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Text by Bethany Rex
Helen Carmel Benigson (b.1985) is media-savy that is for sure; her work layers colour, print and sound to create immersive, dreamlike and hyper-sensual installations that explore the politics of sexual difference and female empowerment. Benigson looks at the nature of identity, performance and masquerade, and her latest exhibition at the James Hockey & Foyer Galleries at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) at Farnham is her largest exhibition to date.
Text by Matt Swain
Diane Arbus (1923-1971)revolutionised the art she practised. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strong those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves. In this first major retrospective in France, a selection of 200 photographs allows the viewer the opportunity to explore the origins, scope and aspirations of a wholly originally force in photography.
Natasha from coggles on Vimeo.
Over the past month, Aesthetica has featured Coggles’ new campaign, Street Styles Series which aim to promote the brand’s primary mission of including personality into their designs for people not models. This exclusive short from Coggles is a portrait of style, featuring Danish tattoo artist Natasha. Natasha styled herself for the film mixing vintage pieces with Paul & Joe Sister.
Text by Emily Sack
The small seaside town of Margate boasts Turner Contemporary, a gallery that celebrates JMW Turner, who made Margate his home for a number of years, and local and international artists from further abroad. The building designed by David Chipperfield Architects is a rigidly geometric structure that mirrors the sails of the boats that frequent Turner’s paintings.
This issue is centered on exploration and re-examination. We start with the blockbuster retrospective Cindy Sherman show opening at MoMA, which brings together over 180 photographs tracing the artist’s career from the 1970s to the present day. The idea of “innovation in the modern age” is surveyed in the V&A’s British Design 1948-2012 show, which opens this spring.
Text by Paul Hardman
“Touching stories picked from a wound. Positive angles wrenched from their sockets,” reads a pair of lines from Running Light, one of the texts that are collected in the publication Dissonance and Disturbance that accompanies Lis Rhodes exhibition of the same name. Rhodes makes video works, often in response to specific political situations, stories of oppression or injustice that could indeed be said to be picked from a wound. Her work is characterised by a political activism and a powerful aesthetic of grainy high contrast photography, the strength of her images matching the force of her convictions.