Art is

My
Name
MYRANDA GILLIES
I was instantly captivated by
this bizarre goldmine and
took most of the restructured
collection; more than three
hundred magazines, lling
several boxes.
PETER HARKAWIK
After all, this is a market, the
dealers want to sell and be
seen, they are committed to
some extent to their artists,
and the crowd who came
opening night was predomi-
nantly well heeled Europeans.
40
The year Elvis died my mother was 16. She was tall and
thin with long muted brown hair, smooth and at; a
few shades darker than her tanned skin. She was Cal-
ifornia. She was To-pang-ga. She bought her rst car
that year. A red four-door Volvo Sedan. She drove up
and down 101 with the ocean on her right and then on
her left and back again. She dated and dumped a guy
when he couldnt x a blown-out tire. Drivers side.
She changed it herself squatting in the highway. Cars
shot past, while he stood idle. Myranda Gillies is an
artist and designer living in New York. She was born
in 1984. She received a bfa from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago in 2010.
Harkawiks work often contains an unacknowledged
temporal component: For instance, in Harkawiks in-
stallation Flesh & Flash (retrotted) (all works 2010).
A single photograph of the artists hand gripping
a bulbous daikon, the index nger mangled (hav-
ing once been injured by a belt sander), appeared
for weeks to be the works only component. Howev-
er, on the nal night of the show, Harkawik, adding
paint to the photos surface, introduced a latticelike
wooden construction to the wall and a chair to the
space, thoughtfully positioned for ideal viewing. In
addition to his studio practice, he has also curated
several exhibitions including, in 2011, Touchy Feely, a
show exploring connections between visual art and
architectural discourse around Critical Regionalism.
Critic Geo Tuck remarked, Harkawiks exhibition is
subtle and deft.
41
TOREY THORNTON
Chock full of hand-made,
handpicked and all-around
special objects, Wendy Yao calls
her carefully curated retail
establishment-cum-clubhouse
grandmas closet.
Through it a man who knows
how to really photograph is
able to channel the impulses
of human beings and to regis-
ter the objective world directly,
through the science of optics
and the chemistry of human.
The Libraries, among many
others. While the gallery is
primarily concerned with pho-
tographs, its books and exhibi-
tions conscientiously explore
photography in relation to the
other visual arts.
Macon, GA-born Thornton makes gurative, color-
ful, crude still lifes with acrylic, oil, glued collage and
graphite. Other artists collect his work. He has had a
one-man show in New York and group shows in New
York and London. OHWOW gallery in Los Angeles re-
cently started representing him and plans are in the
works for a debut show. In the late 1990s, comic artist
Michael Kupperman bought a stack of vintage mens
magazines from an old-timey store near the Port Au-
thority. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that
their original owner had modied them to create his
own hybrid magazines. Kupperman writes, I was in-
stantly captivated by this bizarre goldmine and took
most of the restructured collection; more than three
hundred magazines, lling several boxes. Back at my
apartment I took them apart again, putting the most
interesting pages and all of the covers in clear plas-
tic-sleeved binders, so I could have them available for
study and easy reference. In a way I was continuing the
cycle that the original owner had started; but I have
got a lot of use out of them. Ive mined them for visu-
al reference, imitated the ads, parodied the language,
been inspired by the contradictions; theyve become
part of my vocabulary as an artist. The remaking that
the original owner subjected them to gave me license
to become more intimate and casual with them than
I wouldve otherwise felt comfortable with. Which, of
course, eventually resulted in this book. Pirate Night-
mare Vice Explosion launches Thursday, May 1 at Des-
ert Island in Brooklyn.
In his essay, Is Photography a Failure? reproduced in
Apertures Stieglitz on Photography, Stiegllitz writes,
This machine can negate ninety-nine percent of what
was called and still is called painting.