culture and you can build so many narratives around it. It’s one of those things that brings people together.

Periphery Vision

There are some parts of Melbourne that remain untouched by the tyranny of cool. High Street, Thornbury, with its mix of kebab outlets, tyre shops and non-ironic bikie bars, is one of these places. Sure, the odd café and vintage store nods at what might come, but the area still feels like it sits on an edge. It would be safe to assume that Perimeter Books, a new venture by independent publishers Dan Rule and Justine Ellis, is inspired by the idea of periphery. This is, after all, a city that welcomes entrepreneurial endevours with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for late night whiskies or long summer days.

“I’m a bit weird, being a writer and coming from a background, technically of poetry, I’ve always been hung up on the phonetics of particular words. Perimeter just kept coming back into my head and I really liked its connotations. When we were coming up with a name for the store, I said ‘What about perimeter?’ and we had a bit of a chuckle because I hate place-space names, but at the same time we thought, it’s in Thornbury, it’s on the perimeter. I love the word periphery, but it felt a bit too exclusive,” laughs Rule.

Perimeter Books does seem like an oddly mathematical name for a space dedicated to small press and art, architecture, design and photography books. But the name evokes the finiteness of a perimeter precisely, the potential to keep books safe in a world of laptops and iPads.

The pair first came across the idea for Perimeter Books while visiting friends in Brooklyn. “There was a little store called By and By. I think it’s shut down since. It was about half the size of this space, and it was just a guy, a few books he really liked, and a few magazines, some T-shirts his friends had made and a gallery space. It was really simple, really small and manageable – it wasn’t trying to be a general bookstore or anything. Justine and I just walked in and we were in heaven. We thought it was amazing and said ‘Imagine doing something like this in Melbourne’,” Rule says.

Rule and Ellis returned to Melbourne and put the dream on the back burner, until earlier this year when art book distributor Modern Journal leased out the front of its Thornbury premises. The duo then proceeded with the store fit-out, inspired by elements of overseas bookstores and art spaces. “Justine and I had spent a lot of time in Japan. I don’t want to overstate the Japanese thing but we were influences by a kind of minimalism that’s still warm.” Minimalism and warmth may seem directly opposed, but Perimeter Books somehow manages both. The white walls and hardwood floors are punctuated by the odd plant, pieces from recent exhibitions and the books themselves – limited run and imaginatively jacketed. The store features modular, triangle-leg tables, in keeping with the geometry of its name.

The store stocks international small press and art titles from publishers such as Switzerland’s Nieves, London’s NoBrow Press and Post Editions, from Rotterdam. Citing Post Editions as a favourite imprint, Rule picks up Shelter, a hardback volume of photography by Henk Wildschut. Featuring different sized pages and a cover doubling as a poster, Shelter is the type of audacious publishing project completely at odds with a world drunk on Amazon. Rule lists Berlin magazine Mono Kultur among his most-loved publications. “It’s a big inspiration – it’s what I call gutsy publishing. Just the idea of a 32 page interview with one artist…”

On the front, Perimeter sells back catalogue and upcoming releases from ERM Books, the indie publishing company Rule started along with Ellis and illustrator Marc Martin. Known for championing Melbourne talent, ERM has produced artist’s books by Kat McLeod and photographers Louis Porter and Warwick Baker with a project by Beci Orpin in the works.

“We made a little rule that in our first year we wouldn’t be buying anything for any commercial imperative. Maybe down the track we might have to do that, but now we’re here to show books in a particular way. People often come in and say they haven’t seen this particular book before. Another bookstore might have a copy but its probably buried under a hundred tattered books,” he continues.

“In many ways, the subject and topic that a book covers is really important, but the publishing values are really important as well. We won’t really stock books that are poorly produced. We want to stock books that are beautiful and interesting.”

Commercial gain might not be a priority at Perimeter Books, but highlighting their tactility is high on the agenda. French-folded pages, heavy stitching and exposed glue ask to be picked up and touched, an urge we have yet to shrug off, according to Rule. “We haven’t quite got our head around hard drive crashes. So it’s crazy to me that people are giving away their entire record collections,” he ponders.

Instead of showing art books and small press as a relic of the past, Perimeter is engaged in “bringing them out of the art ghetto and into a vernacular people can understand.” The bookstore also doubles as an exhibition space for artists interested in the printed form – upcoming shows will feature New York photographer Josh Gurrie and Sydney typographer Mark Gowing.

Rule also wants to offer support to younger independent publishers such as Parts & Crafts, a risograph studio and printing press operating out of an old mechanics studio in North Carlton.

“It just comes back to issues with small press publishing and us knowing how hard it is to get distribution and representation in bookstores out here. But there’s quite a vibrant little community of people, especially younger kids, in the last six months to a year. We’re 31, 32 and while we don’t think of ourselves as senior citizens, we can support ourselves. So we thought we’d try and do something that could help nurture the scene and the stuff we like – not just the stuff we like, but the stuff that’s well published.”

Wall Art by Erstwhile

Erstwhile, an artful restorer of vintage maps, knows that design nous goes best with a pioneering spirit.

For Dirk Baetzold, maps spark the power of imperfect beauty as much as our desire to explore. Late last year, the designer and founder of Erstwhile started scouring antique stores, libraries and historical archives for 1930s Australian topography, botanical illustrations from Germany and weathered charts that conceal jewelled riffs on the British Isles, before restoring them in his Rushcutter’s Bay apartment.

“It’s hard not to be fascinated with old maps and charts,” says Baetzold. “Those artworks come out of a time when every mountain range, flower bloom or descriptive text was drawn by hand. There’s a real beauty to the manual creation of those artworks complete with all their quirks.”

There’s something of the 18th century pioneer to Baetzold’s own process. Sourcing maps everywhere from the British Library to the University of Miami, he then sets about tracking down the copyright owner and securing the rights to republish the artworks. He also donates five per cent of all proceeds to the Vera Historical Fund, a Newcastle-based organisation dedicated to preserving regional heritage.

“It was quite a pragmatic decision for us as they provided us with our very first artworks,” he says. “Erstwhile started with their help. I think it’s important to preserve history, both regional and general. If you know where you’re coming from, you understand where you’re about to go.”

Boabs: Ancient Trees, Modern Needs

Boabs: Ancient trees, modern needs  

The boab is the plant world’s most ardent multi-tasker. This native tree might tread the line between ugly and beautiful thanks to branches that resemble gnarled fingers and outrageous hourglass curves but its true magic stems from its ability to address a baffling range of modern-day afflictions. Here are five crises best solved by an encounter with adansonia gregorii.

A temporary abode for the camping-averse

Exploring the outback but completely hapless when it comes to erecting a tent? You’re in luck. The boab may lay claim to a sinister past – it served as a jail cell for indigenous prisoners during the eighteenth century – but it can also double as a weatherproof residence courtesy of a hollow trunk that spans up to twenty metres in diameter.

An impromptu water source

Thriving for over a thousand years in the Australian desert calls for an extraordinary knack for water retention. Luckily, the boab, which can hold nearly 100,000 litres of water, over-delivers on this front. If you’re thirsty, chew a piece of fibrous bark or skip the mastication and install a tap.

A cure for flagging immune systems

Nutrient-rich and boasting elusive medicinal qualities, the boab played a starring role in indigenous diets across the Kimberley while chasing away everything from fever to malaria with ancient aplomb. These days, boab seeds – curious pods with an obscene vitamin C quotient – are an addictive alternative to orange juice. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

An instant fix for a salad malaise

There’s something dispiriting about a tired salad. Sweet, nutty and entirely edible, baby boab roots can lend your sorriest side-dish some much-needed punch. These delicate tubers are also a blissful addition to soups, dips and pickles.

An arresting alternative to iCal 

Tired of a relentless stream of notifications? Nicknamed “Calendar Tree”, the boab’s deciduous rhythms allowed European settlers to read changing seasons with ease. Alternating between dramatic leaflessness and white-flowered splendour, the boab makes a hypnotic – if impractical – replacement for digital bleeps.

Antique China

Published in Scoop Homes & Art, Summer 2013/14

The search for quality Chinese pieces is growing harder, as collector interest reaches its peak 

The London suburb of West Ruislip feels half a world away from South Kensington, home to fabled auction house Christie’s – the unofficial epicenter of the global art world. But in November 2010, an exquisite porcelain vase – etched with the turquoise-and-gold fish motif associated with the Qianlong Dynasty – put the unassuming borough on collectors’ maps. The vase, sold by family auctioneers Bainbridge’s and purchased by an anonymous Chinese billionaire for £43 million, set a new sale record for Oriental art. And although the piece was resold a year later, thanks to the buyer’s mysterious disappearance, it signaled a bold new chapter for the Chinese antiques market.

“The Chinese market is the market of the moment,” says Walter Antoniazzi, antique specialist and owner of Louis Antiques. “When I’m in Europe for buying trips, the sold stickers that once belonged to American dealers are now dominated by buyers from Shanghai and Beijing.”

For Antoniazzi, this influx of Chinese buyers stems from the explosive growth of the country’s middle class – a trend that has renewed national interest in traditional artifacts and interior decoration as well as lavish displays of wealth. “We saw the same thing twenty years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed,” he adds. “It’s the first wave of buyers and we don’t know when it will end.”

Paul Bowler, director of Matilda Antiques Centre in North Fremantle, is seeing this shift replicated closer to home.  “In the last four years, we’ve been answering more queries and shipping more pieces to mainland China,” he says.

This is also shaking up global auction houses – Christie’s held its first Shanghai auction in September 2013, in a bid to tap into the lucrative market and in April 2011, a Melbourne Sotheby’s auction saw a rare Chinese Famille Rose vase fetch $480,000.

Bowler also observes that buyers are exercising new levels of discernment when shopping for Chinese antiques and using technology to hunt down flawless purchases. “We regularly get asked if we have good porcelain in the shop and buyers often scrutinise each piece multiple times,” he says. “Often, they take photos with their smartphones and send pictures back to China for further research.”

However, China’s new love affair with antiques goes beyond the aesthetic. It’s also part of a nationalistic push to recognise a tradition of craftsmanship, dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618 AD) and spanning everything from ceramics and woodwork to earthenware and lacquerware, that – until now – has been tragically overlooked.

It’s this mastery – emulated by European artisans such as Josiah Wedgwood centuries later – that drives both desirability and financial value for Western and Chinese buyers.

“The Chinese have been masters of porcelain and ceramic work for centuries. You can buy a piece of porcelain from the ninth century that was made at a specific kiln in a specific reign by a specific maker and it will be worth millions,” Bowler explains. “It really comes down to the credibility of the potter himself and how he stands in terms of his relationship to the Imperial Court. Another piece of porcelain that looks the same, but perhaps wasn’t made by the same master, won’t come anywhere near that kind of price.”

But for Adam Liebson, a Sydney dealer specialising in Chinese furniture and collectibles such as ornate redwood storage chests and intricate blue and white porcelain from the late Ch’ing Dynasty (1644-1912), this new demand is creating serious scarcity issues. Liebson, who sources his pieces from the Shanxi, Hebei and Tianjin provinces in Northern China and the Guangxi region in Southern China, feels that high-quality pieces are becoming increasingly difficult to source.

“Chinese antiques are running out,” he says. “We used to source our antiques at massive warehouses and we could easily import them in. These days, we have to do all the legwork, visit faraway country regions and go from dealer to dealer before sending pieces to our factory in China where they complete the restoration.”

Liebson also notes that serious collectors that may have once taken a purist’s approach to Chinese antiques are embracing a more offbeat aesthetic. “When it comes to interior decoration, it’s becoming more and more of a cross-pollination of cultures. Clients are blending Chinese pieces with French Provincial furniture, for instance. It’s become very versatile,” he says.

This has also stoked an obsession with raw, unpolished pieces of furniture – softwood tables, clay pottery or elegant bowls minus the signature jade glaze – best suited to a casual living environment.

Still, there’s nothing quite as powerful as being in the presence of an original.

“We often look at a piece of English porcelain – Wedgwood or Royal Doulton – and we appreciate beauty, rarity or collectability,” says Bowler. “But Chinese antiques have an ethereal quality. In China, porcelain is valued because it embodies the spirit of the people as well as the context under which it was made.”

Arthur’s Amazing Babes

For Eliza Sarlos, the creator of picture-book Amazing Babes, the stories we hear when we’re small hold the keys to big dreams.

Eliza Sarlos knows that if we want to live our best story, we need to hear the right ones first. A few months before her son Arthur’s first birthday, the creative producer, broadcaster and writer dreamed up the ultimate present – an illustrated storybook that proved how inspirational women could work as guideposts for an extraordinary life.

“I was really conscious about there being so much in the world about the achievements of men,” says Sarlos. “I wanted him to grow up in a world where he was aware of women striving towards really amazing things. Obviously, he was too young to understand the achievements of the women in the book but it was a starting point for him to look further into what they’ve done and frame how he views everyone in the world, rather than just focusing on men.”

Sarlos whittled down a list of her 10 favourite female idols – everyone from Riot Grrl Kathleen Hanna and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo to modern-day icons such as Tavi Gevinson – before enlisting Tokyo-based illustrator Grace Lee to capture their essence on the page.“Grace is a friend of mine and I’ve always loved her drawings,” says Sarlos. “When I asked her initially, she said no as she’d never drawn people before – she said ‘I only draw animals.’ But I convinced her she should do it. I sent her some references images and she just wove her magic.”

Magic, a quality that makes the impossible seem simple, is a good word to sum up Amazing Babes. The technicolour portraits and accompanying text combine child-like optimism with wide-eyed aspiration and shows that marvelling at what’s possible can bring hidden dreams to light.

For Sarlos, whose obsession with the Dr Seuss classic The Places You Will Go helped inspire a career trajectory that includes stints as board member of FBi Radio and as director of Music NSW and Underbelly Arts, maintains a sense of wonder can have real-world effects.

“When I first got the pictures back from Grace, we did a crowdfunding campaign and Scribe Publications got in touch the second day,” Sarlos remembers. “We were so honoured. All within a year, we’ve gone from not having a book to having a book. Last year it existed as an idea and nothing more and now it exists in stores, which is incredible.”

Released last month, the official version includes the likes of Pakistani teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, Burmese political visionary Aung San Suu Kyi and actress-turned-inventor Hedy Lamarr – a rollcall of female achievement spanning race, talent and class.

“I wanted to make sure that I represented women from different times and different skill sets. I wanted to be clear about the fact that there are different ways to be amazing,” says Sarlos.

“In the last couple of years, feminism has kind of mainstreamed. I think it’s great that young boys and girls are growing up during this time and I can’t wait to see what the world will look like in 10 years.”

Amazing Babes (Scribe Publications) is available to purchase online.

amazingbabes-thebook.com

War is Over! (If you want it)

War Is Over (If you want it), a MCA survey charting the work of artist and performer Yoko Ono, is proof that the relationship between art and activism is as poignant as ever.

For Yoko Ono, the only history that matters is the kind you write yourself. The 80 year old musician, artist and activist might be miscast as the temptress responsible for the downfall of The Beatles but her artistic legacy speaks louder than the acid traces of misogyny.

“Yoko Ono has always been something of an anomaly,” explains Rachel Kent, curator of War is Over (if you want it), the first Australian survey of Ono’s prolific creative output, set to unfold at the MCA in November.“When she relocated from Japan to New York in 1952, she was a young Asian woman working in a white, male American art world. “She didn’t have a context and there weren’t any peers or mentors for her.”
Luckily, Ono has never baulked at the prospect of forging her own path. In 1951, she was the first female student to be accepted into the prestigious philosophy program at Tokyo’s Gakushin University, dropping out after two semesters to study at New York liberal arts college Sarah Lawrence – a period of creative incubation that acquainted her with composer John Cage and the Fluxus Group, a collective of artists, musicians and poets that traded in the avant garde. In the sixties, Ono started staging exhibitions, happenings and performance art including “Cut Piece”, a treatise on selfhood, that saw her sit statue-like while strangers sheared away at her clothing. In the same period, her one-woman show at a London art gallery piqued John Lennon’s interest, sowing the seeds for a love affair and co-conspiracy that would span both art and life.

Kent says that Ono and Lennon’s belief in the link between performance and activism, an idea that found it’s apex in the series of bed-ins staged by the couple in 1969 , resonates as powerfully today as it did five decades ago. It also shaped Kent’s curatorial approach.“I chose the title of the exhibition based on a campaign that Ono generated with John Lennon, a billboard campaign titled I chose the title of the exhibition for a billboard campaign that she generated with John Lennon, titled “War Is Over (if you want it),” she offers.“I think her message of collaboration, conciliation and unified action is incredibly relevant to a new generation. I think over the years it’s galvanised people and reached new audiences.”

Ono’s work has always been interested in individual agency, the role which we each play in shaping and changing the world. She achieves this by troubling the boundaries between audience and artist, inviting you to become part of the process and give in to the chance that you might be transformed.

“There are about eight works in the MCA exhibition that are participatory works, where we as viewers and audiences get involved in the actual creation of meaning,” says Kent. “There’s an interactive work called Play It By Trust, where audiences are invited to play a game of chess with a stranger. You can’t tell who controls each piece and the idea of competition starts to flounder.”

War is Over also includes Wish Tree for Sydney, a work that asks viewers to record their deepest wishes, and display the results on a native tree. Conceived in 1966 and inspired by a Japanese Shinto temple, it’s a Utopian piece that’s steeped in the notion that expressing your desires will set them free.
“It’s five decades of work that I hope will help people understand her as more than just a name but as a very vibrant and prolific artist,” says Kent. “If there is one thing I want audiences to take away from this exhibition, it’s hope. I think that so much of our world is riven with conflict, anger and fear that sometimes we forget about the positive and our humanity gets pushed to the back.”

Make sex like a man

For Anais Nin a chance elevator ride before a Manhattan party was proof that you could have everything at once. The writer and diarist may have only spent a few minutes with Rupert Poole, a former actor 16 years her junior, but these were magnetic enough to see her augment a marriage to wealthy banker Hugo Guiler with a second existence as a housewife in suburban LA. Nin spent the rest of her life flying between coastlines and using a box of index cards to track an elaborate web of lies: a ploy that speaks less of a woman who couldn’t commit than of one who believed singularity is the death of satisfaction.

Depending on who you survey, Anais Nin was either a mid-century feminist postergirl, a self-obsessed bigamist fueled by a monstrous libido and raging ego or a writer with an alchemist’s ability to lend erotica poetry’s high sheen. Nin believed sex could be both an exercise in sensuality and an intellectual excursion and her work is spun as much out of this duality as it is out of affairs with the likes of Henry Miller, Edmund Wilson and Antonin Artaud. But mostly, it reflects a diary suggestion that “we write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

Anais Nin was born Angela y Culmell to Spanish-Cuban parents on the outskirts of Paris. She started the first volume of her diary, aged 11, a few years after her composer father Joaquin Nin abandoned her family for another woman. This compulsion would see her fill eleven volumes and thirty five thousand pages over the course of her life.

Nin married Guiler in Havana in 1923 and the couple relocated to France the following year, where she started therapy with Freud’s rival, Otto Rank. Nin attributes her time with Rank as an artistic rebirth – it drove her to complete her first published work, a critique of DH Lawrence, in sixteen days.
“As he talked, I thought of my difficulties with writing and of my struggles to find a language for intuition, feeling, instincts which are, in themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless,” she writes.

In 1932, a struggling Brooklyn writer called Henry Miller took Nin to a threadbare hotel room in Montparnasse, signaling an affair sparked by a wordless connection but made entirely out of words. Although Nin and Miller spent three decades in secret trysts, it was heated conversation, heady love letters and shared literary aspirations that saw their relationship take shape. “I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realise,” he writes. “Life and literature combined […] being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. The insatiable delight of experience.”

For Nin, gender restraints were no match for this thirst for experience – a focus that was less passion than it was life force. In her 1954 novella, A Spy in the House of Love, a character named Sabrina engages in a string of anonymous sexual encounters in upper-crust New York, in an effort to engage in sex like a man. In a 1978 interview with The Paris Review, Joan Didion would comment that Nin’s mastery of male subjectivity was so striking, that reading her cold was like “reading something written by a man trying to write as a woman.” In a 2001 Salon article, Kathy Wilson suggests that Nin’ is literature’s nod to Stevie Nicks and that “both artists carved out their own niche of feminine sensibility, smack dab in the middle of a man’s realm.”

When Nin died of cancer in 1977, she proved that the urge to experience everything sometimes comes at a price. Obituaries in The New York Times and The LA Times might have linked her to separate husbands but it also played witness to her most enduring motto: “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”

Sister Jane, Whole Wide World

‘Whole Wide World’ is a track that is equal parts sonic sidestep and emotional evolution. The song also hints at the sprawling soundscapes and sweeping imagery at the heart of their forthcoming second record. Frontier will see the Sydney five-piece channel their trademark electricity into an accomplished studio effort.

‘Whole Wide World’ is a treatise on new beginnings and epic ambition. The track was recorded between an abandoned schoolhouse in Wauchope (NSW) and guitarist Liam Judson’s Sydney studio. Mastering duties were taken care of by Grammy award-winning producer William Bowden. Judson’s riffs recall the cinematic splendour of Echo And The Bunnymen, spiked with traces of post-punk and Dan Davey’s vocals – reminiscent of Britpop hedonism – are an exercise in narrative swagger. Elsewhere, Michaela Davies’ bass lends Lauren Crew’s sixties-soaked keyboards a tougher edge while an urgent drumbeat showcases Joe Driver’s technical progression and doubles as Krautrock-inflected call to arms.

The product of a fiercely collaborative ethos, ‘Whole Wide World’ is both a musical departure and a coming of age. It’s also proof of a band at the height of its powers – an unconstrained yet accessible musical foray.

Musical Chairs

First published in Vault, November 2013

Sydney’s Favourite Small Bars

First published in Live4 June 2013 

From lo-fi dive bars to glamorous drinking dens, Sydney’s best types of hedonism are almost small enough to fit in your pocket.

Until recently, Sydney owed its “Sin City” moniker more to sprawling beer barns and heaving nightclubs than the kind of intimate, considered watering holes that make you want to linger. But since the relaxing of the state’s once notoriously tough licensing act a few years back, Sydney’s small bar scene has undergone something of a revolution.

In the last year, the city has given rise to a new wave of drinkeries that couple pocket-sized interiors with oversized thrills – from moody cocktail dens staffed by tuxedoed waiters to back-alley dive bars where the jukebox runs overtime. These are the five small bars you need to know about.

Bulletin Place

First floor, 10-14 Bulletin Place, Sydney

If you were putting together a bartending dream team, chances are it would include Tim Philips, Adi Ruiz and Robb Sloan. Between them, the trio has amassed some serious credentials including stints at London’s high-wattage Milk & Honey and Melbourne’s Black Pearl, as well as a World Class Bartender of the Year title. However, Bulletin Place – an understated upstairs bar featuring industrial touches, flawless service and classic cocktails spun out of fresh, seasonal ingredients – is proof of what’s possible when professionalism meets passion.

The Rook

Rooftop at 56-58 York St, Sydney

Where do you for go for market lobster, dizzying city views and a fitout that’s equal parts glamour and grunge? The latest venture from the minds behind the Newtown Hotel and Sweethearts Rooftop BBQ might have tapped into an unlikely trifecta, but it’s one that somehow works. If you’re a traditionalist, The Rook’s drinks menu is heavy on craft beer, European aperitifs and a classy wine list that includes an Alain Brumont Chateau Montus Madiran and a Stonier 2008 from Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.

The Midnight Special

44 Enmore Rd, Newtown

This Enmore dive bar is a hit with the locals, thanks to candlelit booths, an endless supply of tinnies and its addictive “not dog” – a vegan-friendly version of comfort food featuring tofu sausage and sauerkraut. It also owes its rock ‘n’ roll vibe to checkerboard tiling and a vinyl habit that spans everything from Johnny Cash to The Smiths. If you’re a control freak when it comes to your Saturday night soundtrack, there’s no need to worry – The Midnight Special welcomes regulars who bring in their own records.

The Grasshopper

1 Temperance Lane, Sydney

One of the first fixtures on the Sydney small bar circuit, The Grasshopper proves that the original is sometimes still the best. Tucked away at the end of Temperance Lane, this pint-sized basement bar serves up plush seating, vintage-inspired decor and cures to offbeat thirsts – think vodka-and-pomegranate concoctions served up in jam jars and beakers filled with rice wine, port and aperol. If romance wins out over adventure, The Grasshopper is also home to a hidden dining lair dishing out Parisian dinner staples, wine and ambience in spades.

Selby Road Bar

Corner of Elizabeth Street and Redfern Street, Redfern

It’s no secret that bars such as Arcadia Liquors, The Dock and The Fern have made gritty Redfern one of Sydney’s most inspired places to drink. And Selby Road – a low-lit enclave sporting concrete floors, chilli fries and Little Creatures on tap – is an interesting new addition. The space also features a wide balcony made for sipping a Cuba Libre and surveying the foot traffic crossing Redfern Park.

The path to productivity

First published in Public Accountant magazine, December/January 2013 

Happy, engaged employees are a company’s best assets. But how do you measure and improve staff productivity?
In the last few years, tough economic conditions and rising market competition has set the stage for a new productivity imperative among Australian businesses. For companies, this has seen efficiency become a critical measure of employee performance and play a pivotal role in acquiring and maintaining a competitive edge. Despite this, the 2012 Telstra Productivity Indicator shows that while 80% of Australian businesses identify employee efficiency as an ongoing priority, only 25% were making moves to quantify, assess and improve it. The survey, which examines the views of 387 private enterprises and 109 government organisations, also highlights that a failure to take productivity seriously can see businesses forfeit market share and create major barriers to growth.

Prakash Menon, CEO mentor and executive coach, believes that this inability to recognise the true impact of productivity stems from a lack of understanding about employees’ motivations and goals. Menon, who previously served as the logistics director for Myer, says that the contemporary employee is driven by “learning opportunity” and that employers who fail to address this will see a slump in productivity.

“While it’s true that employees are a company’s biggest asset, if your staff aren’t learning anything new, it’s common for productivity to peak after the first or second year,” he says. “This can often result in high staff turnover and employee absenteeism – two important signs that employers are losing the battle when it comes to employee efficiency and productivity.”

Menon says that while most businesses advocate the value of employee development on a surface level, there is often a major disconnect between the values of an organisation and the culture it fosters. He suggests that businesses that cultivate knowledge and thought leadership, particularly in the case of top-tier or executive level staff, are those best placed to reap productivity gains.

“US company Cisco is a great example of this. They pay employees to attend and speak at industry events, put together presentations and position themselves as a brand. As a result, they experience much greater productivity levels and higher rates of employee retention,” he offers.

But if productivity is linked to investment in staff development and learning opportunity, how should companies measure their employees’ efficiency levels and identify the scope for growth? Effective productivity measurements should provide managers with data that can rank employees according to the frequency of their output as well as their quality of work. Traditionally, efficiency has been calculated by comparing the actual time it takes an employee to perform a UOS (unit of service) against the theoretical time it takes to complete the given task. However, the accuracy of this metric can fluctuate between industries and fail to take into account important variables as well as the nature of the job itself.

“In the case of retail organisation, productivity correlates with the quota of sales you make an hour. If you’re working in a warehouse, UOS is calculated according to the cartons you shift,” Menon says. “The problem with these metrics is that they don’t take into account other signs of employee productivity such as innovation.”

Menon identifies project-based metrics, which assess efficiency based on the ability to meet defined deliverables, as one way around this and stresses the importance of regular feedback to ensure that employees are meeting productivity goals.

Although it’s important that businesses measure and track efficiency, he maintains that developing a sharp understanding of the factors that impact productivity is the first step to charting an effective plan of action and paving the way for growth.

Sydney’s Best Chinese Food

Published in Live4 November 2013

From melt-in-your-mouth dumplings to decadent Peking duck, here’s our tour of the best Chinese in town.

Whether you’re obsessed with back alley dumpling dens or live for late night eateries ruled by heaving yum cha trolleys, Sydney is no stranger to the thrills of eating Chinese. These local institutions are a crash course in the flavours and textures of China, minus the hefty plane ticket.

Billy Kwong, Eveleigh Market

Terrified of the queues snaking around Kylie Kwong’s Crown Street headquarters? Skip the original and head for the scaled down version: a humble market stall doling out Chinese breakfast staples, including pork wontons and savoury pancakes gussied up with organic vegetables and egg, courtesy of the woman herself. Swap your latte for a cup of green tea to start your Saturday with extra zen.

Eveleigh Markets, 243 Wilson St, Darlington

Din Tai Fung

Ever wondered how Xiao Long Bao – that delicate, broth-filled dumpling encased in tissue-thin skin – found its way from 19th century Shanghai to downtown Sydney? Blame Din Tai Fung. The famed Taipei-based dumpling chain has the world hooked on the Chinese delicacy and this local outpost is no different. Pull up a wooden chair, ready your chopsticks and give into slurp-heavy bliss.

450 George St, Sydney

Kam Fook

Waistcoat-clad waiters. Dramatic lighting. Lazy susans piled with bamboo baskets. If you crossed a movie set with your favourite suburban Cantonese joint, the results would look a little like Kam Fook. This sprawling restaurant draws lunching businessmen, expats and families with stuffed crab claw, king prawns crowned with Szechuan spices and a two-course Peking Duck bound to revisit you in your dreams.

Shop 600, Level 6, Westfield Shoppingtown/28 Victor St, Chatswood

Golden Century

It’s easy to see why Momofuku’s Dave Chang swears by Golden Century. Whether you go for the plates of pipis spiked with fiery XO sauce, bowls of soul-affirming rice congee or mountains of crispy whitebait, an evening out in Sydney isn’t complete without a late night date at this Chinatown favourite. Golden Century’s around-the-clock kitchen might manage an endless procession of dishes but it also blends the high-energy with the high-end – this may be the only place in Sydney where you can sip three types of Grange at 4 am.

393-399 Sussex St, Haymarket

China Lane

Asian fusion may be a food world buzzword but China Lane proves that there’s life in that old chestnut yet. Tucked away in Angel Lane, this eatery matches a design-heavy fit-out – all Danish dining chairs and moody lighting – with a version of Chinese that’s high on modern flourishes. Here, dishes such as crispy pork belly topped with chilli caramel and lemongrass sashimi are an ode to hot, sour, salty and sweet, while the dumplings stuffed with lobster and truffle are proof of what happens when adventurousness meets talent.

2 Angel Pl, Sydney

Mr Wong

It’s dangerous to dismiss Mr Wong as just another attempt to paint the city Merivale. The Cantonese eating house, which channels the seedy charms of a Hong Kong dive bar, serves up some of the city’s most addictive Chinese food thanks to executive chef Dan Hong. Although the interiors are impressive – think rows of hanging ducks, brick walls and kitsch prints that conjure the bedroom of a forgotten empress – the menu is the crowning glory. Come for its unrivalled dim sum selection or feast on Singapore-style rock lobster, pigs’ ears and the best whole roast duck this side of Beijing.

3 Bridge Ln, Sydney

It Started with a Sidetable

The Sydney outpost of celebrated US design firm Blu Dot features elegant, considered furniture, minus the aspirational price tag.

For Brett Conroy, a glimpse of a watermelon side table in the pages of Dwell magazine proved that you only need to see something once to know you need it in your life. “I saw this table and thought ‘I need that’. There was something about its architectural qualities, its scale. I knew I had to have it.”

The side table may have represented a blissful union of form and function, but it was when Conroy encountered its makers – celebrated Minneapolis furniture designers Blu Dot – that he realised that aesthetic connection was just a sign of bigger things to come.

“When I first came across Blu Dot, I knew that we needed their aesthetic in Australia,” he recalls. “I’d visited their Soho showroom a couple of times and they told me how many Australians visited. We dated, we fell in love and that was it.”

So Conroy, whose background is a lucky blend of design and logistics, set about bringing Blu Dot to Sydney, the third location for the design firm after New York and Los Angeles.

You can hardly blame him. Blu Dot’s pieces combine the elegance of mid-century modernist design with a level of functionality that suits small-scale living – whether in a Manhattan loft or a terrace in Sydney or Melbourne. Best of all, the pieces are accompanied by a price tag that’s accessible, not aspirational.

“Blu Dot really pioneered modern, affordable, original design,” offers Conroy. “The reason that the brand caught my attention is because I wanted it for my house – there was nothing else that really suited my aesthetic. Unlike a lot of studios, where a lot is outsourced, every piece at Blu Dot is designed in-house. Each piece is incredibly thoughtful and considered.”

If you’ve ever questioned what’s possible when a designer assumes complete control of the process, all you need to do is look around the company’s new showroom in Alexandria. The space is punctuated with svelte couches in persimmon and dusty teal; coffee tables allude to sculpture while remaining fiercely practical and sleek; modular shelving units spin magic with space. Each piece strikes a perfect balance between simplicity and complexity – a hallmark of good design.

In the next year, Conroy hopes to bring Blu Dot to Melbourne and strengthen the brand’s following across the country. At present, the company ships to Darlinghurst, Darwin and everywhere in between.

“Blu Dot was founded by three friends who couldn’t find the product they wanted to furnish their own homes,” says Conroy. “Back then, it was impossible to find affordable furniture that were original designs. So they just thought they could make their own.”

It seems they’ve succeeded.

Urban Artisans

Published in Sydney Style Seekers, Winter Edition 2013 

These six local Sydney producers combine culinary curiosity with a commitment to all things local. This is our pick of the produce bound to keep winter cravings at bay. 

Bread & Butter Organic Pickles and Organic Onion Relish, Cornersmith
This Marrickville café-cum-providore creates pickles, jams and preserves using humble techniques and produce sourced from local farms and inner-west backyards.
$12, 314 Illawarra Rd Marrickville

Ironbark Honey and Honeycomb, Maya Sunny Honey
Regional honeymaker Maya Sunny makes sweet, golden stuff that’s worth a beesting or two. Try the sublime honeycomb.
From $8-$17, Essential Ingredient, 731-735 Darling St Rozelle

Miche Loaf, Sonoma Artisanal Sourdough Bakers
What do you get when you cross artisanal techniques with a painstaking 36 hour baking process? Heaven-sent sourdough.
$14, Harris Farm, 24-30 Springfield Avenue Potts Point

Strozza Pretti pasta, Pasta Emilia
This local producer brings the traditions of Italy’s fabled Emilia region to Surry Hills sidewalks. This hand-rolled pasta is a case in point.
$7.50, 259 Riley St Surry Hills

Natural Lager and Cloudy Cider, Young Henry’s
Young Henry’s Natural Lager owes its flavour to native herbs and spices. The craft brewer also makes cider from apples grown in Griffith.
$8, 76 Wilford St Newtown

La Tur Cheese, Formaggi Ocello
Made from a combination of sheep, cow and goat’s milk, this creamy cheese is bound to visit you in your dreams.
$16.50, 16/45 Bourke Street Surry Hills 

The First Sydney Contemporary Art Fair

When Carole De Senarclens makes her first visit to Sydney this week, it won’t be to immerse herself in the city’s water vistas or the sleek curves of the Opera House. Instead, the Singapore gallerist is bound for the industrial elegance of Carriageworks, home to the newest event on the international art circuit. “We’re really thrilled to be part of the first instalment of Sydney Contemporary,” De Senarclans says. “I’ve always heard that Sydney is an important art destination and that contemporary art is definitely on the map. We’re excited to check out the galleries and the art scene when we’re in town. It’s really relevant to have this kind of an event in Sydney.”

For gallerists such as De Senarclens, who runs Art Plural, a commercial space with a stable that includes US cross-disciplinary duo Doug and Mike Starn and Chinese painter Li Tianbing, Sydney Contemporary serves as a passport to the global market while offering easy access to Australian art stars. The fair, which opens on Thursday, will feature over 80 galleries from 11 countries, ranging from established capitals like Berlin to emerging centres such as Cape Town and Jakarta.

For Geoff Newtown, founder and director of Melbourne’s Neon Parc, Sydney Contemporary is an important stop-off in a crowded calendar. It’s also proof of the way art fairs are essential viewing for ambitious galleries with dreams of an international presence. “We probably go to three or four fairs a year. This year, I’ve been to Los Angeles, Cologne and Hong Kong and last year it was Copenhagen, Hong Kong and Brussels,” he says. “Everyone is feeling really positive about Sydney. Everything is pointing to a good experience.”

Sydney Contemporary was established by Tim Etchells, art world veteran and co-founder of the Hong Kong art fair, and will unfold every two years in tandem with the Melbourne Art Fair. It’s also the largest event of this kind to date and, along with the Biennale, signals the city’s growing status on the global art circuit.

The fair is a familiar idea to Sebastian Goldspink. The founder and director of Alaska Projects, an experimental arts space housed in a Kings Cross parking lot, says Sydney Contemporary signposts the way the city has become an international contemporary arts destination. “Most major world cities hold art fairs and biennales an we’ve seen a real growth in this area in the last five to 10 years,” he says. “Art fairs are becoming more important, with more people taking the opportunity to attend and partake in what’s on offer.”

Goldspink, who will be hosting offsite exhibitions as well as works by Jess Olivieri, Samuel Hodge and Phil James as part of Sydney Contemporary, believes that the fair will widen Alaska Project’s reach. He’s equally inspired by the event’s international prospects. “We’re in an out-of-the-way hidden location so we’re really excited about creating greater exposure for our artists and engaging new audiences,” he says. “We’re also really looking forward to seeing what other galleries have to offer – particularly those from New Zealand and Asia.”

However, you don’t have to be in the art business to be swept up by Sydney Contemporary. The event will also play host to artist talks, including a discussion about beauty versus anti-aesthetics featuring Archibald winner Ben Quilty, as well as a creative breakfast that will see Kylie Kwong, Rachel Griffiths and architect Nick Tobias explore the ways in which art offers inspiration points for various creative pursuits.

Amanda Rowell, director of The Commercial, a Chippendale space that will show works by installation artist Yasmin Smith and minimalist Gail Hastings, says that art fairs are often a microcosm of the art world at a point in time.

“Fairs are really interesting things. People sometimes say that they’re not always the best way to see art but they offer a really strong snapshot of what’s going on,” she says. “It’s really good to meet your tribe and catch up with your colleagues in an intensified way. Melbourne Art Fair has always been a really great thing. And I’m really excited that Carriageworks is just down the street.”

A New Revolution

Published in Scoop Homes & Art, Spring 2013 

A culture that spend decades creatively shackled is experiencing a new revolution, with an enormous talent pool of Chinese artists finding purchase in the West. 

In China, contemporary art is the product of a collective moment rather than the talent of individual artists. The death of Mao in 1976 might have signaled the end of the Cultural Revolution but it also marked the start of a creative awakening, where artists reversed the effects of the past three decades by creating explosive, emotionally charged works.

“One of the things that really sets Chinese contemporary art apart is the way it’s shaped by a  very specific set of social situations which occur in China anywhere from the eighties onwards,” says Aaron Seeto, curator of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and director of the National Association for the Visual Arts. “It’s really an art of its time but its relationship to different types of social transformation across the country is what’s most interesting to me.”

The Chinese art scene’s one-of-a-kind relationship with historical context has also shaped its progress on the international art circuit, as well as the ascension of a series of art stars who commit observations on the country’s dizzying Westernisation to installation, sculpture and ink.

Xu Zhen is a case in point. In 2009, the controversial artist, who once exhibited a leather cathedral woven out of bondage equipment at Hong Kong’s Art Basel, shelved his highly bankable public identity to form MadeIn Company – an artist’s collective intent on churning out contemporary art at a production-line pace. “Commerce and art are no longer separable in modern society,” Zhen said in a September 2012 interview with lifestyle magazine That’s Shanghai. “We don’t resist commerce. We make commerce serve art.”

Half a world away from Madein Company’s Shanghai headquarters, the White Rabbit Gallery sits on a sun-dappled Sydney street. The four-story 1920s knitting factory, home to a 700-strong contemporary Chinese art collection assembled by philanthropist Judith Neilson, will soon feature Madein Company’s Immortals Trails in a Secret Land (2012) as part of  Serve the People, a biannual exhibition curated by Edmund Capon, the former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Although the show, which unfolds over six months from September, takes curatorial cues from an old Maoist slogan, it also plays with the idea of creative production as a form of service – a theme that overturns art world hierarchies even as it informs contemporary Chinese art.

“‘Serve the people’ was, ironically, one of the catch-phrases of Mao’s Cultural Revolution – that event which cast such a dark and lingering cloud on the Chinese people and extinguished its creative spirit,” explains Capon, who first witnessed the maxim during a 1974 excursion to China. “Now I think art ‘serves the people’ in liberating their spirits and their imaginations.”  This also recasts contemporary artists as service providers tasked with reviving the country’s cultural imaginary rather than creative geniuses who have actively chosen the artist’s life.

The Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 but its spectre has loomed over China’s unconscious ever since. For example, Sun Furong’s Nibbling Up Series: Tomb Figures (2008) sees a row of formless subjects cloaked in shredded Mao suits, shoulders hunched in despair. The mixed-media piece draws its power from its holes and absence, which hint at a spiritual erosion that’s proven impossible to repair. Elsewhere, Zhang Peilli’s installation Happiness (2006) is a lesson in the revolutions’ flipside. Appropriating footage from the 1975 film In the Shipyard, the piece conveys the euphoric thrills of emancipation via a montage of beaming smiles.

If contemporary art in China is a service, then it’s one that’s highly prolific. And for White Rabbit’s founder Judith Neilson, this proliferation is precisely the source of its appeal. “I am focused on Chinese contemporary art because there are more artists in China than the rest of the world,” offers Neilson, whose obsession was stoked during a chance encounter with Beijing artist Wang Zhiyuan at a Sydney art opening.

“In America there might be 100 contemporary artists, but in China there might be 100,000. And in both countries, the same proportion would be good. You would also find those interesting artists who would never make it due to lack of fortune or visibility. You could never put together a collection as large as I have on American art or Indian art. It’s impossible,” she continues.

Although the White Rabbit’s twice-yearly shows are usually curated by Neilson’s daughter Paris, the gallery’s expansive collection is the result of regular buying trips to Shanghai and Beijing, where she avoids the hype of auctions in favour of forging personal connections with up-and-coming artists.

Neilson also says that her collector’s eye isn’t as enamored with technical mastery than it is with artists who show a willingness to make mistakes. “A lot of the work is not meticulous, it’s experimental. Artists will try all kinds of strange things and aren’t afraid to fail. That’s why I like it,” she admits.

Chinese contemporary art often serves up readymade responses to the Western art market through aesthetic – and symbolic – crudeness. In Dregs of Old Society, Liu Dahong’s childlike sketches imbue Mao-era political satire with comic-book charm. And Su Meng-Hung’s The Album of Immortal Blossoms in An Everlasting Spring by Guissupe Castiglione (2002) might borrow the 18th century painter’s florid visual style but its skull motif lampoons the economics of the modern art world, in a nod to the diamond-encrusted versions made famous by Damien Hirst. In this case, pandering to the art world itself becomes a form of cultural service – success stems from the ability to pander to broadcast the version of China that consumers most want to see.

“[The contemporary art scene] in China is like a restaurant in Chinatown that sells all the standard dishes, such as kung pao chicken and sweet and sour pork,” writes Ai Weiwei, the political provocateur who’s widely considered China’s most famous living artist. “People will eat it and say it is Chinese, but it is simply a consumerist offering, providing little in the way of a genuine experience of life in China today.”

Whether or not you side with Weiwei, he overlooks the way Chinese artists serve global forces while fulfilling local missives – shaking up the way we perceive contemporary art in the process.

“There are 300 Chinese artists in the White Rabbit Collection but these are just the ones I like,” says Neilson. “You could go to China and find hundreds more. And I have no idea if they’re the best, or the worst, or whether they will last. Only history will tell us that.”

A Monument Within a Sculpture on an Island in Japan

Published in Broadsheet, Spring edition 2013

The Fukutake House Asia Art Platform – a collaborative exhibition that unfolded in Japan as part of this year’s Setouchi Triennale – saw food and contemporary art bridge the gap between the local and global.

The Seto Inland Sea might only be four-and-a-half hours by shinkansen from Tokyo, but there’s no trace of neon amid its expanse of ethereal blue. Although this archipelago plays host to tourist drawcards such as Naoshima – an island dotted with concrete installations by revered architect Tadao Ando – it’s mainly home to coastal fishing villages, dwindling industries and an ageing population on the brink of decline.

But the Setouchi Triennale, a contemporary arts festival funded by philanthropist Soichiro Fukutake, has shown that deterioration can prove a windfall for creative possibility. Unfolding over 12 islands in the Seto Inland Sea, the third incarnation of the triennale saw abandoned buildings and desolate spaces double as canvases for a series of ambitious exhibitions – an effort to reverse social and economic erosion with the transformative power of art and its associated economics.

In Japan, however, erosion and decay are two very different concepts. Fukuda Elementary School, an abandoned building on the postcard-perfect island of Shodoshima, might have closed its doors four years ago, but its perfectly preserved classrooms hint at weekend hiatus rather than a permanent desertion.

In July this year, the Fukutake House Asia Art Platform momentarily interrupted the elementary school’s stasis. A collaboration between Asialink and seven regional centres, the project saw artists such as Australia’s Jackson Slattery, Indonesia’s Irwan Ahmett, Taiwan’s Wei Lin Yang and Singapore’s Grace Tan create installations that breathed life into the school’s empty spaces, all the while mapping the relationship between globalisation and local culture.

“The biggest challenge was definitely the deadline,” admits Slattery, a Melbourne-born, Montreal-based artist currently on residency in New York. “Unfortunately, the nature of my work is quite labour-intensive. When I got back to New York, I had to lock myself in my studio for a month.”

This pressure had as much to do with theme as it did with time restraint. “This work on globalisation is a very, very big departure from my usual work,” says Slattery, who has made his name via technically profound watercolours that explore beauty, squalor and artifice. “I think that it’s impossible for an artist to say something new or interesting about it without jumping around conceptually.”

Slattery’s installation, Monument Within A Sculpture, took its cues from the granular aspects of globalisation, rather than the grandiose.

“Shodoshima was once famous for its granite, which was used to build and decorate many of Japan’s temples and palaces,” he says. “But the industry has been completely destroyed, unable to compete with the low cost of imported granite and marble from China. Brought over from Greece several decades ago, the olive industry, on the other hand, has been the island’s most lucrative. It’s also heavily marketed to tourists.”

Drawing on his previous work on found and conjured surfaces, Slattery built a structure in a room on the elementary school’s second floor, painted it to resemble imported Chinese marble and placed a hand-carved olive branch inside it. Powerful in its subtlety, this gesture challenges the idea that globalisation is an external force by highlighting the innumerable, accumulative ways we’re complicit in it.

The Fukutake House Asia Art Platform also proved that food can illustrate the connection between the local and the global as poignantly as art. The collaboration also saw seven chefs from the Asia Pacific region (including Andrew McConnell of Melbourne institutions Cumulus Inc., Cutler & Co. and the Builders Arms Hotel) present one-day regional food workshops to teach Japanese communities in wider Asia Pacific cuisine. Local volunteers would then prepare and serve the dishes in an onsite restaurant designed by Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa for the course of the triennale.

“I spent two days prior to the workshop exploring the island, sourcing ingredients, visiting farmers markets and various fish vendors,” says McConnell, who travelled to Shodoshima with his Melbourne assistant John Paul Twomey. “There was a bit of pressure to find ingredients and put together a dish that was manageable, but I was really surprised by the quality there. I created a dish using local Japanese beans, prepared using French techniques as well as an aioli dressing and seared calamari seasoned with fennel and chilli.”

McConnell also says that Australian cuisine, which weaves together techniques and traditions from multiple countries, was a tailor-made treatise on globalisation. “It’s difficult to find a dish that’s distinctly Australian, so I created one that used various influences that highlighted what modern Australian cooking was about. I used French mayonnaise and cooked the local calamari by drawing on Spanish techniques. I explained that in Australia, we borrow from various places – this gave locals an insight into what the country was about.”

While Slattery says that the triennale has bolstered the region’s economy, the future is still cloaked in uncertainty.

“When we think about Japan, we think about the chaos of Tokyo or we think about manicured cherry blossoms. But in these little villages where we worked, it was really sad because you wouldn’t see anyone under 65 for days. And you just wonder what will happen in 10 years time.”

The Setouchi Triennale is an Asialink project supported by The Australia-Japan Foundation, The Australian Embassy, Tokyo and The Fukutake Foundation in Japan. It took place at Fukutake House Asia Art Platform from July 20 to November 4, 2013.

Sydney Film Festival – Greatest Hits

The 60th edition of the Sydney Film Festival is a cinephile’s dream

It may not have the Riviera glitz and glamour of Cannes, but there’s plenty to love about Sydney’s own tribute to celluloid gold. The Sydney Film Festival, which unfolds over 12 days in June, is known for unearthing cinematic talent from Australia and around the world, thanks to a program that spans art house, arresting documentaries, left-field shorts and narrative features.

You don’t have to be in the industry to get swept up in festival fever. Here’s our round-up of the films bound to linger in your mind all year.

Mystery Road
This taut genre piece focuses on Jay Swan, an indigenous inner-city detective who returns to his isolated hometown to solve the murder of a teenage girl. Starring Aaron Pederson, Hugo Weaving and Jack Thompson, the film owes its power to the way it uses Western narrative devices to map the psychology of the Australian Outback.

When: Wednesday June 5, 7:30 pm
Where: State Theatre

Richard Lanklater’s Before Trilogy
It’s hard to overstate the impact of Before Sunrise – the cult 1995 film that follows a chance encounter between two travellers in Vienna. The film, which stars Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke and features meandering, dialogue-heavy sequences, could have easily been dismissed as an art house flop but somehow managed to educate a generation of cynics about the possibilities of emotional connection. This year’s festival will pay homage to the Before Trilogy by screening Before Sunrise and the 2004 sequel Before Sunset alongside the widely anticipated final chapter,Before Midnight.

When: Saturday June 8, 12:00 pm, 3:00 pm and 9:30 pm
Where: State Theatre

Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer
Directed by Academy Award-nominated producer Mike Lerner, this incisive documentary takes a look at the fallout surrounding the arrest of Pussy Riot, an all-girl Russian punk group that lampooned Putin’s regime by staging a provocative performance in a Moscow cathedral. Weaving interviews with friends and family and live footage,Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer offers sharp commentary on the collision of punk politics, feminism and power.

When: Saturday 8 June, 4:30 pm
Where: Event Cinemas

Only God Forgives
Director Nicholas Winding Refn’s follow-up to the suspenseful neo-noir Drive may have divided critics with its obsessive violence, but it promises to be a compelling study in style over substance. The film sees Ryan Gosling star as the owner of a Bangkok boxing club and follows his descent into the city’s seedy underworld. Although not for the squeamish, fans of the director should not miss it.

When: Saturday 15 June, 7:00 pm
Where: State Theatre

The Look of Love
Collaborators Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan join forces to chronicle the life of Paul Raymond, the notorious nightclub baron whose empire spanned Soho strip clubs and soft-porn magazines such as Men Only andEscort, as well as the stormy relationships with the women in his life. Although it takes the form of a biopic, it also paints a gripping portrait of hedonism and nihilism in ’60s and ’70s London.

When: Saturday 15 June, 9:30 pm
Where: Event Cinemas

For more information visit the  Sydney Film Festival site.

Table for Two

There’s a point in every writer’s life when they question whether they’re on the right path. For Terry Durack, it was a story about a fine dining encounter in France’s Alsace region, submitted to US food bible Gourmet and returned, rejected and unread. “I scrunched the whole page up, threw it in the bin and walked out of the room, disgusted,” laughs Durack.

It’s a good thing the celebrated food critic had already met Jill Dupleix. “I had no idea that Jill took it out, flattened it and sent it to the editor of Epicurean magazine. It then received a four-page spread.”

When Durack’s world first collided with Dupleix’s, he was working at a high-powered Melbourne advertising firm, a role that included regular lessons in the art of the long lunch. “We had a fight the first night and hated each other! Then we met at the pub later and never really parted. Terry found out that I was helping a friend write a book and that must have intrigued him a bit. We met for lunch and finally got together six months later,” Dupleix recalls.

Dupleix and Durack’s culinary journey has always been bound up in their romantic one. They flew to Singapore and Hong Kong, sipped cocktails at the Raffles and fell for food prepared humbly and served up on the street. Durack bought her a book on the great chefs of France and they toured Europe’s Michelin star institutions, a trip that sparked a love affair with haute cuisine. The couple also began writing about their experiences, accumulating bylines one by one. They both worked as food critics at The Age, then The Sydney Morning Herald and went on to co-author the cities’ well-thumbed Good Food Guides. “We were so innocent, so naive. There was a real learning curve about food in the eighties and we were just in the right place in the right time. And everything we knew how to do – write, eat, drink – all came together at the right time in this really great way,” says Dupleix.

It wasn’t long before London called. Dupleix was made cookery editor of The Times, ruffling the country’s stuffy foodie establishment with her wit and no-nonsense approach. And Durack became the chief food critic for UK’s Independent on Sunday, reviewing restaurants from here to Monte Carlo and was named World Food Media’s Best Restaurant Critic in the process.

But since returning to Sydney, it seem that this city best reflects who they are. When you ask Dupleix about her favourite dining experiences are, she says sharing a beer and a hot dog slider with Durack at a local pub is as memorable as dining at Noma in Denmark or a Florentine trattoria.

“We met over a drink and we’ve probably stayed together over a drink as well.”

Online Community Versus Original Thought

Stefan Sagmeister believes that if you want to achieve greatness, you should take time to be alone. The graphic designer, best known for heading up New York studio Sagmeister and Walsh and creating darkly inventive album art for Lou Reed and The Rolling Stones, insists that periods of solitude are essential for sparking the original ideas that lead to evolution and growth. During his most recent sabbatical, the design legend spent a solitary year in Bali, where he swapped client work for periods of extended, uninterrupted experimentation beginning at dawn each day. “Basically everything [Sagmeister & Walsh] have done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking from that one year,” Sagmeister explains during his TED talk, The Power of Time Off. “One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for very few companies and not for everybody else.”

Despite the wisdom of Sagmeister’s approach, a quick glance at the contemporary design world suggests that its community, not solidarity, that will take our creative powers to new heights. In the last few years, technological explosion has given rise to online tools such as Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest and Dribbble – channels that double as around-the-clock ideas portals, where knowledge, trends and criticism can be shared effortlessly and in real-time. And a new brand of virtual community is turning traditional processes and distribution systems inside out. This is setting the stage for a new design democracy where collaborative creation and crowdsourcing are erasing the barriers to global reach.

In Tribes, futurist and marketing expert Seth Godin explores the way online communities form around a shared belief in an idea. He also argues that the future of creative industries will be built on clusters of like-minded people who find an audience and spark wide-scale change. It’s hard to find a better instance of this than Etsy. The online marketplace might serve as a vehicle for the new global obsession with the artisanal and handmade but it’s also a study in how community operates on the cusp of creative ambition and market demand. For Angela D’Alton, Community Manager for Etsy Australia, the company’s focus on community has played a pivotal role in its growth – a trajectory that has seen it evolve from a fledgling virtual marketplace to an online community with 24 million members and 42 million unique visitors a month.

“Etsy has always been lead by our community and we believe deeply in person-to-person commerce. Throughout the company’s lifetime, we have never lost sight of that. I think we are incredibly lucky to have such a high level of engagement among our members and it has always been our mission to stay true to our roots by listening to and working closely with our community of creatives and makers,” she says.

D’Alton also believes that community encourages collaborative creation and open dialogue, practices that can see creative conversations evolve. Ultimately, this leads to a richer design culture where old hierarchies are flattened out.

“The fact that participation in fields such as design is both accessible and affordable means that ideas flow more freely between people and their peers. This contributes to the overall diversity and quality of products that are created.”

But five years before carpenter Robert Kalin started laying the foundations for Etsy in a Brooklyn apartment, Jake Nickell, a 25-year-old Chicago designer was quietly spinning his passion for T-shirts into an online community with game-changing implications for the future of design. Threadless began as a social network, where members were invited to submit designs and asked to vote on their favourite versions. The winning pieces, which feature everything from manga-style drawings to comic book landscapes re-imagined in minute detail, were then turned into T-shirts and sold back to community members. According to an article by Max Chafkin in Inc magazine, Threadless achieved early growth of 500 percent a year – proof that a powerful online community could trump the presence of in-house designers, advertising or traditional sales. Threadless also allowed designers and illustrators to collaborate and exchange ideas, while offering a foolproof avenue for gaining exposure and finding paying markets for their work.

“In addition to attracting a lot of talent, the contest format encouraged artists to tell their less artistic friends about the site. Designers labour mightily on their submissions; they spend weeks tinkering with their work and soliciting advice from other members. Then they post links to their submissions on their websites, blogs, and MySpace pages, asking their friends to click, vote, and, the artists hope, buy,” Chafkin writes.

D’Alton says that online communities has meant that disciplines that were historically solitary or elite way to open conversations between buyers, sellers and makers. “This dialogue, an integral part of collaborative creation, enables us to explore new levels of innovation and resource-sharing, in design and beyond.”

But in the last few years, community has cast aside its novelty status to take centre stage in our creative lives. Online platforms such as Dribbble and Forrst allow designers to gain feedback into works-in-progress while social media tools like Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest spark lightning-fast inspiration to help us fix bad design decisions on the fly. The constant presence of online community also means that we’re never truly on our own. It allows us to test out our creative paths before we walk them and know that our work will find an audience before we put it in the world.

However, the rise of online community is not without its price. Access to a constant network of collaborators can ease the pressures of creative autonomy – there’s no need to forge an original vision and take the necessary risks to bring it to life.But in his seminal book Ignore Everybody cartoonist Hugh Macleod writes that the best ideas have lonely childhoods and that these don’t always line up with what others think. Like Sagmeister, he believes that community doesn’t change the fact that creative work is a solitary pursuit – one that asks you to shut out the noise if you want to truly find your voice. Macleod also suggests that relying too much on your community can become a pillar, a way to hide from the work that really counts.

“Nobody can tell you if what you’re doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile,” he warns. “The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.”

How to Make a Cult Magazine

Nothing beats the buzz of creating something out of nothing. Like the thrill of road-tripping your way around the US without seeing the inside of a hotel. Or publishing a genre-defying indie magazine without a decent editorial budget, advertising revenue or cigar-toting publishing mogul in sight.

Chris Ying and Mauro Bedoni are familiar with this sensation. The editor of left-field food quarterly Lucky Peach and photo editor of Colors, a magazine with a knack for turning features on the economics of human shit as a vehicle for a distinct brand of humanism, both believe that nothing fuels creativity quite like limitation.

At a recent Vivid Ideas panel High-End Content, Low-End Budgets, Ying and Bedoni showed us that starting an indie publishing empire from your bedroom isn’t as difficult as you think. Here’s how to beat them at their own game.

Enlist your famous friends 

Lucky Peach might not have an inflated bank balance but what it does have is David Chang, a dude who is less chef than he is cultural force thanks to his famous pork buns and an equally zeitgeist-happy bad-boy schtick. Ying says that Chang’s co-founder status has helped pull in high-profile contributors from the food, music and art worlds – a key ingredient in its success. “Lucky Peach doesn’t have money, resources or an office but it does have Dave Chang’s cache and the advantage of his friends contributing to the magazine,” says Ying. “Anthony Bourdain writes a column about film, you have [American chef] Mario Batali spewing things that you wouldn’t normally hear from him. We give them the opportunity to publish things that you couldn’t really publish anywhere else.” It’s difficult logic to argue with.

Ten ideas are better than one 

Conde Nast can afford to send their writers to the arctic circle to survey the mating rituals of polar bears but if you’re a fledgling indie publisher, you’ll have to be a little more strategic. For instance, Chris Ying turned a visit to Sweden with the tourism board into five videos and three articles and asked a friend on an official tour in North Korea to spin his experiences into a four-page feature – proof of the way resourcefulness adds up to indie publishing gold.

Call in favours 

Every magazine may aspire to being a global phenomenon, but Colors – published in six languages and distributed everywhere from Seoul to San Francisco – actually is. Bedoni says that Colors owes its international reach to social distribution, a model that’s more cost-effective than setting up a platinum account with Air Express. “We basically just ask friends in various countries to help us distribute the magazines to news agencies and bookshops. They might not make much money out of it but they’re passionate about what we do and willing to help out.”

Fire your advertisers 

How do you run a story on what the cocaine traces on hundred dollar bills tell you about the commerce of drug trafficking without scaring off your advertisers? The trick is not to need them in the first place. Colors magazine is bankrolled by Benneton, a brand that’s become shorthand for boundary-pushing advertising campaigns, and produced at Fabrica, the company’s Italian-based communications and research sector – a kind of utopia for editorial freedom. “I can’t vouch for other magazines but at Colors we don’t have any advertising pages. This means we have fewer factors influencing our course. The editorial process is simpler and it give us greater leverage,” says Bedoni.

Do it for love

Of course, the whole indie publishing caper hinges on the fact that print isn’t dead. And if it is, you might as well just embrace it. “Our magazine has been an outlandish success given its size,” says Ying. “But who knows how long it will last. “We’re somehow still sailing this dumb little ship and there’s every possibility that it will sink. But that’s sort of the exciting part about it.”

Chris Ying and Mauro Bedoni appeared at a Vivid Ideas session Indie Magazines: High-End Content, Low-End Budget
www.vividsydney.com/ideas/

Why I Broke Up with Gatsby

Jay Gatsby is the patron saint of the self-made. The shadowy millionaire may have been shot to death in F Scott Fitzgerald’s taut 1925 masterwork The Great Gatsby but his spectre still appears everywhere from Forbes profiles tracing the rise of entrepreneurs to debates about how minority figures achieve political success. And this month’s $127 million Baz Lurhmann adaptation will see the life and times of the Jazz Age bootlegger rendered in three dimensions and set to a soundtrack by Jay-Z. It’s a fitting tribute to a character whose larger-than-life cultural presence outwits his dubious taste in women or record of personal tragedy.

Unsurprisingly, the last few months has seen Gatsby-mania reach something of a crescendo. The hype surrounding Lurhmann’s remake has turned Fitzgerald’s lesson in the dangers of excess into an aspirational handbook, thanks to a spate of Prohibition-themed parties and breathy editorials on how to turn your suburban two-by-one into an Art Deco lair. And whether or not critics believe that Fitzgerald’s elegant prose is safe with the master of visual hyperbole, there’s a consensus that Gatsby’s pursuit of greatness in 1920s New York is still universally relevant in 2013.

For The New York Times’ Adam Cohen, Gatsby’s cultural pervasiveness stems from his ability to successfully create the life he wants – a goal that’s often linked to the American DreamÔ but easily translates across historical and geographical contexts.

“In the great American tradition of self-invention, Gatsby decided at an early age precisely who he wanted to be. He dropped his father’s clunky, foreign-sounding name, Gatz, in favor of Gatsby, and James for the swankier Jay. A poor runaway from the Midwest, Gatsby has worked his way up to a sprawling Long Island mansion, where he gives boozy, jazz-filled parties for New York high society and drunken flappers. He dresses lavishly, claims to have been born to money and refers to everyone with the upper-crust affectation ”old sport,” he writes.

As the story goes, this didn’t work out so well for Gatsby. But what’s surprising is the way Gatsby’s failures don’t stop us from reading him as a Jazz Age version of modern-day success.

But this isn’t a standalone phenomenon, nor is it limited to fiction. In a February 2013 article in The Atlantic, Alexis C. Madrigal suggests that we construct Great Man narratives by honing in on details that serve as metaphors for genius while glazing over those that hint at a more complex truth. It’s why we’re inclined to cast Don Draper as a Madison Avenue maverick before we dismiss him as an emotionally bankrupt womaniser and the reason Fitzgerald will always be a literary hero, not a man at the wrong end of a battle with alcohol abuse.

Curiously, when it comes to Fitzgerald’s female cohorts, these narratives often work in reverse. For instance, the author’s contemporary Virginia Woolf is often represented as an artist fending off voices in her head rather than the writer of some of this century’s best Modernist prose. And as Daily Life’s Nicole Elphick points out, if maligned writer Cat Marnell trades on her drug use to generate notoriety, it’s a technique that the likes of Brett Easton Ellis has drawn on for years.

In Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is, John Scalzi uses a videogame to illustrate how the road to your dreams is made easier or harder depending on the settings you’re assigned. Whether you define greatness as obscene wealth, career success or an artistic legacy, he believes that this is process is smoothest if you’re straight, male and white. For Scalzi, the default barriers for completion of quests are lower and your leveling-up thresholds come fast.

“You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.”

But the real trouble with The Great Gatsby is the way we still see it as a universal story of self-invention rather than a singular account of one man’s path. By conflating greatness with male privilege, we lend ironic new meaning to the novel’s famous last words: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Glimpses of Water and Signs of Life

SEMF Rebrand

SEMF is an engineering, environmental and management consulting firm with offices across Australia. However, the company was limited by an outdated brand presence that failed to reflect its values. Working closely with Melbourne design studio Jacinabox, I replaced tired corporate-speak with informative, engaging and inclusive website copy.

I also launched Insight, a sleek print publication designed to build client relationships and promote SEMF via a blend of news stories, profiles and features on flagship projects.

Sydney Style Seekers Issue Five

Published twice a year by Urban Walkabout, Style Seekers is an accessible, elegant publication focusing on arts, culture and lifestyle in Sydney. The magazine combines intelligent profiles on Sydney’s most interesting creatives and features on the things that make the city tick with practical information for locals and visitors. I interviewed the personalities highlighted in the magazine, wrote and edited the profiles, feature articles and chapter descriptions and worked closely with the editorial team to refine the magazine’s tone and voice. Style Seekers has a circulation of 100,000 and is distributed at various outlets across the city.

The Angry Fix

There’s a faintly dystopian air to the part of Regent Street between Cleveland and Broadway. This pocket of Sydney is a postcard-perfect slice of urban decay, a strip of boarded-up facades and abandoned warehouses that hints that something subversive might be brewing just below the surface.

It comes as little surprise that this stretch of Chippendale is home to The Angry Fix, a cafe that blends caffeine obsession with a beat poet sensibility. Although the Angry Fix might be named for Ginsberg’s Howl, there’s no room here for the writer’s high-maintenance leanings – it’s all about a lo-fi vibe, interesting paninis and excellent single origin coffee by local roasters Numero Uno.

At the Angry Fix, no ristretto is complete without a choice side of reading material. The cafe plays host to limited edition volumes by overseas art stars and cult design magazines such as It’s Nice That.

Park yourself under the giant Matterhorn mural, pore over some Ryan McGinley photography and plot your next revolution.

Substance Over Style

Published in Style Seekers, November 2012 

Sibella Court’s endlessly inspiring interiors are a perfect blend of imagination, detail and story.

Sometimes, our obsession with the perfect is precisely what holds us back. Too often, we cast aside flaws and rough surfaces in favour of a glossy reality that’s best left to the pages of a magazine. Sibella Court may have started her career at Vogue, but her approach to interiors couldn’t be less interested in high-end luxury or material aspirations. Instead, Court focuses on creating warm, tactile spaces that are shaped by our personal stories – an aesthetic that has seen her become one of the world’s most sought-after stylists and carve out a career spanning New York, Sydney and everywhere in between.

“I completed a history degree at the University of Sydney and then started styling at Vogue,” offers Court. “I then moved to New York and worked in the US for ten years.” During her time in New York, Court contributed to publications such as Gourmet, Marie Claire and Town and Country and collaborated with the likes of Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue and lifestyle brand Anthropologie, for whom she recently designed a line of homeware.

She also refined her signature styling language, a way of layering found objects, interesting textures and historical and cultural references that’s so masterful you can’t help but be transported somewhere else – whether you’re flipping through the pages of Bowerbird, her new book on decorating with the things you love or stepping inside Mr Wong, a restaurant that powerfully re-imagines 1930s Hong Kong, thank to details such as hand-dyed beaded curtains, a mirror edged with gold leaf and a mural of Chinese movie star Zhou Xuan.

The Society Inc, the Paddington haberdashery and hardware store that saw Court swap the New York skyline for Sydney sunshine, stands testament to her imagination and attention to detail. Court describes the store as “more installation than retail,” and it’s hard to deny its magic. Stocking everything from apothecary jars, rope and elements of nautica to miniature felt animals, zinc tubs and wire baskets, The Society Inc celebrates the extraordinary in the everyday – while offering us a backstage pass into Court’s chimerical and transfixing world.

Jeff Wall’s Unseen Realities

Published in Broadsheet 

Jeff Wall’s survey exhibition at the MCA is proof of his talent for bringing unrealised narrative moments to life.

In literature, the subjunctive mood is a technique that assigns meaning to something that hasn’t yet happened, rather than what is actually been described. In doing so, it creates moments that owe their impact to an unseen reality – a truth that’s always bigger than what first meets the eye.

In many ways,Jeff Wall Photographs – the MCA’s new survey of classic and recent works by the celebrated Canadian photographer – is a study in the power of the subjunctive. It’s this focus, along with precise execution, that has seen Wall elevate photography from an act of observation to a process of creation in which the artist takes centre stage.

Unsurprisingly, Wall ranks Kafka – a fellow advocate of this underrated narrative mode – among his favourite writers and is a firm believer in the relationship between literature and visual art. “All pictorial art is linked to literature in some way; everything visual is always related to some kind of literary form,” he offers. “Consider photojournalism for instance. A lot of great photographs in the journalistic tradition connect back to journalism.”

The 27 works, which span full-colour transparencies in light boxes, smaller prints and finely-tuned photographic observations, are more powerful if you read Wall as a visual storyteller rather than a conventional photographer.

For instance, Destroyed Room (1978), a large-scale recreation of a woman’s destroyed bedroom, might include a violently torn, overturned mattress and yawning, ransacked drawers, but its narrative subtext is perhaps its most disturbing element (Wall created this piece shortly after his wife Jeannette left him for another man).

Similarly, A Woman and her Doctor (1981) – an image of a sultry, affluent women smoking a cigarette while her older doctor attempts to catch her gaze – relies on the taut, sexually charged language of 1930s pulp fiction to make its point. It also captures an unspoken history between its two protagonists at the very point at which it is about to unfold.

Elsewhere, After Invisible Man (2001), a meditation on Ralph Ellison’s acclaimed novel of the same name, displays Wall’s combination of technical ambition and creative audacity. The piece, which took a year to produce and features 1369 light bulbs meticulously arranged on the ceiling of an underground cavern, shows that Wall’s vision is closer to that of a cinematographer rather than a photographer.

It’s also proof that Wall’s ability to imbue his art form with fresh potential may be the reason he’s considered one of the most significant photographers working today.

Jeff Wall Photographs shows at the MCA until July 28.

For Men Who Date Men

Published in Broadsheet  March 2013

Meet Hello Mr., a carefully considered new magazine that’s more interested in imbuing the gay experience with depth than it is in keeping up appearances.

Ryan Fitzgibbon believes that you have to expose yourself in order to evolve. A year ago, the designer and independent publisher started Hello Mr., a blog that documented everyday life from a gay perspective minus the high-gloss sheen and smooth surfaces.

“Hello Mr. started as a blog but it was casual in tone and casual in frequency,” says Fitzgibbon over coffee at The Commons in Darlinghurst. “It was just a few friends posting these stories about dating and life. You know how blogs go. It just sort of fizzled out but I knew there was something really interesting there. I just didn’t have time to pursue it.”

Luckily, Fitzgibbon was brave enough to trust his instincts. He quit his job, packed up his life in San Francisco and moved to Australia, excited by the country’s playful design culture and knack for championing ambitious editorial projects.

Inspired by publications such as London-based Fantastic Man and Spanish interiors bible Apartamento, Fitzgibbon started laying the groundwork for a biannual publication that spoke to the complexities, pleasures and real-world narratives that underpin being a gay man today.

“I thought it was time to evolve from generations past and I wanted to make sure it would be relevant to more people in more places. Hello Mr. is not about perfecting appearances. Really at the end of the day, the undercurrent of it all is to start conversations and create a new offering that says we want to be seen and heard. This is what this generation is asking for,” he offers quietly.

Hello Mr. may have been born out of dissatisfaction with magazines that deal in fictional gay lifestyle fantasies, but Fitzgibbons isn’t interested in pitting one agenda against another. His version of activism is carefully considered – an attempt to grant the gay experience the long-awaited luxury of depth.

Fitzgibbon’s inkling for boundary breaking isn’t limited to the editorial realm. He launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the first issue and raised $26,000 in the process. “I really wanted to make sure that there were creatives that could contribute to it. Independent publishing is really high-risk and it’s an uphill battle. But when I got the funding, there was no turning back.”

The first issue of Hello Mr. features a global network of writers, illustrators and photographers, including the outstanding Brisbane-based writer and author Benjamin Law, NYC-based blogger Ryan O’Connell, Australian ex-hockey player Gus Johnston and Brooklyn-based photographer Greg Reynolds. Fitzgibbon’s design sensibility is visible in everything from the size and paper quality to the density of the content.

“The magazine contains personal narratives, features and short stories and I decided to organise the magazine into four chapters. The first is about learning about ourselves and our community and the second is about understanding what we’re doing. The third, ‘Love and Let Go’, is about dating and the fourth is about belonging,” he says.

“I really wanted to express this idea of vulnerability, of the importance of having flaws. Many magazines that exist now say that we can’t show our flaws, that if we do we’ll be easily picked apart. The reason that we try really hard to have this perfect image of ourselves is because we were seen as outsiders before. And once we do come out, it’s a statement to ourselves that we’ll never go back.”

MONA FOMA in Hobart

Published in Broadsheet, January 2012 

Curious and irreverent as ever, MONA’s Festival of Music and Art returns to Hobart with a star line-up and a festival experience that is anything but ordinary.

You would be forgiven for mistaking a subterranean art lair built by a collector with a thing for gambling, an ex-bassist turned Zen devotee and a perplexing series of acronyms for the plot points of the latest Murakami novel. But when it comes to the makings of MONA FOMA – the Hobart-based contemporary arts and music festival – the truth is more intriguing than fiction.

Now in its fourth year, MONA FOMA (or for the uninitiated, the Museum of Old and New Art Festival of Music and Art) promises to swap the bleakness of Flemington or a sweltering laneway for the type of festival experience you couldn’t imagine if you tried. Running until this weekend (January 21) and with a line-up that includes PJ Harvey, iconic French composer Pierre Henry and Boston punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, the program shows a critical focus without becoming steeped in the commercial. But anyone who brings the tone down with tired debate about critical versus commercial should take note of the festival’s pseudonym, MOFO – a jab at the art world’s tendency to navel-gaze rather than explore and give in to its pleasures.

MONA FOMA features a roster of artists and performances to help mine these pleasures. Acts such as Icelandic six-piece Amiina, DIY wunderkind tUnE-yArDs and New Orleans street musicians Tuba Skinny join headliner PJ Harvey, who will play highlights from the Mercury Award-winning Let England Shake. Installations by Sydney artist Nell and Turner Prize winner Susan Phillipz tackle the big existential questions, while a naked tour of MONA led by artist Stuart Ringholt caters for the festival’s voyeur element.

Reflecting the shared vision of MONA founder Walsh and the festival’s curator, former Violent Femmes guitarist Brian Ritchie, the event aims to do away with the pretension that tends to mar the music and art worlds, letting curiosity take the lead instead.

Here are some of our top picks for the festival:

The Barbarian
The festival’s biggest commission to date, modern Greek opera The Barbarians is a collaboration between Constantine Koukias and large team of designers, musicians and singers. Jan 21 & 22, 2pm & 7.30pm, City Hall

Amiina
Amiina started life as a backing band for Sigur Ros and share the same lush Icelandic sensibility along with a habit of instrument-swapping. Friday Jan 20, 7pm, Stage 1

Toshimaru Nakamara
For ‘No-input sound mixer’ Toshimaru Nakamara, technology is not destroying music, but can actually create it. The Japanese artist manoeuvres his sound desk without the aid of mics, instruments or any external input. Thursday Jan 19, 6.30pm, PW1, Stage 2

tUnE-yArDs
New England local Merrill Garbus has drawn critical kudos for her brand of experimental pop, where drum loops are layered with the ukulele and electric bass. Saturday Jan 21, 6pm, Theatre Royal

MoMA
Held on the roof of the museum, the MONA market combines food, fresh produce, live music and demos with the chance to get some much-needed down time. MONA rooftop, Jan 21

Making Plates With Mud

Published in Broadsheet, Summer print issue December 2012

We visit the Mud Australia workshop to chat with owners Shelley Simpson and James Kirton about their impeccable ability to do one thing well.

It’s common knowledge that a badly designed jug is guaranteed to make you spill. But for Shelley Simpson, the founder of celebrated ceramics company Mud Australia, design flaws are no match for a steady hand and an unwavering focus. “It’s a confidence thing,” she says. “The second you lose confidence when you’re pouring something, it just drips everywhere.”

Located in Sydney’s Marrickville, Mud Australia’s studio and production facility is the physical manifestation of Simpson’s wisdom. Everywhere you look, workers spin jugs, bowls, plates and platters out of lumps of clay, moving to a rhythm that is both understated and urgent.

A woman meticulously applies colour to a container of porcelain slip. Later, her efforts will come to life in velvety pinks, earthy greens and sky blues – a colour palette that has seduced everyone from David Chang of Momofuku fame and Australian chef Bill Granger to discerning stylists, home cooks and dinner party enthusiasts.

In many ways, the space strikes the balance between artisanship and mass production – conflicting values that have seen the brand evolve from a one-woman operation founded in a Surry Hills terrace 18 years ago, to a design success story with a global wholesale presence and stores in Sydney, Melbourne and New York.

“The idea was born when I moved into a house with a woman who had a kick wheel in her backyard,” recalls Simpson. “She went to the Blue Mountains for the weekend and encouraged me to have a go and I discovered I really liked throwing clay by hand and hand-painting what I created.

“I wasn’t sure what I was doing in terms of a career and a lot of the things I was trying, I wasn’t achieving. I thought it was time that I did my own thing.”

Simpson initially went into partnership with her then housemate, but that soon changed. “I was always supported by James who is my life partner as well,” Simpson pauses to glance at James Kirton, who co-runs the business. There’s something inspiring about the apparent energy between them, an affinity that seems a silent catalyst in Mud’s success.

Then, of course, there’s Simpson’s tenacity and sharp design instinct – attributes she owes not to art school but to her work ethic and willingness to do whatever it took to make Mud work.

“Finding the Mud look took three years,” she says. “Up until then, we were just doing whatever we could to pay the rent. We had a few interesting meetings with retail stores and asked them what they were looking for. At the time, a lot of people were talking about simplicity and colour. We just evolved from there.”

As far as creative ambitions go, a focus on simplicity and colour may seem relatively modest, but in the case of Mud, it has helped blur the line between ceramics and art. Whether you’re looking at a classic, oval platter or tall, peaked jug, every piece is both distinctly sculptural and highly tactile – equally worthy of being collected or for every day use.

“The range hasn’t changed too much and we’ve kept production processes the same since the beginning. We’ve just added or removed various colours and shapes seasonally,” says Kirton.

“Each piece is timeless and quite emotional – simple shapes with touch marks that remain. People who own Mud pieces understand that it’s an emotional product and have a strong connection with it.”

Simpson and Kirton are firm believers in the accessibility of design and cite iconic American designer Russel Wright as a major inspiration. Unsurprisingly, every piece is microwave and dishwasher safe.

“I think Wright said that, ‘good design is for everyone’,” Kirton offers. In the case of Mud, it’s a commitment that has paid off in spades.

Out of the Shadows

Published in Broadsheet, March 2013

Dissolve brings the work of celebrated street artist Vhils to Sydney for the first time.

In the last few years, street art has gone hand-in-hand with bankability. Although figures such as Banksy, Shepard Fairy and Space Invader may have once mounted their cultural critiques from the shadows and alleys, their work now graces coffee table books, political campaigns and everything in between.

But Dissolve, a new collaboration between Skalitzer Contemporary Art, the Rocks Pop-up and Art Month Sydney, is set to allay any cynicism about the state of street art today. The show, which will unfold in a 220-square-metre space underneath the MCA, features the work of Vhils (aka Alexadre Farto), a young Portuguese artist interested in the way cities shape our identities and the poetry of decay.

“We’d been speaking to Alexandre about doing the show for some time. It’s his first time in Australia and I think he jumped at the opportunity to show here,” says co-curator Kelly Reiffer, a former investment banker and art dealer who founded Skalitzer Contemporary in Berlin with partner Rory Schmitz in a move to champion the city’s dynamic graffiti scene.

“We’re both originally from Perth and have been in Berlin for four years. The gallery started in a small basement three years ago as a tagging gallery. We absolutely love tags – we think it’s the purest form of expression. When we first got to Berlin, we were really surprised that it was one of the biggest centres for graffiti in the world, but there was no one taking graffiti seriously as an art form. For us, tagging is where most of these guys start,” she explains.

However, Vhils’ work combines the frenetic energy of tagging with a technical ambition that’s rare for a street artist. His portraits, produced using chisels, acids, explosives and bleach, are best read as literal and figurative excavations of identity and history.

Although Vhils’ etchings – which are largely inspired by the faded revolutionary stencils of 80s and 90s Lisbon – have appeared in Brazil, Moscow and New York, he achieved global reach when one of his works was featured in Banksy’s Cans Festival in 2008. Dissolve will also play host to his Sydney debut – a portrait of activist Jack Mundey.

“Vhils’ walls, which involve detailed carvings into bricks, are among the most interesting features of the show,” says Reiffer. “But the exhibition will show a range of mediums and play with the idea of public and private space.”

Creative Spaces – The Tin Shed

Published in Broadsheet 

Redfern’s grimy energy stops short at the pocket between Phillip and Baptist Streets. Here, concrete Brutalist architecture gives way to rows of Victorian terraces, and a tin shed juts out of the storybook setting, lending an otherworldly shimmer to the sepia haze.

For Jane Smith, it was this precise quality that drew her to the shed in the first place. “I grew up in farms and I’ve always thought there was something romantic about tin sheds,” says the film producer and long-time Redfern local. “I’ve lived on this street for years and always loved the shed. I decided to buy it two and a half years ago, right at the peak of the market. Strangely enough, it got through council really quickly.”

Smith enlisted the help of young architect Raffaello Roselli to repurpose the existing structure – a process that saw them scour Sydney scrap yards to reassemble layers of corrugated iron and create steel window boxes that overlooked the street. She says that the mishmash of textures was inspired by a recent trip to Barcelona, a city possessing the kind of adventurous attitude to architecture that she believes Australians should adopt.

“A Canadian couple recently knocked on the door to tell me how much they loved the place,” says Smith. “They said, ‘We’ve just been travelling through Barcelona and this place reminds us of being there’. It made me realise that I’d achieved my goal.”

Although Smith had intended for the tin shed to serve as headquarters for her production company, these days it strengthens her connection to the rest of the world.

“I rent it out through Airbnb and so far I’ve had French, Canadian, English and Danish travellers stay. Most people say it surpasses their expectations, which I love.”

Although the dilapidated shed has beared silent witness to Redfern’s evolution since 1920, it had been under threat of demolition for years. When Smith rescued the shed, she saw it as an opportunity to create something that went beyond design statement. Indeed, she sees it as a tribute to the suburb itself.

“It used to be an old shearing shed and, for me, that was the beauty of it. When I first moved here, so many people asked me why I would choose Redfern, but there’s nowhere else I’d rather live. Here, the trees are deciduous and you actually feel like the seasons are changing. There’s something really special about this.

Splendour in the Grass

Sometimes, it takes a shared experience to make a city come to life. An afternoon swapping strawberries and stories can transform a sun-dappled garden from tranquil to sublime and an evening of cheese and champagne on a secret beach show us that fleeting moments can spark new beginnings.

You don’t have to convince Simon and Natalie Thomas. The couple are the co-founders and owners of the Sydney Picnic Company, a business for whom weaving moments that matter is a stock in trade.

“Basically, we moved to Sydney a few years ago – I was working for a design agency and Simon was working for Simon Johnson, the fine food providores,” offers Natalie.

“Simon’s always been into food – his family has owned restaurants and things and I’d always worked in design for a long time – but neither of us liked our jobs very much. One day, a friend asked us if we could make a picnic, because it was Valentines Day, and so we did. We just grew from there.”

That was three years ago. Since then, the Sydney Picnic Company has garnered a serious following, thanks to picnics that blend exquisite ingredients such as Medjool dates with gorgonzola and slow roasted tomatoes with touches that conjure a certain bygone charm. For instance, each picnic menu is handmade by Natalie and punctuated with flourishes such as the recipient’s favourite flower.

“We source our produce from places such as the Norton Street Grocer and Harris Farm and we keep things simple – when we put together our cheese plate, it depends on what’s looking good on the day. We also include herbs and flowers that we’ve grown and picked ourself,” she says.

Unsurprisingly, Natalie and Simon’s creations have captivated the likes of Cate Blanchett and have added an element of magic to everything from impromptu weekend lunches and housewarmings to weddings and proposals.

“For one guy, we put together a picnic for his first date and a year later he proposed to his girlfriend over one of our picnics. She emailed and thanked us for the part we’ve played in their relationship.”

That might just be the secret to Sydney Picnic Co – the ability to inspire Sydneysiders to slow down and appreciate what’s around them. Or in some cases, what’s in front of them.

Editorial Coverage – Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia

Vanishing Elephant – MBFWA 2013 Collection Review

At a glance: Marked by irreverent styling and crisp execution, Vanishing Elephant’s fashion week debut proves that the five-year-old brand has come of age.

Signature detail: The jumper knotted around the waist – an iteration of a nineties trend that’s destined for big things.

Style might be invisible but you still know it when you see it. Whether it’s a shirt buttoned up to the collar or trousers rolled up at the cuff, it’s often based on insider codes translated to command the eye. In the last few years, Vanishing Elephant has made it their business to crack these codes wide open, scoring a legion of devoted fans and establishing a brand presence that’s blissfully free of the fashion industry circus. But while Huw Bennett, Arron Russell and Felix Chan may have no need for a runway show, their not the types to back away from a challenge – Wednesday’s effort, set in an old railway museum in Australian Technology Park, was a case in point. The runway, which snaked around vintage locomotive equipment, was a study in artful layering and beaten-up elegance. Crisp shirts appeared under sleek, tailored jackets in charcoal and navy while polka dots injected preppy denim separates with a welcome dose of play. Tooth-baring sharks loomed on button-down shirts and a navy-and-blue suit that appears hand-painted, proves that the trio are finding their voice when it comes to womenswear. The label recruited the styling talents of Mark Vassalo for this show suggesting that the Vanishing Elephant gentleman might have found his spirit animal in the nineties skater. The reflective shades, knotted sweaters and Hawaiian shirts might seem to come out of left field, but it’s an experiment that somehow feels right.

Jayson Brundson – MBFWA 2013 Collection Review

At a glance: Jayson Brundson brings Old Hollywood fantasy to the runway with Obsession, a collection that combines luxe fabrics with nods to mid-century couture.

Signature detail: A fashion fixture since the 18th century, the bell sleeve is just the right shade of restrained. But Jayson Brunson’s version – accented with silver embroidery and stopping just above the elbow – manages an offbeat elegance as well.

Jayson Brundson is the type of designer that shows what’s possible when singular vision meets precise execution. Brundson, who’s previously worked as an illustrator and fashion editor, has always understood how clothes can create a story around a woman’s allure – a quality that has seen the label embraced by the likes of Linda Evangelista and Princess Mary. Obsession, a show inspired by screen sirens and celluloid glamour is proof that Brundson is as much an auteur as he is a designer. Boat-neck blouses in silver silk top off stark, knee-length pencil skirts in pure white and glossy black. Elsewhere, a breezy, bell-sleeved trapeze dress finds it opposite in a corseted, silk gown in fiery vermillion that’s a lesson in flawless craftsmanship. Heavy, cinematic music sets the stage for the collection’s standout pieces – a pair of dresses in raw, emerald silk that suggest that it’s possible to become a fifties starlet, if only for a day.

 Published online at Urban Walkabout 

48 Hours in Sydney

48 Hours in Sydney 

10:00 AM

There’s no better initiation to Sydney thrills than a sun-dappled morning in Circular Quay. Step into the glass elevator at the foot of the newly refurbished MCA and head to the rooftop café for breakfast – it’s the perfect vantage point for watching the light bounce off the curves of Jon Utzon’s Opera House.

11:00 AM

For an instant dose of summer holiday magic, stroll down to the Manly Ferry terminal and hop onboard – this classic trip offers dreamlike views of the Harbour and Sydney Cove. When you disembark, cross the Corso on your way to Manly beach – but for a true slice of surfing village nostalgia, skip the main drag and take the backstreets. Cycle fiends should head to Manly Bikes, for a two-wheeled take on seaside charms.

1:00 PM

Featuring chirpy Tropicana-print cushions and lush foliage, lunch at Manly Wines is a nice way to refuel. Grab an outdoor table, order some BBQ prawns with chilli and lime and settle in for some Island-themed good times.

 3:00 PM

From the gold-and-cedar grandeur of The Strand to the uber-hip The Galeries, Sydney is an arcade city. Farewell Circular Quay and say hello to Sydney fashion royalty by dropping into Lover, Akira and Sass & Bide as well as cult retail emporium The Corner Shop. For a break from the sartorial, visit Books Kinokuniya – it’s a bibliophile’s dream.

 7:00 PM

Its fitout might take cues from 1930s Shanghai but the dumplings at Mr Wong’s are perennially delicious. This restaurant is drawing serious culinary kudos thanks to its heavenly take on Cantonese classics – try the roast duck or the pipis in XO sauce.

 9:00 PM 

The Victoria Room blends a note-perfect cocktail list with an interior that could double as a secret drinking den for the British Raj. Take a post-dinner stroll to this Darlinghurst institution for a nightcap with a side of breezy colonial grandeur.

SATURDAY

 9:00 AM 

Walk through the Botanic Gardens and up McMahons Stairs to Potts Point. Breakfast in style at Chez Dee, a slice of Paris in Potts Point. Linger over scrambled eggs with shaved truffle and the Saturday paper before making your way down Macleay Street via the King’s Cross Organic Markets.

 10:00 AM 

Stroll past candy-coloured terrace houses to Object Gallery in Darlinghurst, an exhibition space that reads like a who’s who of Sydney design talent. Next up, it’s design retail space Workshopped and then a stroll down leafy Bourke Street for a lesson in clever furniture and objets’ d’art. Take a detour to Ici Et La and Elements I Love for St Tropez chic. Keep walking down Bourke Street to Small Spaces, an artful tribute to small scale living before rifling through the leather trunks, apothecary glassware and Danish coffee tables at Doug Up on Bourke – a hive of industrial furniture and vintage finds.

1:00 PM Lunch at Café Sopra 

At local institution Café Sopra, lunch is a well-heeled affair. Let a tuxedoed waiter escort you to your table and give in to Italian culinary flair in the form of melt-in-your-mouth gnocchi and vine-ripened tomatoes with creamy mozzarella.

3:00 PM 

For dessert, try some contemporary art at 2 Danks Street, a nearby art space with a bold curatorial vision. Don’t miss Utopia Art for indigenous pieces and the Brenda May gallery – a space with a knack for championing the city’s emerging art stars.

 6:00 PM

Movida’s new Sydney outpost might serve up a sleeker version of Frank Camorra’s brand of culinary rock n’roll – but it’s no less addictive than the original. Slide into a leather banquette and surrender to a procession of dishes including Andalucian braised rabbit and Catalan sausage with clove and anis, chased up with a bottle of velvety Tempranillo.

 9:00 PM

Decked out in rock n’ roll paraphernalia, Mojo’s Record Bar promises vintage vinyl and freewheeling good times. Pull up a bar stool and brood over a Lemon Cohen – a gin-and-apricot-brandy concoction with all the soul of the original.

The Fine Print

Although no one enjoys entertaining worst-case scenarios, there’s no denying that life doesn’t always go according to plan. That’s why it’s critical that your loved ones are taken care of in the instance that disaster does strike.

Life insurance can offer a powerful safety net by safeguarding your family’s future and giving you peace of mind. Investing in a life insurance product can mean the difference between easing their stresses and burdening them with money worries on top of their loss.

However, before you sign up for a life insurance policy, it pays to understand the details by reading the PDS or contacting a provider to ask a question. Here are some of the major factors to consider before signing on the dotted line.

Understanding your policy type

Before committing to life insurance, it’s important to understand what type of life insurance policy you will be getting. In Australia, most providers offer term life insurance policies. This type of life insurance policy provides cover for a specific amount of time at a fixed rate, with the life policies generally expiring at age 75.

 Accounting for critical illness

Critical illnesses can be debilitating for families and can often severely impair a breadwinner’s ability to earn an income. That’s why it’s important to consider whether your insurance policy factors in an optional critical illness benefit to offer protection against illnesses and major injuries such as heart attacks, cancer and sudden paralysis.

 Age and lifestyle factors

It pays to note that life insurance premiums can often vary depending on factors such as age, gender and lifestyle. High-risk habits such as smoking generally result in higher insurance premiums and must be disclosed before committing to a life insurance policy. Age can also affect the rate of your premiums – in most cases, your insurance premiums increase incrementally as you get older.

Although these conditions shouldn’t deter customers from investing in life insurance, it’s important to stay abreast of this information when choosing and committing to an insurance policy.

There’s no reason to wait around until you’re in your 30s or 40s to start researching life insurance. And depending on your health and lifestyle, the older you are means the more expensive it will be to purchase life insurance.

While choosing the right life insurance policy for you can be challenging, take the time to read the PDS so you can be confident in your life insurance decision.

Telecommuting: The Living Room Office

Published in Amex Business Room 

For the last few years, new technology and rising connectivity levels have been rewriting the rules for business culture. Practices such as telecommuting, which were once reserved for those at the very top of the corporate pyramid, are now considered beneficial for productivity, innovation and employee happiness.

If a 2012 survey by collaboration software company Wrike is anything go by, the telecommuting phenomenon is fast gathering steam – the report showed that 83 per cent of all respondents are working from home at least part of the day¹. Although there’s no denying the perks of working from the comfort of your living room, telecommuting is not without its dangers and professional pitfalls. Here’s how to solve them.

Image is everything

Although working from home can be highly productive, it’s not uncommon for major clients to question your professionalism or ability to do your job. That’s why it’s important that you tell them that you are working from your home office rather than working from home – otherwise it’s easy to assume that you’re doing your neighbourhood ironing for a small fee. Make sure you don’t tell your clients you’re based at a sprawling corporate headquarters when you’re chasing deadlines from your living room. Misrepresenting your work situation will damage credibility and do your business relationships more harm than good.

The perils of being alone

Your home office might open up blissful windows of productivity, but the absence of workplace banter comes at a price. Sometimes being alone for long stretches can be daunting and demotivating – when you lack colleagues to bounce ideas off, the fallout can be frightening. Counter this by staying connected via Twitter, email or LinkedIn and make sure you consult your support network when the solitude gets too much. By reaching out, you gain the benefits of a digital community without the distraction and fuss.

The downside of domestic bliss

Does your toddler shriek each time you take an overseas conference call? Your dishwasher flood when you’re battling the deadline crunch? Telecommuters need to exercise a form of damage control so that domestic issues don’t hamper professional progress. Whether it’s employing a babysitter or hiring a regular handyman, it’s important that you set clear boundaries between your home life and your career. If you maintain a high level of professionalism, your living room can become the launching pad for your biggest career goals.

Dress for the occasion

Although ditching the suit for your flannel pyjamas might be a telecommuter’s dream, saying goodbye to your working wardrobe isn’t as appealing a prospect as it may first seem. Taking care of your professional appearance will help you forget that your lounge room doubles as a living space. You need to consider the hours you spend at your desk as business, not recreation – it’s the best way to reap the benefits of an at-home workplace.

Telecommuting might bring its fair share of issues, but it can also promise some serious professional perks. If you make sure you treat your living room office as a sacred space, it’s bound to revolutionise the way you work.

Melbourne City Guide

After Store
This one-of-a-kind retail space combines an inventive edit of homewares, jewellery and furniture with an exposed brick interior that conjures your dream New York loft. Come for technicolour textiles, colourburst jewellery and jars of wild strawberries that bring a piece of the outside in.

L’ucello
This shrine to vintage haberdashery blends homespun chic with a fashion purist’s eye for detail. It stocks timeless Liberty-print textiles, silk embroidery threads and exquisite pieces courtesy of French needlework maestro Sophie Digard.

La Belle Miette
This pint-sized patisserie combines Parisan culinary nous with the adventurous spirit of a German wunderkammer. Locals flock here for melt-in-your-mouth macarons in flavours such as Fleur de Sel caramel and Moet et Chandon.

Mamasita
Spanish for “hot babe”, this classy Mexican joint serves up inventive food alongside the freewheeling energy of an all-night tequila bar. Indulge south-of-border cravings with tostaditas stuffed with crab meat and tamarind mayo, braised lamb quesadillas and the palette-cleansing ceviche or perch a the bar with an icy michelada – a sublime blend of beer, lime juice and spice. If you’re feeling brave, the well-edited tequila list is a lesson in hedonism.

SEMF Website Copy

SEMF is an independent engineering, environmental and management consulting firm with a wide national presence and an interdisciplinary focus. We offer planning, design, project management and consulting services across the building and property, manufacturing and processing, energy and resources industries. Through our work, we shape the built and natural environment for the better.

Founded in 1980, SEMF is known for its innovative design approach, technical excellence and ability to master complex projects spanning various disciplines. Our work on the state-of-the-art moving roof system for Melbourne’s iconic Etihad stadium and projects such as the Royal Hobart Hospital, Darwin Port Corporation shiploaders, the Friskies pet care factory for Nestle Australia and the Sugarloaf Pipeline have cemented our reputation for thought leadership as well as our sharp commercial awareness and commitment to sustainability.

At SEMF, we owe our success to a spirit of collaboration and on partner relationships that are driven by open communication and mutual respect. We have an operational agreement with Tenova Spa, through our joint venture company Tenova-SEMF, a partnership that plays a critical role during the design and construction phases of large-scale mobile machines.

SEMF brings together talented individuals from a broad range of disciplines and encourages them to look beyond the limits of their own expertise. We are wholly owned by our staff and employ over 130 engineers, managers, consultants and technical specialists across offices in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart, Burnie, Launceston and Gladstone.

Read more about the SEMF Story

Is Sex Just a Substitute for Talent?

Published in Daily Life 

David Choe is more interested in making good art than he is in feeling good. In a recent interview with The Daily Beast’s Lizzy Crocker, the 36-year-old LA street artist whose frenetic, erotically charged murals read like a kind of unchecked outpouring of the id, says that when he’s in a happy place, his art gets worse. “I need therapy, and I do believe in helping yourself,” he says, also revealing that he used to see four shrinks a week. “It may have been all in my head, but I was like f—k this. My mental health comes second to my art.”

Lately, Choe has been pouring all that self-destructive energy into a different type of project. Co-hosted with Japanese-American porn star Asa Akira, DVDASA (short for Double Vag, Double Anal, Sensitive Artist) is a free podcast featuring 90-minute episodes which explore a spectrum of sex, relationship and race issues – everything from the challenges of reconciling the vocational thrills of double penetration with the logistics of maintaining a brand-new marriage (Akira’s) to the heartbreak that ensues when the object of your masturbation fantasy is already attached (Choe’s).

DVDASA swiftly ascended the iTunes charts – the podcast received a top twenty overall ranking and reached first place in the Health category in early February. Unsurprisingly, there’s something of an inversely proportional relationship between the adventurousness of the podcast and the explicitness of its content. Choe, who claims that he created DVDASA as a forum for his personal transgressions, spends most of his time trying to outmatch his guest with the sheer outrageousness of his exploits – a kind of locker room banter for the sexually deranged – while Akira supplies the narrative soundtrack, complete with XXX-rated highlights.

lthough Choe might sound like the poster-boy for the sort of demographic that would get off on Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d, the truth is he’s anything but. He’s managed to carve out a successful career as a commercial illustrator, regularly contributing to Vice and Giant Robot – in between a gambling addiction and stints in jail. He sold a $250 million painting to the princess of Azerbaijan, thanks to the hype sparked by 2010 documentary Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe and a decision to be paid for a mural in Facebook stocks has seen him reap the spoils of last year’s IPO.

Luckily for Choe, transgressive sexual behaviour, manufactured or otherwise, is a recurring factor in an age-old art world equation. If you’re a man who’s good at maths, it’s one that almost always adds up to infamy, cultural currency and sales.

In her New York magazine feature “Chasing Dash Snow”, Ariel Levy traces the careers of the late artist Dash Snow and photographer Ryan McGinley, who are best-known for immortalising a brand of sex-fuelled hedonism in art.  In doing so, she exposes the cultural machinery that produces the city’s (male) art stars and the invisible connection between bankability and underground success.

“And because notoriety is crucial to something much larger than graffiti culture, Dash Snow is becoming a kind of sensation. Young people poured out onto Joey Ramone Place waiting to get into his last show at Rivington Arms gallery. You may not be able to find him, but you can hear his name, that zooming syllable—Dash!—punctuating conversations in Chelsea galleries and Lower East Side coke parties and Miami art fairs and the offices of underground newspapers in Copenhagen and Berlin, like a kind of supercool international Morse code. Because the art world loves infamy. Downtown New York City loves infamy—needs it, in fact, to exist.”

But for infamy to work, first we have to be enamoured by it. Choe might use a wealthy porn star as a vehicle for his version of debauched masculinity but his paintings are gritty, dreamlike and undeniably compelling. And Snow and McGinley’s work might feature ingénues in compromising positions, but it also transports you to a hypnotic Neverland that’s immune to both time and place.

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger offers one explanation for this struggle between liberal myopia and feminist instinct – why we identify with art that reduces our bodies to the level of 35mm film or a tube of acrylic paint.

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight,” he writes.

But if this means we’re doomed to substitute sex for talent, how do we tell the difference between good art and the stuff that makes us squirm? Watch the Girls episode where Marnie realises she’s drawn to Booth Jonathan’s infamy, not his ability – after all, breaking sexual boundaries has nothing to do with creating groundbreaking work.

Chicks on Speed: “Julian Assange has an honesty that’s very similar to that of an artist”

Published in The Vine

There’s the kind of artist who says they’re interested in pushing boundaries. And then there’s the type for whom self-interested talk about boundary pushing is less productive than doing the work it takes to break new ground. In theory, Alex Murray-Leslie and Melissa Logan should be exhausted. The duo, who started Chicks on Speed after a fateful art school encounter, might have thrown the illegal parties that shaped Berlin’s nineties electroclash scene but their knack for erasing the lines between fashion, music, performance and art has seen them achieve global success. Along the way, they’ve collaborated with the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Peaches and Yoko Ono and shown everywhere from MoMA in New York to the Venice Biennale.

Although Chicks on Speed may trouble the divide between high and low culture, it’s dangerous to dismiss them as a Warholian wet dream. They’ve spent the last eight years working on a range of Objekt Instruments including a high-heeled shoe guitar (Kate Moss wore it naked and sent them a picture), they did a stint artists-in-residence at Hobart’s MONA FOMA festival in January where they performed in an abandoned church and, most recently, they’ve launched a major show at ArtSpace in Sydney.

Chicks on Speed have lately fixed their creative focus on the equalising power of technology, the way it can rewrite old distribution systems and disseminate new ideas. The pair’s new album, Scream, is set to be released in app form in July and will feature a collaboration with Julian Assange, recorded in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, his home since last June. Chicks on Speed were introduced to Assange through their friend Angela Richter, a theatre director who conducted a series of interviews with him for her latest play, which takes a non-narrative look at WikiLeaks and its global fallout.

In the wake of Chicks on Speed’s ArtSpace exhibition launch, Murray-Leslie, Logan and Richter sat down with TheVine for an exclusive interview about boundary-pushing, why it’s a good thing that the music industry is dead and how Assange is more artist than he is political provocateur.

Chicks on Speed are known for creating wildly original work. Which artists inspire you?

Alex Murray-Leslie: Well, sort of the obvious ones – Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic (sometimes), Carolee Schneeman. We’re inspired by a lot of seventies feminist performance artists as well as bands such as The Slits and The Raincoats. I feel like what The Raincoats were doing back in 1978 reflects a certain side of what we do now. It’s the idea that we’re all somehow linked to this greater chain.

In the last three decades, the DIY and punk scene has had many incarnations. What forces are shaping it at the moment?

Alex: You know, the DIY thing is always mentioned a lot and in a way we now have this idea that you don’t do it yourself, you do it with everybody else. So in a way we’ve shifted our manifesto.

So has your manifesto evolved? Has it become more collaborative?

Alex: We now think that loneliness is the enemy…Information frees you and so it’s better to align yourself with a lot of people rather than be alone. We work in the art world where there’s this belief about what we do being unique and exclusive. And artists such as Damien Hirst and Murakami [Takashi] have sort of changed all of that which is interesting. We’re more interested in breaking down those barriers between high culture and low, blurring them and being accessible. We’re really interested in organisations such as Wikileaks, which empower people and are total supporters of free information.

Did you both start off as fine artists and branch into different spaces?

Alex: Well, Melissa and I were both art students but we were attracted to music because it represents such a proliferation of one idea. If you held an exhibition you might have 500 people come to see your show, but if you create a seven-inch you reach so many more people.

Tell me about your next project.

Alex: We’re working on our album Scream, which is going to be released as an app in July and will also be launched digitally and on vinyl on Chicks on Speed Records and Valve. It contains ten songs, each addressing a different theme and is based on our Objekt Instruments as well.

Melissa Logan: Every time we release a new track, we’ll just put it out as an update.

Alex: The app will also contain videos we’ve developed for each song and audiences will be able to play it at the show and interact with us. You’re a user, but you’re also a creative user. It takes away that hierarchy between stage and audience and opens it up to new public art experiences.

What are your hopes for the album?

Alex: We hope that it will really change how artist release music. The music industry is long overdue to find different mediums.

Melissa: It was the industry’s own fault that it collapsed. They were overcharging, ripping off artists. It’s a great thing for the artists that the industry collapsed. Now we really have to find different systems – it’s not just something that you can become passive about.

Alex: The album includes a recording with Yoko Ono, collaborations with Anat Ben-David and [Australian extreme drummer] Tina Havelock Stevens. We also made one of those songs with our friend Angela [Richter] and Julian Assange.

How did you become involved in this album Angela?

Angela: I’m a theatre director who got bored of Shakespeare and Chekhov. I started researching a play about Julian Assange and Wikileaks but it was too difficult to get in touch with him. But then, I heard that he was auctioning lunch with himself on eBay. I eventually won it and that’s how we first met. I was very lucky. I met him some months later, we talked for five hours and he said, ‘okay you’ve convinced me’ [to work on the project]. I feel like despite everything he’s experienced he’s still someone with a lot of trust in people – he very much opened the door.

I’d visit him in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the evenings and we would talk the whole night – Julian is very detailed when he answers questions. And then, the Chicks came to me and asked if they could work with him and use some of the material. There’s this part when I asked him if God exists and he refused to answer. Then he realised he couldn’t escape – the answer he gave was long and complex, but also very deep. This is the part the Chicks used to make the song and it’s a miracle that they managed to do that.

Melissa: We’re going to release the track on an eight-inch single and we’re speaking to Vice about doing the video at the moment.

You guys align yourself strongly with Julian Assange. In what ways do your worldviews intersect?

Alex: I think we’re all interested in empowering people through information. I think there’s this innate basis that’s similar but with very, very different ways of going about it. Julian was the one who helped bring the internet to Australia! He also has an honesty that’s very similar to that of an artist. But we’re told he’s not an artist. And that’s why he causes so much trouble because when an artists does what he does, it’s another story. Artists can do what they want, but on the other hand they don’t have the same political impact – unless you’re [Chinese artist] Ai Weiwei.

Melissa: Maybe he’s open to working with us because his mother was involved in theatre and was also an activist in the seventies, exposing atomic testing grounds. She used to have very strong views – she was very courageous but she could also perform.

Angela: We played the song for Julian in the embassy. It was that typical effect – he was embarrassed to hear himself but I think he was flattered too. He then he swung straight back into political discussion.

Anish Kapoor at the MCA

Published in Broadsheet, January 2013

Anish Kapoor’s new exhibition at the MCA proves that the pull of irony is no match for the power of poetry.

There’s a brand of contemporary art that can make you feel clever just by being in its presence. The kind of cool, cloying work that helps you master your world by recasting your deepest experiences in an ironic glaze.

And then there’s the type of contemporary art that’s so visceral, it makes you feel like your insides are on show. When you stand before it, it unravels you to the point that you’re not sure what form you took before.

When Anish Kapoor won the Turner Prize back in 1991, his sculptures displayed a deeply unfashionable fascination with interiority – a kind of poetic mysticism that’s the antithesis of work by contemporaries such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. But when you visit Kapoor’s new show at the MCA, it’s clear that the pull of irony is no match for the power of poetry, the way that art which trades in the abstract can manage to hit you where it hurts.

“I’m not that interested in doing retrospectives,” says Kapoor, when speaking of the exhibition. “I wanted this show to be a kind of survey that would allow for the development of certain ideas. I wanted it to include the pigment works that touch on a few ideas that are fundamental to me, like the notion of the object without the hand, generated by its own volition and the idea of colour as materialist stuff as well as the object that isn’t what it describes itself to be. Pieces that are somewhere between illusion and the real thing.”

Kapoor’s first major Australian exhibition invites viewers to inhabit the shadowy realm between the illusory and the material, to cast aside the limits of the body and let self and object blur. At first glance, My Body Your Body (1993) appears to be a flat rectangle rendered in iridescent blue. As you move closer, it takes the form of an abyss in what becomes a gentle unfurling of perception and space. Elsewhere,Void (1989) induces this same sense of subtle vertigo. The concave sculpture is both thoroughly pleasurable and highly immersive, couching the promise of sensual abandon in the terror of falling too deep.

“I think that’s what great art does,” offers Liz-Ann Macgregor, MCA director and exhibition curator. “It transcends the description of the materiality and the colour. Something happens between the viewer and the work, and it’s magical. It pulls you in, it pulls something out of you and it makes you have this reaction. And it’s powerfully visual.”

Kapoor might have an aptitude for visual trickery but it’s dangerous to dismiss him as a showman. 1000 Names (1979–80), a tableau of geometric forms created via radiant powdered pigment, eschews optical illusion in favour of emotional simplicity. Created following a trip to India and inspired by the notion of ritual, the sculpture is highly personal and deeply moving.

Not that Kapoor, who was born in Mumbai but studied and works in London, has any interest in letting his work serve as a vehicle for personal narrative.

“There are so many artists who see it as their mission in a way to do only what all of us can do and only do as human beings,” he contends. “To rely if you like on our psychobiography, because all we have is birth and death and all the stuff in between. But I feel, somehow or the other, that psychobiography seems to limit what it’s possible to do poetically, and that though you can’t avoid this, I feel like it’s not necessary to place all our emphasis on it.”

Kapoor is vehement about rejecting the mantle of confession and representation. “I put a lot of emphasis on the idea that I have nothing to say as an artist, and I do have nothing to say. Maybe making work is about the process of getting those things out of the way, so we can make room for everything else.”

But you get the feeling that meaning is rarely static in Anish Kapoor’s world. To connect with art, it has to resonate with our truth, form a bridge between the artist’s experience and our own. My Red Homeland(2003), the sprawling, viscous mass of wax that occupies the MCA’s expansive level one gallery, does exactly this. It’s blood, guts, viscera, home – your insides wrought in a formless explosion.

“Art is good at something we call intimacy,” Kapoor says. “It’s good at saying ‘Come over here and come and be part of this’. Sculpture in particular, the work doesn’t work from over there, it works from over here. It demands a personal engagement and maybe that’s something that we all want and need.”

Anish Kapoor shows at the MCA until April 1.

How to Hustle Your Way to Success

Published in Daily Life, December 2012

If you’re familiar with Dazed and Confused, you’d know that the indie bible isn’t exactly famous for championing feminist iconography. Last month, the magazine, which regularly publishes provocative editorials shot by the likes of Terry Richardson, ran a cover featuring self-styled Harlem rapper Azealia Banks blowing up a raspberry condom. Despite being banned in seven countries, the image isn’t half as risqué as the subject herself – a woman whose success trajectory throws up a narrative of female ambition that owes more to the ability to hustle than a misguided effort to have it all.

“I know it sounds really self-centred, but I’m sort of obsessed with myself,” Banks says in the interview. “I have to be because this is the only way I can stay focused. That’s the theme of my album – if you don’t take care of yourself, no one else will. It’s about a girl doing everything she can to achieve her goals, to make it somehow, someway.”

Whether you put this down to ambition or blind egotism, there’s something undeniably shocking about Banks’ statement, a subversiveness that would barely register if it came from the mouth of Mark Zuckerberg or Jay-Z. It highlights the unspoken rules that dictate the ways we’re allowed to pursue what matters to us, an invisible proviso that polices female ambition even as it celebrates it.

But it seems that Banks isn’t the only one breaking these rules. M.I.A has been a long-time advocate for hustling in the name of art, spinning a career as a musician, designer and artist out of connections, cultural influences and grandiose ambitions. What M.I.A lacks in talent, she makes up for through her ability to weave together politics, word beats and a street art aesthetic – a display of resourcefulness and determination that’s attracted Grammy nominations and off-the-chart album sales.

But if hustling allows you to shape your own career, this control is not without its price. M.I.A was dismissed as a politically naiive opportunist in a feature by New York Times’Lynne Hirshberg and Hazel Dooney’s insurgent tactics have drawn scepticism and accusations from the art world.

For now Banks’ brand of audacity seems to be working. In the year since the release of 212, the addictive single that secured nearly 24 million views on YouTube, Banks signed with Interscope Records and topped NME’s list of the year’s most influential artists. Karl Lagerfield asked her to perform at his house in January and her upcoming album Broke with Expensive Taste, featuring Grammy-winning producer Paul Epworth, is among next year’s most hotly anticipated releases.

It’s easy to dismiss Banks, whose aggressively sexual tracks and proclivity for the c-word have scored fans across the art, music and fashion worlds, as the pin-up for a new, particularly obnoxious brand of girl power and her success as straight out of the annals of internet celebrity – where making it is not about doing whatever it takes but about the well-timed intersection of privilege, technology and luck.

However, if you listen closely, the lyrics of breakaway hit 212 tell a much more interesting story: “I heard you’re riding with the same tall, tall tale / Telling them you made some / Saying you’re grindin’, but you ain’t goin’ nowhere / Why you procrastinate, girl? / You got a lot, but you just waste all yourself / They’ll forget your name soon / And won’t nobody be to blame but yourself, yeah.”

Love it or hate it, the tune highlights an invisible connection between ability and accountability that’s often missing in conversations about female ambition.

“For the most part, Azealia Banks has never been an amateur at much of anything,” writes Zach Baron, in an August profile for Spin magazine. “When she first started rapping, she was immediately better than the boyfriend she was trying to impress. She was better than her boyfriend’s friends. To this day, people who knew her talk about how eerily good she was at all of it, before she’d even practiced, before there was a notion that she might get paid for doing it […]

But talent, the silent protagonist of this type of story, has little to do with the rise and rise of Azealia Banks. Rather, her success is about how the ability to hustle can bridge the divide between raw talent and outsize ambition.

Hustling is an ugly word associated more with con artists than those whose satisfaction in life depends on creative success. It’s even less likely to feature in narratives of female ambition, which are usually couched in cultural permissiveness or pitted against marriage or relationships – that pervasive “all” that’s the focus of so many feminist debates.

Yet strangely, this hustle – the aggressive pursuit of one’s living through whatever means or the relentless search for markets for one’s work at whatever cost – is often the unseen factor when it comes to making it as an artist.

Banks deals in rap music – a genre that’s indebted to the figure of the hustler and where trading bombast for bucks is nothing new. It’s also, as Zadie Smith writes in a recent New York Times feature on Jay-Z, a genre that uses language as a form of asymmetric warfare where hustling is intrinsic to both success and survival.

Although Jay-Z and Banks may both be celebrated for their lyrical mastery, it seems that hustling – a practice that breeds a distinctly unfeminine brand of ambition – is still considered a man’s game.

In a commencement speech to Wellesley University, the late writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron once warned against the forces that quash this ability to hustle. “What Wellesley wanted was for us to avoid the extremes. To be instead, that thing in the middle. A lady. We were to take the fabulous education we had received here and use it to preside at a dinner table or at a committee meeting. We were to spend our lives making nice,” she said.

Banks seems to understand that as a project, making nice is wildly at odds with pulling out all the stops.

“The only thing you could ever accuse Banks of being bad at relates to her inability – so far – to become a star for the world she has always been to herself and to those people who knew her when she first started trying,” writes Baron.

In Banks’ world, hustling is just trying – dressed up in flashier clothing.

We Are Handsome

Published in Style Seekers, October 2012

It started with an image. A picture of a girl on a rooftop in a lion-emblazoned one-piece against the washed-out blue of a summer sky. Going viral days after it reached the internet, the photograph sparked a curiosity about the picture’s creators as well as the swimsuit that somehow blurred the line between fashion, swimwear and art. Three years on, we’re still curious about Jeremy Somers and Indhra Chagoury.

The duo behind Sydney swimwear label We Are Handsome may have secured a global following since that picture was taken, but they’re still fiercely focused on what they do best. “Everything we do is about the imagery,” offers Somers, whose background is in photography. “I think that’s why we’ve been successful – because the imagery within our swimwear is so beautiful to look at.”

It’s impossible not to be mesmerised by We Are Handsome swimwear. Each collection features images that range from nostalgic and whimsical to just plain arresting – everything from hazy dreamscapes dotted with hot-air balloons and postcard-perfect alpine villages to zebras in the wild and tigresses mid-roar. And then there’s the matter of colour. Whether it’s a 50s-style bikini or a classic, scoop-backed one-piece, every swimsuit has an unmistakable, iridescent quality that adds an element of the surreal.

“We digitally print all our swimwear and Jeremy works on all the imagery so we can get the colours just right,” says Chagoury. “Secondly, we use really bright, shiny Italian Lycra – almost metallic, but not quite. We were one of the first brands to really embrace this technique.”

This risk has paid off in droves. We Are Handsome counts US retail giant Barneys and cult fashion emporium Colette among its international stockists and has been featured everywhere from The New York Times to French Vogue.

Although the pair are both inspired by travel, cities and fleeting moments, each takes a distinct creative approach. “We have very different ways of brainstorming. Because Jeremy is a photographer, he’ll see a beautiful image and say ‘let’s put this on a swimsuit.’ Because I’m a woman, I’ll see something beautiful like palm trees – and want to put it on a swimsuit,” she laughs. “I work from the inside out and Jeremy works from the outside in.”

Funkis

Good design strikes you when you see it. Whether you’re looking at the graphic colourbursts of a Marimekko cushion, a sculptural Le Klint lampshade or an artful pair of clogs, it sparks a lightning-bolt moment of recognition that’s impossible to forget.

Carina Enstrom Gibb agrees. Enstrom Gibb is the founder of funkis, a lifestyle retailer that combines a laid-back Sydney sensibility with a powerful appreciation of Scandinavian design. Enstrom Gibb runs the Paddington design emporium and Strand Arcade offshoot with the help of Brianna Cheeseman, Rochelle Gibbs, Frida Svensson and Rachael Maude – a collective who share a common creative approach along with an impeccable eye for homewares, fashion and textiles.

“We started importing secondhand furniture and antiques from Sweden in 1995,” offers Gibb. “The next year we decided to do a contemporary version of it. At the time, Bondi was the epicentre for stylists in Australia and funkis managed to gain a following.” It’s not surprising that funkis was conceived in Bondi. The brand might draw heavily on European artisanship, but its palette conjures the turquoise, taupes and muted corals that colour the iconic Sydney suburb.

“I think funkis works because it’s so beachy and light,” Gibb continues. “I think it works for the Australian psyche too. I think the Swedish and Australian mentalities are similar – unfussy and low-key.”

Although funkis is heavily focused on Scandivanian design staples – from exquisite, Marimekko scarves and textiles by iconic Swedish designer Stig Lindberg – the store’s curatorial focus is as imaginative as it is timeless. funkis also stocks up-and-coming local designers including Cheeseman’s own label, Secret South.

Cheeseman attributes the brand’s success to Enstrom Gibb’s combination of passion and vision. “Carina is a real creative powerhouse,” she says. 

Enstrom Gibb might shy away from such accolades, but Cheeseman’s observation is clearly grounded in fact. funkis recently launched an online store and plans to expand to Melbourne and revamp its Paddington flagship.

And as for Enstrom Gibb’s own inspirations, she can’t get past Stig Lindberg. “I’ve been working with some of those designs for 20 years and I still love them. I think that’s a sign of good design.”

Making Terrariums with Bosky

Published in Broadsheet

Bosky is feeding our terrarium fixation with miniature worlds that blend horticulture and art.

There’s something comforting about terrariums. The miniature greenhouses might represent a charming combination of horticulture and art, but they also offer a type of pleasure that’s a world away from the concrete thrills of city life.

Maybe that’s why these pint-sized ecosystems have shrugged off roots in 70s kitsch to enjoy something of a revival. Patrick Ryan seems to think so. The Melbourne sound engineer and bass player is the founder of Bosky, a business that signals the terrarium’s elegant new incarnation.

“The terrariums that are around now are quite different from the ones from the seventies,” offers Ryan. “Today, terrariums involve a lot more open glassware and miniature figures. They’re a beautiful and sustainable way to incorporate some greenery into the indoors, so they’ve always had an appeal. But I think a long break from their over-exposure was probably necessary.”

It’s hard to imagine a Bosky terrarium in the same space as a fondue set or garish orange wallpaper. Ryan’s creations, which range from lush arrangements of fern, wood and moss to verdant little landscapes, populated by miniscule wanderers and roving deer, are thoroughly contemporary and strangely absorbing.

“I try and visualise a miniature scene when building a new terrarium,” says Ryan, a member of Melbourne local rock outfit the Dead River Deeps. “I always want the mix of plants, wood, rocks and figurines to compliment the shape of the glass and create a balance between the different elements.

“More often than not, the terrarium is inspired by the glass itself.”

Thanks to the imaginative use of glass, Bosky’s terrariums are closer to living, breathing sculptures. Ryan often works with vintage and repurposed glassware, ranging from antique cooking jars and decanters to various spherical vases. One terrarium, featuring gossamer-like ferns in a teardrop-shaped enclosure, muddies the line between plant and art.

For Ryan, glass will play an ongoing role in Bosky’s evolution. “I think the next logical step for me is to learn about glass-blowing, so I can create my own terrarium vessels,” he says.

Ryan started Bosky 18 months ago after spotting a terrarium in a café, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. “It took me a lot of trial and error to get the hang of putting them together and selecting the plants. Eventually, I had so many around the house that it seemed like a good idea to start selling them and regain some space.”

Ryan’s not the only one. Melbourne is nursing something of an indoor gardening addiction, with pieces by local makers such as Miniscapes and Petit Green adorning gallery spaces, bars and restaurants. And Sydney seems to be following suit – terrariums are making regular appearances at pop-up shops, cafes and the likes of cult design emporium Koskela.

Maybe our terrarium fixation is part of our move towards all things locavore – the need to calm jangled inner city nerves and take greater responsibility for what we consume and create. Or perhaps it brings the pleasures of green thumb status to the houseplant killers among us. Either way, we hope they’re here to stay.

The Rise and Rise of Tablet Magazines

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald

The swift uptake of tablet devices has set the stage for a new wave of magazine publishing, without the glossy pages.

f you believe the online revolution couldn’t be further away from the tactile thrills of your local newsagent, you may want to reconsider. The tablet is becoming a newsagent in your pocket thanks to apps such as Zinio, Newsstand and Magshop, offering instant access to local and international publications and an endless library of back issues.

”Publishing for tablets is expected to accelerate quickly in the years ahead,” says Carl Hammerschmidt, director of the digital arm of the ACP magazine stable responsible for Woman’s Day and TV Week, among others. Hammerschmidt may be on to something. A recent study by technology research firm Forrester predicts half of Australia’s population will be using tablets by 2016. It says 2.3 million tablets will be sold in Australia this year alone.

The popularity of tablet devices has allowed publishers to find new readers for once popular titles now plagued by sliding circulation.

”The tablet allows readers to access their favourite magazine brands when, where and how they want, and in a way that provides meaningful engagement with that brand,” Hammerschmidt says.

Launched late last year, Apple’s Newsstand app has made it easier than ever for iPad users to read their favourite national publications and international titles without hefty overseas costs. Taking the form of a digital bookshelf, the app allows readers to browse a library of current editions and back issues with the swipe of finger.

Along with Next Issue, a US iPad app that equips readers with flat-fee, unlimited access to titles such as Wired, GQ and Esquire, Newsstand is changing the game for readers and publishers. Conde Nast, US publisher of Vanity Fair, Vogue and Golf Digest, reported a 268 per cent jump in digital downloads just two weeks after Newsstand’s launch.

Australian publishers are fast playing catch-up. In December 2011, ACP joined with Samsung to launch Magshop on the Galaxy tablet. Magshop’s virtual newsstand offers more than 50 titles including digital editions of Cleo, Rolling Stone and The Australian Women’s Weekly, downloaded for 30 per cent off the retail price of print versions.

”We repurpose the full issue for the tablet with bonus content and include features that provide a new and engaging proposition for readers,” Hammerschmidt says.

But when it comes to the tablet, publishing innovation is a level playing field. The chief executive of independent publisher Fashion Industry Broadcast, Paul Roberts, says tablets offer creative possibilities that aren’t limited to big publishers.

Artisan, a local food and lifestyle publication, seamlessly blends images, text, animation and video footage – evidence a tablet magazine can leap off the page.

”In the past, the publishing business has been two-dimensional,” Roberts says. ”But the tablet gives you several dimensions to play with … you can touch things, click things, pinch and zoom. It’s like having the full box of colour pencils, rather than one.”

Chasing the White Rabbit

Published in Broadsheet, Summer edition 2013 

Sydney’s ode to contemporary Chinese art is a compelling blend of serendipity, inclusiveness and imagination.

In Alice in Wonderland, Alice’s first glimpse of the white rabbit sparks a strange shift in her consciousness. When the creature materialises, it pulls at the threads of her reality and what follows serves to unravel everything she thinks she knows.

When you step inside this elegant, four-storey building on a tree-lined Chippendale Street, Lewis Carroll’s brand of chaos is the last thing that comes to mind. The flawlessly restored 1920s knitting factory that plays host to the White Rabbit Gallery – one of the world’s most celebrated private collections of Chinese contemporary art – cultivates a certain stillness and symmetry, a sense of balance that’s at odds with what’s outside.

“Judith Neilson first had the idea for the collection in 2007,” says Sarah Jenkins, the gallery’s communications manager, of White Rabbit’s founder and director. We’re chatting over Princess Flower tea at White Rabbit’s teahouse, a space punctuated by shafts of light and delicate bronze birdcages, which hang gossamer-like from the ceiling.

“Several years before that, she stumbled across the work of a Chinese artist called Wang Zhiyuan and she was absolutely amazed at what she saw. She ended up establishing a very close relationship with Wang and he opened her eyes to what was happening in Chinese contemporary art. She realised that what she was witnessing at the auctions didn’t really reflect what was going on in the country’s art scene.” She pauses to take a sip of her tea.

“Instead of approaching a big gallery, Judith wanted to create a platform for these lesser-known artists and to document Chinese art after the year 2000. A few days later, she saw this building. She had it shortly after that.”

It seems that serendipity, the force that spins fateful accidents out of ordinary encounters, has played an unseen part in White Rabbit’s evolution. Neilson, a philanthropist with an art school background and lifelong passion for collecting, went onto establish the gallery with her husband Kerr, a prominent Zimbabwe-born investment manager. The space is funded via the Neilson Foundation, a $30 million charitable venture that also supports the Biennale of Sydney and makes major contributions to the city’s cultural life.

Europe and the USA might have the Medicis and the Guggenheims, but in Australia – a country whose contemporary art scene is often at the mercy of public institutions and government bodies – this type of model is rare. It also makes for a curatorial vision that rejects stifling art world hierarchies in favour of accessibility, imagination and wit.

“From the very beginning, one of our main goals was to be as accessible and open as possible,” says Judith’s daughter, Paris Neilson, who is also White Rabbit’s curator and director.

“We want everyone to feel welcome when they enter the gallery and not feel intimidated. I know that contemporary art can scare off a lot of people and you sometimes feel that you have to explain yourself and say something intelligent. Mum always says that she’s succeeded if people look at every work and have a response to it. It doesn’t matter if they love it or hate it – as long as they respond to the piece and don’t just walk past.”

There’s no doubt that accessibility prevails at the White Rabbit. On the third floor, Sunflower Seeds – a piece composed of tiny, meticulously painted porcelain sculptures by Ai Weiwei, a social activist and China’s most famous living artist – sits alongside work by Pisan, an underground figure known for video works that blend real footage with digital animation and comic-strip references. This particular piece playfully lampoons the recent conflicts between Ai Weiwei and the Chinese authorities – an artist’s critique of political hypocrisy that doubles as the gallery’s takedown of art world elitism.

Elsewhere, Dust – an installation in which young Beijing artist Cong Linqui captures the minutiae of her life through tiny replicas of objects such as electrical drills, wheelbarrows and cutlery – offers the sort of meditation on the everyday that feels both highly immediate and deeply personal.

But White Rabbit’s inclusiveness extends to more than just the art. Downstairs, the teahouse is presided over by Yusuf, an amicable tea expert who doles out fresh, home-baked cookies, while the gift shop stocks breezy, clever curiosities rather than the usual line-up of expensive collectibles. The gallery also hosts a monthly book club and regularly screens Chinese cinema – everything from action films and romances to documentaries and cult classics.

But on a rainy August evening, a line that formed at the White Rabbit’s doors and snaked its way down Balfour Street quashes any temptation to conflate the gallery’s influence with its accessibility. The crowds, which spanned everyone from art students and journalists to families and Friday night revellers, were there for the opening of the gallery’s third anniversary exhibition, and most ambitious yet, Double Take.

“Putting together an exhibition can be quite tricky, because although the works come out of one country and a tight time period, it’s difficult to find threads that run through the collection,” offers Neilson, who’s an avid art collector herself.

“That’s how we begin. With some exhibitions, there are clear threads. For instance, this particular show is all about imitation and copy. And because that was quite obvious to us, we picked out the works in the collection that related to that. But often, a show will come together based on an aesthetic rather than an idea.”

This left-field approach is typical of White Rabbit. Rather than hosting regular exhibitions, the gallery stages two major shows a year, featuring pieces from the Neilson Foundation’s vast private collection along with new works sourced by Judith during monthly trips to China. Instead of constructing a show based on a movement or practice, the gallery highlights the connections and collisions between different pieces, in what becomes a compelling patchwork of the country’s cultural imagination and realities.

In the case of Double Take, this seems to be working. On the second floor of the gallery, people gather around Valentines Day, a chocolate shop festooned with pink ribbon and featuring rows of heart-shaped boxes, created by Taiwanese artist Tu Wei-Cheng. Upon closer inspection, the boxes house perfectly rendered miniature guns, tanks and hand grenades – a comment on China’s terse relationship with Taiwan and the tenuous barrier between love and war.

“I think we’ve grown and changed with each exhibition,” says Jenkins. “Everyone who comes to White Rabbit experiences it in a different way and everyone has their own favourite pieces. Because we’re a private museum, we have the freedom to acquire pieces according to Judith’s taste and what she considers to be excellent art.

“And we’re just lucky that she’s right.”

Double Take runs until February 3 at White Rabbit Gallery.

Rosas Walk the Line Between Voice and Dance

Published in Broadsheet, Spring edition September 2012

Contemporary dance was included in the Biennale of Sydney’s artistic program for the first time this year, with Carraigeworks unveiling a compelling new work of equal parts art, dance and spectacle.

For most of us, music offers a soundtrack to our lives, imbuing the best moments with greater meaning and spinning memories out of the mundane. But for music director Bjorn Schmelzer, music is a living, breathing organism with the power to tell us who we are and map our relationship with time and place.

The composer and ethnomusicologist is the director of Graindelavoix, a group that –in overturning ideas of performance and exploring the granularity of the human voice – veers closer to an art collective than a traditional musical ensemble.

As Schmelzer explains, the group’s name derives from a term borrowed from French cultural Roland Barthes. “We’re interested in what voices can do,” he says. “How the mix of voices combined in a polyphonic structure produces sounds that are completely different from what you’re used to.”

He posits his approach to be “more spatial”. “I take a psychoacoustic view of music,” he says. “For me, music is a reservoir of sounds and sonorities and I’m interested in the politics of what we listened to in the past and why we are listening to it now.”

Cesana, a new work by contemporary dance troupe Rosas is the perfect vehicle for Schmelzer’s combination of musical rigor and creative ambition. The work sees 19 dancers and singers explore the limits of their abilities as dancers sing and singers dance on a set designed by Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens. Conceived in collaboration with legendary choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the piece had its world premiere at Carriageworks earlier in September as part of the 18th Biennale of Sydney.

“Basically, our vision for this piece was to try to get everyone involved in creative possibilities,” says Schmelzer. “We did not separate the singers [Graindelavoix] from the dancers [Rosas] and made sure they were on the same level. Some dancers were selected for their singing capacities, but some discovered how well they could sing in the process. Sometimes, I didn’t know who was the singer and who was the dancer,” he muses.

But Cesana isn’t just interested in breaking down barriers between disciplines. The piece also re-imagines the limits of our bodies and explores the transformative power of time – an idea that inspired Janssen’s arresting set.

“I think Cesana has a very special status. You don’t know what you’re seeing. It’s a strange piece. It’s like when you watch, you’re assisting some sort of ritual. Sounds very 60s, no?” he laughs. “It’s kind of like a happening.”

Cesena’s Australian dance premiere is the counterpart to De Keersmaeker’s En Atendant, which Rosas Belgian Contemporary Dance Ensemble performed at Carraigeworks for the Biennale of Sydney in September 2012.

Young at Heart at Sullivan + Strumpf

Published in Broadsheet

Dane Lovett’s latest exhibition at Sullivan + Strumpf is a mature take on teenage dreaming.

In Dane Lovett’s world, the still life is anything but static. His depictions of plant matter and pop culture ephemera shift between personal and universal orientations, in the way you’re never quite sure if your love for a 1990s VHS is everyone’s or yours alone.

Forking in the River of Time, a new exhibition at Sydney’s Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art, features a series of Lovett’s latest works – paintings that are beautiful without an ounce of prettiness. In Jenny, a wilting plant on top of an old rental video sparks wistfulness, but Lovett’s palette of washed out pinks and blues avoid descending into nostalgia. Similarly, Dead Ghosts recalls a forgotten corner of your best friend’s record collection and brings it to life in technicolour fuchsia and yellow.

Delicate, evocative and visceral, it’s art for music lovers and the young at heart.

Forking in the River of Time shows at Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art until April 21.

Angles + shapes + geos + space

Published in Broadsheet

If artistic exploration is about the unknown, then geometry – with its sharp edges and measurable angles – might seem its antithesis. But if you visit the latest exhibition by Sydney artist Criena Court, you’d be inclined to disagree. Angles + shapes + geos + space, which opened at the Robin Gibson Gallery in Darlinghurst last week, explores the way that we can use geometry as a praxis for understanding ourselves.

Court’s mixed-media works map the relationship between geometry and nature by juxtaposing pastel-coloured triangles and hexagons against wide, pixelated landscapes. Her figure + nature series sees a constellation of shapes stand in for the human form, exploring the part these shapes play in our experiences of the world.

Bold and strangely disquieting, you won’t look at a protractor the same way again.

In Giro by Design & Other at Perimeter

Published in Broadsheet

Melbourne-based collaborators Design & Other explore the relationship between travel and memory with their debut Australian exhibition at Perimeter Books.

Our experiences of place can often be more powerful in retrospect. Sometimes creating an image or telling a story can evoke a technicolour version of the past, bringing new depth to old travel encounters or casting a well-worn memory in a different light.

In Giro, a new exhibition by Design & Other – the collaborative vehicle of Cameron Lofthouse and Monica Placella – sets out to explore exactly this notion. The collection of silkscreen prints produced by the Melbourne duo during a residency at Amsterdam’s Graficsch Atelier re-imagines the moments that defined a journey through Asia and Europe as a series of angular compositions and colour-bursts.

In Giro recounts the neon energy of Hong Kong with concentric circles and swathes of hot pink, and an encounter with the aurora borealis in Reykjavik via immersive green and grey forms. It’s an approach that rejects the trope of the postcard-perfect image in favour of travel’s assault on the senses.

In Giro shows at Perimeter Books until March 30.

Alice Rawsthorn on 7 Kinds of Happiness

Published in Broadsheet 

Global design critic Alice Rawsthorn from the International Herald Tribune will give the keynote speech at 7 Kinds of Happiness: Conversations on Design and Emotion, presented as part of DesignEx in Sydney next week.

Like good design, good writing is effortless. A well-written piece of criticism can make an ambitious idea seem blindingly obvious or spin a powerful observation out of the tired and mundane. Take Old Signs of the Times, a recent column by International Herald Tribune’sdesign writer Alice Rawsthorn. Published in the paper’s global edition earlier this month, the piece shows us how Melbourne’s public signs – the words “deep water” rendered in Italian at the Fitzroy Pool and the iconic Skipping Girl Vinegar neon – serve as signposts for the city’s cultural history. The article is trademark Rawsthorn: it’s an intelligent, accessible look at the ways design can be deeply personal.

It comes as little surprise that the influential critic will give the keynote speech at 7 Kinds of Happiness: Conversations on Design and Emotion. The three-day talks program, presented as part of DesignEx in Sydney next week, is concerned with whether designers can create happiness and if objects and places can alter the way we feel. Rawsthorn’s work often explores the space between the aesthetic and the emotional and – in a similar vein to pop philosopher Alain de Botton – is interested in how design can help us live better lives.

For instance, it’s no coincidence that different cities can inspire distinct emotional states and highly specific experiences. “The design of a city is an essential element of determining its character and its experience of being there,” Rawsthorn says.

“Cities with very long, dynamic histories like London are fascinating agglomerations of all the changes that have taken place over the centuries. Though I find ‘designed’ cities fascinating too, like Chandirgarh in India, which was built from scratch by Le Corbusier and Edouard Jeanneret in the mid-20th century. It’s heartening to see a city which was designed specifically to give its inhabitants happier, healthier lives.”

This logic also goes a long way to explain why catching a glimpse of the harbour between Sydney buildings can instil calm while walking the High Line in Manhattan can make you feel like anything is possible.

Rawsthorn also believes that the design of a certain object can directly impact the pleasure we derive from them. This is why the iPad can’t quite seem to seduce us away from our book collections.

“The traditional printed book is one example of great design – it fulfils the practical function of protecting the text and enables us to read it in a compact and portable form, but can also delight us with the beauty of its typography and imagery or the quality of its paper,” offers Rawsthorn, although she’s quick to point out that e-books can be just as beguiling, especially when designers highlight features such as animation and interactivity.

As for whether it’s the responsibility of designers to help us live better lives, Rawsthorn thinks that happiness, like sustainability, should be part of any design agenda.

“To me, sustainability and happiness are inseparable in design. How can we feel happy unless we are confident that we have no reason to feel guilty about the things that surround us every day?”

7 Kinds of Happiness: Conversations on Design and Emotion is a three-day talks program exploring how happiness impacts the practice of local and international designers. Presented during DesignEx and curated by the Office for Good design, it runs May 14–16.

Vini

Published in Broadsheet

You’d forgive a city known for dappled light and harbour views for being a little suspicious of moody, intimate wine bars. Where’s the fun in knocking elbows across a pint-sized table, when you can sip a pinot grigio in the afternoon sun? But if you visit Vini, a Surry Hills enoteca with a regional bent, you’ll be convinced there’s really nothing better than leaving the world outside.

Opening doors in 2006, Vini has survived an onslaught of pop-up venues and places to be seen, drawing a stream of foodies and locals with a classic trifecta: great wine, honest food and warm, attentive service. The revolving menu conjures the flavours and textures of a dream Italian holiday, grissini, proscuitto and plump, green olives making way for slow-cooked secondi and an inspired wine list.

Vini’s fixed-price regional dinners are something of an institution, offering four courses plus wine for a tidy $50. The first of chef Andrew Cibej’s small bar ventures, Vini proves that that original is sometimes the best.

Sketches & Tulip and Coffee Too

Published in Broadsheet

A new North Melbourne cafe combines good food and coffee with hopes of giving new exposure to local creatives.

When you live in the type of city that elevates its coffee to high art, the pleasures of caffeine consumption can get a little lost in the process. That’s why the Sketch & Tulip, the newest entry to North Melbourne’s cafe circuit, is more interested in becoming the sort of place customers enjoy frequenting and isn’t just about wearing its single origin blend as a badge of coffee-cool.

“Really, my inspiration is all about friends,” says owner Huda Sleiman, who previously headed up Flemington’s Made. “With my previous cafe, people walked in and said they felt comfortable straight away. I wanted to recreate the same thing here, where you can come in with a group of friends and not feel like you’re taking over the place.”

Sketch & Tulip might feel like being in a friend’s living room, but don’t think it doesn’t take its coffee seriously. “Coffee is going to be the main focus – that’s why we have the Slayer machine. We also work closely with Coffee Supreme,” she adds.

The menu is eclectic but inspired, featuring Eggs Mediterranean and Cajun-style shrimp alongside wood-fired calzone.

Though Sleiman says that the Sketch & Tulip concept had been brewing for about five years, it wasn’t until she stumbled across an empty, warehouse-style space on Victoria Street that the cafe began to take shape. “I used to work nearby six years ago and knew the space – it used to be an Italian restaurant. I was familiar with it and it just worked with what I had in mind with Sketch & Tulip. We wanted to keep it fresh, but have an industrial feel.”

She’s largely succeeded. Sketch & Tulip blends garden-green couches and floor-to-ceiling windows with recycled wooden pallets, books and old barrels. It’s an industrial fit-out minus all the hard edges.

The walls are also adorned with pieces by emerging artists and illustrators, proof of the cafe’s second ambition – championing the work of local creatives.

“We want to be a stepping stone for artists to get their work out there and we want to be support base for them to put their pieces on display without taking any kind of commission from them,” Sleiman says.

The cafe is home to an upstairs exhibition space, which Sleiman hopes will be up and running in the next six months.

“We have a stage up there, so it’ll be a place for actors and musicians as well as art. It’s exciting as well as daunting. But I’ve definitely never looked back.”

Birdman Eating

Published in Broadsheet

Perched near the corner of Smith and Gertrude Streets, the curiously named Birdman Eating serves up sleekness and eccentricity in equal parts. The Fitzroy cafe sits cosily on a downhill slope between neighbours Northside Records and Dr Follicles, offering trattoria style all-day dining with a slice of panache.

The cafe is the go-to place for a left-field breakfast with specials such as smoked pork liverwurst with sourdough alongside braised beans, ricotta hotcakes and other staples. But queues form on weekends for the signature baked eggs, doled out in metal skillets and dressed up in rotating accompaniments including chorizo, tomato and flaked trout.

Though the cherry and Kermit chairs and ‘birdmen’ suspended from the ceiling add colour to a lazy morning catch up, the cafe’s moody timber and banquettes easily translate for dinnertime tapas. Open late from Tuesday to Saturday, Birdman’s style, quirk and buzzy service draw a mixed but constant crowd.

Dangling Carrots

Published in Broadsheet 

Michelle Hamer’s large, hand-stitched tapestries of urban signs set out to explore the currency of the suburban dream in the wake of the GFC.

Mundane and often unremarkable, urban signs point to the ‘nothing’ moments in our existence – the dead ends, wrong turns and roadblocks that go by unnoticed. But signage can also serve as cultural artifact, embodying conflicting values and speaking to our collective desires. It is the ability of signs to serve as physical and cultural markers that underpins the work of artist Michelle Hamer and forms the basis of her 10th solo show, Dangling Carrots, opening at Craft Victoria on tomorrow night (Thursday April 28).

Hamer sets out to explore the currency of the suburban dream in the wake of the global financial crisis through large-scale tapestries of urban signs. Her work is concerned with the edge of suburban sprawl and how the signs found at this border negotiate the tension between suburban ideals and contemporary realities. By rendering these signs as tapestry, Hamer turns signage into hand-stitched object and highlights the way signs work as a projection of our own narratives. A time-lapse installation by Cat Wilson will feature alongside the tapestries for the first time.

Dangling Carrots will open at Craft Victoria tomorrow night by architect and Triple R broadcaster Stuart Harrison and runs until the June 11.

Dear Patti Smith – New Gallery Space in Fitzroy

Published in Broadsheet 

A new artis-run contemporary art space in the Paterson Building on Smith Street is driven by the possibilities of transience.

Smith Street’s Paterson Building sits somewhere between Fitzroy’s working class past and its redeeming present as the heartland of the Melbourne art world. The former 19th century furniture warehouse has been part of the area’s evolution from an industrial hive populated by factories and silos, to a creative enclave struggling to define itself against waves of gentrification.

It is not surprising then that the Paterson Building is home to Dear Patti Smith, a non-profit artist-run initiative and contemporary art space driven by the possibilities of transience and the process of becoming.

Any confusion between the space’s playful name and this lofty-sounding agenda is dispensed when speaking to founding members Marika Nilsen and Anna Gilby. The pair, along with fellow artist Brandon Hocking, architect Ross Brewin and photographers Ash Kerr and Simon Nicol, established the gallery as a ‘speculation’ space for emerging creatives and an alternative to the traditional Melbourne exhibition circuit.

Ringing the doorbell to the Paterson Building and walking up the stairs to Dear Patti Smith is itself an oddly speculative experience. Despite the grimy Smith Street sunlight, the space feels elegant and expansive – unusual for a part of town associated with tight, mixed-use living and smaller, cult galleries.

We wanted to give a professional environment to the developing artist. It’s sometimes difficult to bridge that gap between leaving an institution and getting shows, finding yourself with an established practice,” offers Nilsen, an RMIT sculpture graduate and West Space committee member whose own practice has taken her to Utrecht and Berlin.

“We’re trying to see if there is some sort of median there, a place for honest critique.”

The gallery was launched in August last year and has hosted the Text Camp Reader, a publishing project spearheaded by the Next Wave Festival. But it is through a series of three-day shows, opening every month from February to November, that it hopes to explore its unique missive.

“We’re all quite interested in the temporal aspects to work,” says Nilsen with quiet excitement. “We wanted to offer the three-day show as a point of difference to the ordinary two, three, four week show – in terms of presenting an affordable, flexible option to young and developing artists but also to create immediacy and transience and the opportunity this presents.”

Dear Patti’s curatorial focus spans visual art, performance, installation, video and text works and reflects the dappled background of its founders. However, the space’s ambitious approach to programming – an attempt to recreate the sense of immediacy and risk sparked by happenings and live artworks – is what sets it apart from the city’s art establishment.

The first show for the year opens this Thursday and playfully invokes this fascination with temporality. ¡INSTRUCCION. PIÑATA. DESTROZAR uses the piñata, and its surrounding rituals, to explore transformation and change. During the first stage of the project, volunteers were invited to build a piñata containing a memento from the past they wish to leave behind; these then form the basis for an installation by Michelle Barrow and Sarah Gordon. Thursday’s exhibition will see these piñatas destroyed, in celebration of the year ahead and the power of new beginnings. The show will also feature works by artists Lachlan Anthony, Lucy Farmer and Winsome Spiller.

The gallery’s proportions and sprawling rooftop terrace offer the ideal canvas for experimentation and are equally suited to the short-term projects that will run alongside the main program.

“Dear Patti is unique in terms of the amount of space there is, in terms of having an outdoor space,” says Gilby, an artist who explores her spatial preoccupations through video installation and large-form sculptural works.

Though the collective may share a past as tenants of the building, there is nothing possessive about their passion.

“We’re open to allowing the space to evolve,” says Nilsen of the initiative’s refreshingly democratic approach. “We always wanted the space to be more than just us.”

¡INSTRUCCION. PIÑATA. DESTROZAR opens at Dear Patti Smith this Thursday, February 3, 6-8pm.

Don’t Tell Me Your Dreams

Published in Metro magazine

Its subject matter may seem familiar now but when it first graced television screens, Love My Way offered a groundbreaking depiction of contemporary Australian life. Neha Kale reflects on the series’ unique approach and considers its impact on representations of adulthood.

In season one of Love My Way, Frankie Paige, the show’s heroine, shares a moment of reckoning with her wary lover: ‘I’ll be here Howard. I’ll be complicated and I’ll be possibly intense. But I’ll be here.’ Frankie makes this statement without a hint of apology, daring Howard to take her seriously, liabilities and all. Love My Way premiered on FOX8 in November 2004, to a theme song of the same name, a strangely addictive cover of a Psychedelic Furs track performed by rock band Magic Dirt. It followed the lives, loves and dashed expectations of four thirty-somethings and played out in an inner-city Sydney rendered in lush greens and blues. Created by John Edwards, Jacquelin Perske and Claudia Karvan, the team behind popular relationship drama The Secret Life of Us, Love My Way was labelled ground-breaking by critics and attracted a slew of awards for ‘quality writing, acting and commitment to reflecting the reality of being a thirty-something today.’ Six years on, this glowing critical reception often acts as a smokescreen for the real import of the show – its ability to emotionally resonate with an audience that Australian television drama had failed to take seriously.

Co-creator and script producer Jacquelin Perske says that Love My Way was born out of the desire to make a series ‘about the next stage of life’, the period following the ‘share house years’ explored by The Secret Life of Us. In his 2006 article ‘The Secret Life of Character’, Peter Craven writes:

Love My Way came, after all, out of the quest to find something that might follow The Secret Life of Us, the versatile, complex show about people in their twenties, committing themselves and not committing themselves, taking it hard and taking it easy, which seemed to represent some kind of paradigm shift in an Australian TV series because it appeared to speak to a youthful audience with a new intimacy: crotch to crotch, eyeball to eyeball, maybe even heart to heart.

Like Secret Life, Love My Way dispenses with the ‘cop/lawyers/women-on-horses formula’ often plaguing Australian TV drama and concerns itself, instead, with examining the condition of contemporary Australian adulthood. The show focuses on the journey of 31-year old Frankie Paige, a free-spirited artist who lives with her volatile flatmate Tom (Brendan Cowell) and splits custody of her daughter Lou (Alex Cook) with her ex-partner Charlie (Sam Wylie) and his wife Julia (Asher Keddie). At first glance, Love My Way’s interest in the search for identity and the breakdown of the nuclear family appears consistent with the defining themes of its genre. The show marks out new territory, however, by using the demise of the nuclear family and the failure of conventional markers of adulthood as the premise for its central narrative.

In Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood, Kate Crawford takes a critical look at the way adulthood is typically defined and understood. She writes that adulthood in Australia has been historically measured by ‘following expected steps in process – be it taking your first full-time job, marrying your partner or getting your first mortgage.’ Crawford argues that this checklist understanding of adulthood does not account for a growing demographic that refuses to be motivated by money or power and ‘shies away from any of the aspirational cornerstones of Australian life.’ She deconstructs this ‘crisis of adulthood’ by asking the question: ‘what is a real adult and how does it differ from the kind of adult we’re programmed to be?’

Love My Way sets out to explore the emotional reality of this crisis by speaking directly and intimately to an audience embroiled in it. The two households depicted in Love My Way seem to tell the story of rival versions of adulthood. The first house, a whitewashed rental by the sea is home to Frankie and Tom and fuelled by wine, weed and laughter. The second, an imposing warehouse conversion owned by Charlie and Julia is home to IKEA furniture and a baby monitor – tracking their baby Toby as well as the rift in their marriage. Despite these polarities, the characters all occupy a middle ground where the reality of life has eclipsed expectations of what it is to be a ‘grown-up.’ Crawford writes about the mainstream media’s failure to ‘attempt a deeper engagement with the social, cultural or economic circumstances’ of this demographic, portraying them instead as ‘underdeveloped and simplistic, yet also mysterious and threatening.’ 
By charting the emotional terrain of its characters, Love My Way gives this demographic a voice and reworks dominant understandings of adulthood.

The relationship between Frankie and Charlie and their shared custody of Lou forms the basis for the extended family portrayed by Love My Way. Though passionately involved in their twenties, the couple took different paths: Charlie toward marriage and an architecture career and Frankie toward art and adventure. For Jacquelin Perske, this notion of the seldom-represented ‘happy divorce’ is at the heart ofLove My Way. She says,

So much is made of the wrench of separation and divorce and it seemed to us that many of our contemporaries and indeed our parents generation, were very successful at working through the issues and had established a new kind of extended family that included step-siblings and your partners ex and their families and we hadn’t seen this working model represented on TV.

Love My Way attempts to explore both the dynamics of this model and the tensions underpinning it. The show depicts Frankie and Charlie, along with their parents and partners, as a clan-like extended family for which Lou is central. In Love My Way, the characters cast aside their chequered histories to engage in each other’s lives, sharing problems as effortlessly as they share sun-drenched barbecues. If conventional notions of adulthood are linked to the privileging of the nuclear family, then Love My Way makes a compelling case for an adulthood of a different kind

Ken Done – ATTACK: Japanese Midget Submarines in Sydney Harbour

Published in Broadsheet

Too often, beauty is associated with a lack of substance. It’s easy to look at something beautiful and debate its worth, but its power is often a symptom of something much bigger and more elusive.

On a sunny day, Sydney Harbour has this slightly perplexing effect. Its beauty is so arresting, you can’t help but second-guess yourself. Ken Done understands this. The harbour features heavily in the work of the Australian artist, whose buoyant images of Sydney achieved icon status around the world in the 80s.

“Sydney harbour is a constant source of inspiration for me,” says Done. “To most people, the work I’ve done is essentially a celebration of Sydney Harbour, and my studio’s right by the harbour so I’m very fortunate.”

However, Done’s latest exhibition is a darker incarnation of his role as a chronicler of harbour life. ATTACK: Japanese Midget Submarines in Sydney Harbour, which opens at the Mosman Gallery on May 19, portrays the 1942 attack on Sydney Harbour by the Japanese. He was commissioned to produce the paintings by the Mosman Gallery to commemorate the attack’s 70th anniversary.

“The younger generation might not recall this, but I’m 71 and can remember being a young boy in 1945 and that there was a net you had to go through on the Manly Ferry,” he says of this largely forgotten chapter in the city’s past.

“Every city has a dark side – it’s just that popular imagery tends to focus on the more celebratory things. When you can see suicide bombers on your telly at home, I think the role of art is about beauty and celebration… But to be given this opportunity to tell this story and to make it into art was a great challenge.”

The series of 15 artworks explore the Japanese attack on Sydney Harbour including the journey to Australia and the assault itself, which saw 21 people lose their lives. Although the images are rendered in Done’s trademark bold brushstrokes, they are wildly at odds with the images he is known for – the depictions of Sydney that sold the city to the world.

Emblazoned on the T-shirts and resortwear produced by his design company Done Art & Design, Done’s images are indicative of a certain Australian cultural moment, but this hasn’t stopped critics from questioning his populist approach.

Done’s response, however, reveals his signature combination of passion and pragmatism. “Whatever you do, you have to do it as well as you can and that means that some things you will do to seek a wide audience. If people make a record or make a film, they actually want people to go and see it. When I made things to seek a wide audience, whether it was swimwear, or resort wear or even a simple T-shirt, I wanted people to buy them. That was the exercise.”

That said, Done is quick to point out that while his early work was extremely commercial, “T-shirt is not the Sistine Chapel”. This is why he has spent the last 20 years making paintings for himself, staging over 50 exhibitions in Australia and overseas. He says that the fact that people continue to like them is just a great bonus.

As for Done’s love affair with Sydney, dark side or not, an anecdote from his day best sums it up: “This morning was beautiful. I was able to get up, walk onto the beach – it was crystal-clear, autumn water. I went to the studio, did a bit of work and got my paintings together. Sydney is a constant source of inspiration for me and I’m very lucky to be here.”

ATTACK: Japanese Midget Submarines in Sydney Harbour opens atMosman Art Gallery tomorrow (May 19) and runs until July 8. Admission is free.

State of the Arts

Published in Relative magazine

A few weeks upon my return from an extended overseas foray, I found myself at an event that halted the driving force behind the extended overseas foray. The event was a launch of a street press so obscure, so purposefully underground that it did not take the form of paper but was presented in DVD form, its’ mock decoupage cover a grudging nod to its paper-and-ink grandparents. This launch was unfolding at The Bakery, a new venue that did not seemed at all preoccupied with baked goods unless the good in question was iced with bohemian. It was evident that a certain ethos pervaded every inch of The Bakery from the cavernous rooms lined with street art and faded liberty-print wallpaper, to the giant letter installations on the rooftop to the grungy concrete beer garden. Here I thought I had to travel to London and New York to find places that were edgy, interesting and devoid of the footballers wives that tend to frequent Perth “nightspots.” Turns out that Perth had given birth to its own artistic enclave, in an abandoned warehouse nestled alongside the Roe Highway railway tracks. One glance at the patrons of The Bakery revealed that this was no ordinary enclave. The moody rock misfit in skinny black jeans, the beret-and-waistcoat clad ingénue spouting spoken word rhymes on stage and the little blonde pixie in the green paisley vintage were all bound by one attribute. How I could live in Perth my entire life and fail to rub shoulders with these people was beyond me, and as I left the Bakery that night, my insight clearly hindered by my decision not to wear black, it became clear that I had stumbled upon a social phenomenon particular to a city on Australia’s West Coast, more commonly referred to as “the most isolated capital in the world.

This condition began to manifest itself in many forms through the following months. Suddenly a city commonly considered to be a cultural wasteland was playing host to cutting-edge exhibitions, one-off designer boutiques were springing up alongside decaying factories, and the acid splashes of street art could be seen in the darkest corners of abandoned thoroughfares. What was left of Perth’s creative community, marginalised by the “Boomtown” ideals on which this city was founded and continues to premise itself seemed to have banded together to start a revolution.

History has shown us that revolutions are sparked as a response to conservative cultural regimes and characterised by massive imbalances in power. Over the last couple of years an innocuous little city on Australia’s west coast has been privy to the sort of national and international attention reserved for metropolises that are far more glamorous. Hailed as one of the world’s fastest growing economies, Western Australia’s mineral wealth has also given birth to a legion of accidental millionaires, their booty courtesy of a property market that has ricocheted to obscene heights. In Perth, the words “Rio Tinto” and “BHP” adorn yellow cranes in glittering lights, the wild-eyed ethos of the 1820s goldrush literally inscribed on the city’s skyline. Perhaps most notably, the figure of the “cashed-up bogan”, flying in every four weeks from a dusty mining town to indulge in heady excess in a Northbridge “nightspot” has taken his place as the city’s rightful subject. Or did he ever really leave?

The cultural myths that permeate Perth’s social landscape leave little room for those outside the burgeoning business, mining and construction industries. What are the options for the state’s young, creatively ambitious twentysomethings when the West Australian media peddle a relentless stream of stories about property investment and its related perils and when the terms “mortgage” and “portfolio” have become as ubiquitous in this town as discussions about the weather? Should a 25^th birthday be commemorated with a house-and-land package in a suburb faraway enough to warrant its very own airstrip? Perhaps this segment of the population would be better served by swapping their aspirations with a shovel and some Cat boots to descend upon the Pilbara en masse.

It seems that increased support for the arts in the form of the State government’s “Ignite” package, the success of the Perth International Arts Festival under the leadership of new artistic director Shelagh Magadza and the promise of new exhibition and performance spaces have worked to dull the lure of that quintessentially Perth duo – real estate and Rio Tinto. Not-for-profit organization Form is committed to “building a state of creativity” and local designers and artists are forging collectives to rejuvenate decrepit parts of town. Writer Cry Bloxsome has identified that the West Coast is in the throes of a cultural new wave. “The Boom”, an idea that has proven central to this city’s identity, has shaken up the Perth arts scene.

But Physics dictates that fallout is a necessary part of every explosion and this is no better observed than by a Saturday night stroll through Perth’s cultural hub. Hordes queue out of pulsing nightclubs like snakes about to strike. Boys in popped collars and steel-capped boots leer at lycra-clad girls in a historic if ill-fated mating ritual. The streets are clogged with broken beer bottles and the air is stale with the stench of angry hedonism. How, then, can a Northbridge that is rife with bikie-run bars and characterised by excess and violence set the scene for the city’s creative underground?

The Keith and Lottie Gallery, The Bakery and Ginger’s Garage are among a host of interesting spaces that have emerged amongst the cultural detritus of Northbridge and have offered hitherto unheard-of avenues for collaboration and expression. But they also point to Perth’s tendency to incubate in-crowds and warring factions. West Australian music documentary Something in the Water hints at the incestuous nature of Perth’s creative realms, a clique mentality specific to the artists, writers and musicians who reside here. The “Perth Artist” can often be identified by a certain embattled pretentiousness – but is there a politics to this pretension?

The underground, as defined by Urban Dictionary, is art, opinion, or organization that exists outside mainstream society or culture and is historically embedded in the politics of resistance. Kerouac and his contemporaries rebelled against the rigid values of forties America by inhaling Benzedrine and penning frantic realms of free verse. The prolific grunge counterculture in nineties Seattle was sparked as a furious response to dot com consumerism. Perhaps, Perth’s own cultural renaissance is the revolt against vicious conservatism and wealth-obsessed economies that will pave the way for the future.

Who Likes to Rock the Party?

Published in Metro magazine

Television series Flight of the Conchords tackles the serious task of subverting stereotypes while still making us laugh, writes Neha Kale.

In April 2006, Bret McKenzie, one half of New Zealand folk parodists Flight of the Conchords, told Time magazine: ‘Musical comedy sounds awful – I guess I’d describe what we do as understated banter between weird songs.’ The following month, HBO, the US TV network behindEntourage and The Sopranos, leaked their upcoming comedy series Flight of the Conchords on the internet, allowing viewers to share the pilot virally across the web. Flight of the Conchords sparked a cult following on YouTube, with mock music videos filmed and posted by fans, well before its first US broadcast in June 2007. Drawing on the conventions of sitcom, musical comedy and observational documentary, the show follows the tribulations of Jemaine Clements and Bret McKenzie, ‘the fourth most popular folk parodists in New Zealand’, who play fictionalised versions of themselves. The Flight of the Conchords battle their incompetent manager Murray (Rhys Darby), wild-eyed stalker Mel (Kristen Schaal) and locals who continually mistake them for Australian or British in their bid to meet women and crack the Manhattan music scene.

However, the show turns the tired starving-artists-in-New York narrative on its head, by interrupting the droll exchanges between Bret and Jemaine with spontaneous musical numbers. Inspired by pop cultural influences as diverse as the hip hop video clip, French pop and David Bowie, these musical numbers are as important a narrative device as the banter between Jemaine and Bret, delivered in the famously flat Kiwi accent. Written and co-executive produced by Clements and McKenzie, Flight of the Conchords was commissioned for the US market as part of HBO’s comedy programming. Mostly dispensing with New Zealand or Australian television conventions, Flight of the Conchords takes its cues from British cult comedies The Office and The Mighty Boosh and US-made Arrested Development, where parody, absurdity and comic awkwardness are the key modus operandi. The show’s central punchline trades on the relative obscurity of New Zealand in the American cultural consciousness where Bret and Jemaine are constantly misidentified despite their quintessentially Kiwi traits. Cultural confusion is the show’s recurring trope, eliciting humour through a playful interrogation of racial stereotypes. In this way, the narrative conventions of Flight of the Conchords invert widespread assumptions about culture and race.

[Excerpt]