Stealing is your best vice

 "Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."

 - Jim Jarmusch (American independent film director)

Bermuda Bonnie

Bermuda Bonnie is a music solo project by Rebecca Huston who currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Evil by Bermudabonnie

Define yourself
Imagine group of 15 best friends, all around age 11 dancing around on a hot beach at sunset, eating rainbow popsicles and dancing in perfect synchrony when an extraterrestrial life form beams them all up to a psychedelic space ship. On this ship, they find themselves in a technicolor dance all, with smoke, laser beams, and extravagant swimming pools. The aliens offer them the secret to eternal youth, which also comes with the ability to never have to rest to keep dancing, so they dance, and dance, forever.

Influence
Originally, it was The Smiths who inspired me to start writing my own music, but my influences sonically consist of Stephen Merrett, Fiery Furnaces, Of Montreal, Passion Pit, but mostly pool parties and rooftop sunrises.

Pros and Cons of being a musician
The "pros" of being a musician would have to be all the free traveling into space for alien dance parties, hover-boarding, unicorn riding, free snacks, and having an "excuse" for staying up all night long and sleeping all day. As for the "cons"? Having difficulty describing how awesome I am to non-alien lifeforms would have to take the cake.


Favourite Places
Aside from psychedelic technicolor alien dance halls in space ships (obviously,) I also enjoy remote deserted islands, any place with delicious mixed drinks. There was this one time when my Dad and I were on a shallow sandy "spot" in the middle of Lake Poygan when Daft Punk appeared and gave us a private show while we water-skied and danced. That was pretty sweet.

Feeling Lost ?
Oh I feel lost all the time, sometimes I wake up not knowing what planet the beach I'm on is.... I'm currently a beta tester for a new (top secret) Google Maps "galaxy edition" which has helped me a tremendous amount when I'm floating in space and trying to find where planet earth is. I often get lost in my music and don't know what direction is up, nor what direction is down. Sometimes I get lost in different dimensions and have difficulty understanding what "reality" is.

Best Gig
I bought this flash drive once that was sold as "1GB" but once I plugged it into my computer the actual memory of it was a whopping 1069 megabytes!!! That was definitely the best GIG I've ever had, since most of the time there is less storage than is advertised.

Three essential things
Swimming with fish in water, dancing with robots on the beach, and my personal intergalactic unicorn taxi.


Picnic or movie
Without a doubt I'd pick doobie, I am a big supporter of marijuana legalization and find it to be a great icebreaker when meeting extra-terrestrial beings, it brings people together and expands their minds.... what's that?  you meant "movie" and not "doobie?" sorry, then definitely a picnic... obviously. 

William Hundley

 (born 1976) is an American artist born in St. Paul, Minnesota.

 He lives and works in Austin, Texas.

In 2006 he began an ongoing series of photographs that he titled “Entoptic Phenomena” in which he photographs people jumping underneath fabrics and other various materials. The instant of the jump can be thought of as super ephemeral sculpture, lasting only a few seconds before reverting to their base components. The resulting photographs appear to have been made by computer manipulation, but Hundley stresses that “they are just photographs” and that there were absolutely no computer applications used in creating the images. He goes on to say that having “acrobatic models” is the key to the success of the imagery.

In an article on Sight Unseen, Hundley is quoted as saying, “My work started with the influence of Erwin Wurm and Maurizio Cattelan, these absurdists. I love the practical-joke nature of it; if I can make humor and beautiful aesthetics come together, that’s the biggest powerhouse I can imagine.”

Chad Wys

I was born in Illinois in 1983 and I still live and play there today. 

 Despite always having had the urge to grab a crayon or a camera, I'm something of an artistic recluse. 

 It has taken some time for me to get used to the idea of sharing my work. 

 As my voice has grown stronger with many things to say, 

I have found the prospect of sharing experiences through art quite advantageous.

  Incidentally,

 many of the conversations in my own work are about art itself. 

 What does art mean to me? 

What purpose does it serve in my life and in the lives of other folks?

  What are the "boundaries" and 

what are the "limits" of the art experience?

Deconstruction 

is a major part of my thought process in and out of the studio.

  Academically, 

I am pursing a study of art theory and criticism and

 I reward myself by writing about the problems 

and 

triumphs occurring in the art universe today as well as in the past—

I thoroughly enjoy taking contemporary ideas into the past and considering things in new ways. 

 In my writing 

I use theoretical frameworks to negotiate

 a more lucid and dynamic understanding of culture 

and 

how culture interacts with the visuality that permeates there.

A major strand throughout much of my work, 

beyond the broader inquirers into what art means socially,

 is the notion of object:

 object ownership,

 objectification of history, 

objectification of people, 

objectification of artwork 

and 

its many mediums; etc. 

 I often explore/exploit the idea of objecthood: 

how we decorate our lives with arbitrary, as well as meaningful, things;

 how we objectify the ones we love and the strangers we see; 

how we objectify pain and death;

 how we objectify complex and sensitive cultural histories.

My artwork is also,at its core,

 an experiment in composition, color, and form. 

Through a variety of mixed media I have chosen as my inspiration a color palette that is

 at times complimentary and at other times destructively contradictory.

 The literal destruction of an object is secondary to the overall effect created by color (dis)harmony and the overall aesthetic of the reclaimed and reinvented object/experience.

 I openly play with the allure of foreign and aggressive new colors and forms into otherwise familiar and traditional settings. 

Barriers and obstacles are thereby created between the viewer and the object through which

 one must negotiate an understanding of what is both present and hidden.

My readymade works frequently deal with the re-contextualization of decorative art objects.  

By retooling the object and then re-presenting it before the viewer I intend to add new layers to the conversation of the original object.  

By reclaiming these objects I mean to acknowledge how our possessions (can) (do) define us. 

In so many innumerable ways the bric-a-brac of our lives becomes a unit of measure of our own worth.  

I enjoy infiltrating this territory of being 

and

 I revel in pointing to the superficial and the deeply intrinsic character traits in all of us.

—the artist, February 2011

Marlo pascual

(1972 Born in Nashville, Tennessee (US))

Taking found imagery and film as a point of departure in her work, Marlo Pascual creates photo-based sculptures, installations, and images that employ strategies of artistic movements such as Conceptual Art, Surrealism, Minimalism, and Arte Povera. 

Re-examining the viewer’s relationship to the photograph, Pascual is interested in exposing an image’s active presence by playing with the relationship between the work, the space, and the viewer.

 By creating sites of engagement, whether that site is in the form of the domestic or the theatrical, the image is the catalyst.

Pascual culls her vintage pictures from eBay and thrift stores, some coming out of an amateur photography club where the photographers strive to take ‘artistic’ photos. They are of historical genres; still lifes, interiors and furniture, portraits, headshots, nudes, and pin-ups. When they arrive, the images are small, handheld, fetish-like objects.

In an interplay with the photograph’s own physicality as an object, Pascual then enlarges, crops, and re-stages the images using minimalist objects, props and lighting to form new relationships. Filtered through her imagination, the subjects are removed from their previous context and recast in new roles.

Andy Denzler

(3rd August 1965 in Zurich) is a Swiss artist.

The art media he works with comprise

 painting, printing, screen printing, graphic design, sculpture and drawing.

Andy Denzler’s works move between abstraction and reality.

With the classic means of oil painting, 

the artist endeavors to fathom the borderlines between fiction and reality.

 He presents his own perception of the world in his pictures. They are snap-shots of events that take place, blurred, distorted movements, Freeze Frames that stylistically move between Photorealism and Abstract Expressionism. 

In his paintings Denzler frequently alludes to other media.

 Titles and subject matter refer to films, 

as for instance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Viktoria in The Birds. 

His "Motion Paintings" are divided into four groups of works: "Portraits", "History Paintings", "Figures & Landscapes" and "Urban Figures". Andy Denzler translates them into painting, sculpture and drawing.

"Andy Denzler analyses the medium, the ideational and representational possibilities inherent in present-day painting with dedication and enthusiasm. 

He has thereby secured himself an important and individual position on the international art scene and attracted the enthusiastic attention of collectors. (Tages-Anzeiger, 24 August 2008, translated from German)"

Karen LaMonte

Born December 14, 1967


is an American artist known for her life-size sculptures in ceramic, bronze and cast glass as well as her large scale monotype prints.Her art deals largely with the central themes of beauty and loss, exploring the fragility of the human condition through a sartorial lens.

"The dress belonged to a moment when the wearer was, to use an expression of Proust’s, en fleur. The dress belonged to a certain moment of history, which it preserves—it shows how women dressed for certain occasions at a certain moment. The wearer will have aged. She looked like that then, but, if she is still alive, it is certain she will not look that way now. There is a double melancholy—the melancholy of fashion, and the melancholy of bodily change, from nubility to decrepitude. The breasts have fallen, the waist thickened, the skin has lost it transparency and luminescence. The poignancy of LaMonte’s dresses is a product of two modes of change in which we participate as human beings, composed, as we are, of flesh and meaning. Their poetry is the poetry of beauty and loss."