Are you ready to JUMP?

The Perfect Cherry Blossom is a symbol for flourishing spring and peace, but also the name of one of the most advanced and violent Japanese Bullet Hell Games. A video game made by gamers for gamers from a time before the gaming industry turned into a home entertainment device. Artists Keiichi Tanaami and Oliver Payne explored this game in their latest series of work.

In the films by Keiichi Tanaami pop culture from east and west meet. Abstracted, post-traumatic impressions from the Great Tokyo Air Raid are combined with LSD fantasies and aesthetics of consumption merge with hallucinatory erotic desires. Tanaami is one of the most influential Pop Art artists of post-war Japan. His work had a great impact on a younger generation of artists working with pop aesthetics in Japan and abroad like Oliver Payne.

In Oliver Payne’s collages stickers of Japanese Bullet Hell Games are arranged on torn out pages of an ancient Greek sculpture catalog. Payne transforms the violent imagery of these videogames into psychedelic explosions of color. Greek statues serve as a background and a reminder of the fantasy worlds produced in Japanese arcade games, which often picture rural Europe. Sounds of an arcade field recording give a notion of manic playfulness towards the exhibited works.

The arcade has traditionally represented an idea of a “third space” for teens. Too young to go to bars, adolescents have so few places to hang. I like places like that — skate spots, graffiti halls of fame, arcades. Slightly sketchy places for teens to kick it. The arcade industry is on the way out and they really wont be around for much longer. I think places like these are important to document. An aural representation of them makes the most sense to me as the “noises” they create have these completely inimitable and unique quality. Nothing but an arcade sounds like an arcade — a completely deafening cacophony of bleeps, bangs, teenage yells and deposited tokens. It’s a noise that I can hear many bands aspiring to capture — but always falling short of the mark. Perhaps due to the fact that they don’t spend hours playing in arcades.

 Another motivating factor for the recordings is that it poses the question: Why are arcade on the decline? Why have they they been shutting at an alarming rate? The lazy answer is that home consoles such as the PS3 and the XBOX360 are so good that they have brought arcade quality to the home. But arcades are still in full force in Japan. So why can the west no longer profit from dedicated gaming rooms? Oliver Payne

“Everything is born of the need to answer the call of the subconscious.
Open a channel where can emerge, these dream images that come to my mind.
I try to illustrate a confusing message, which will take effect over time.
My work reflects a personal universe that is embraced with Dada and Surrealism kisses.
Bright colors, nature, humanity and the spark that gives life, are the protagonists of this in my work, which is constantly evolving. Always with hands full of spray paint, crop images, draw, paint, on paper, canvas or digital, trying to not have any structure or steps. Try my work is an invitation to travel without movement and feel without touching.” – Ale Sinestro

sorteo / prize draw: “Torre de Babel” (dic’11) from ale siniestro on Vimeo.

Ale Sinestro is a self-taught Argentinian artist, born in Buenos Aires in 1982. In his teens, he made poster and flyer illustrations for underground punk rock bands from Argentina. At the of age 22 he moved to Berlin, Germany, where the explosion of the 1990s underground art street scene influenced and encouraged him to develop and dig deeper. Street art often associated as a platform for social or political activism, notoriously if not always blurs boundaries. With Sinestro it is no different. Contemporary culture is his medium as he uses iconographic collage as a primary weapon, superimposing colorful images evoking dreamlike scenes. The succubus surrealist narrative of his work is clear. In which the element of surprise and unexpected juxtapositions are common, if not defining theme throughout his prints and videos. His prints, generally small in scale (no larger than 12x16in in size), often depict an uncomfortable mix-mashed confusion of human figures with animal anatomy and vice-versa. Described as dreamlike, they could only be found in the darkest of fetish nightmares or perhaps on the downward spiral of the brightest acid trips.

In September of last year Sinestro had his first exhibition in the United States in the C.a.v.e. Gallery in Los Angeles, California. Dig for Fire was a group show curated by Kevin Titzer, of art inspired by the 1980s American alternative rock band Pixies. Sinestro exhibited art-work Ed is Dead- a canvas print which had been digitally collaged. Characteristically Ed is Dead is true to Sinestro’s vexatious nature, a colorful contortion of nine human hands manipulated to depict features of a human face. Where the eye would find the eyes, they are round wide and startled, symptomatic to that of an owl. The mouth is a dark hole surrounded by the eroticism of a single male hand gesture. It speaks of the self-satisfaction of masculine power play. However on closer inspection of the image as collective whole, another hand gesture could be in the foreground, a symbol of anti fascism-the Nazi salute appearing upside down as a nugatory. Given Sinestro history with Berlin and the street art scene, this may not be such a far off assumption. The piece is a colorful mix of suggestive stupor.

Currently living in Barcelona, Spain, the theatrical eccentricity and complacency of Sinestro’s work continuous to attempt to reveal the unconscious and reconcile it with rational life.

New Africa. Pyramids and Pride. The trippy and the tribal make love in the work of Jabari Kenay. It’s a no-brainer that the 21-year-old artist of multiple mediums is also a student of cultural anthropology. I’ve had the opportunity of watching Jabari’s work progress into the collage of influences you see today. Take a closer look at more of Jabari’s work below.

Hispanic artist David Bru knows a thing or two about long distance relationships. A continuous change of place, a feeling of strangeness along with nostalgia that comes with a long-distance love, injects a kind of rareness into the ordinary. Everyday things, usually perceived as familiar by the couple, suddenly become unsettling. These images from David’s series Disreality illustrates a different range of moods, the majority about fear and a melancholic perception of my surroundings.

“A sentiment of absence and withdrawal of reality experienced by the amorous subject, confronting the world.” – Barthes

The title makes reference to the concept disreality, as mentioned by Barthes, when two lovers are apart: “a sentiment of absence and withdrawal of reality experienced by the amorous subject, confronting the world.” Take a closer look at more work below.

Hayley Warnham travels through the times silently ridiculing the ridiculous and arriving at realism upon social realization. She portrays life simplified down to its simplest terms, erasing the excess while speaking universal notions unspoken. From then to now, she satirizes the two-dimensionality of the timeless facade.

Following Warnham, we too fall desperately into the bottomless time warp, in which (as the series is entitled) “Everything is Beautiful,” or so it seems. Alas, a utopian society is uncovered; It’s Pleasantville meets John Baldessari, a youthful simplicity within an empty conscience, wherein the weary mother suppressed by her self-explanatory title is ever present. Warnham stacks color atop the colorless. We stand mere observers of the scene; Everything, Beautiful as it may have looked through Warnham’s retro-polished lens, is passive to the shift of her subject matter. Taken on a whirlwind yet again through the life and times, we experience the pattern of timeless triviality through a timelessly trivial society.

Hayley Warnham plays comedian, blunt and witty in performance. Her “Head Rush” series, sort of a Mad Men sans sex and swagger deems her ready and willing to point the finger at “that guy.” You know the one, wide stanced and routine minded, hilariously egotistical without plausible reason. But that’s only one topic of Warnham’s mockery, others including the circulating “Load of Tweet” we encounter on a daily basis both literally and figuratively.

On a more serious note, we arrive upon a fashion-forward assortment  of Warnham’s work, colorlessly modernized and finished with a colorful stroke of a paintbrush. The journey is concluded, yet we see that the trivial pattern is as timeless as the facade.

I once read that every thing and every one is essentially perfect. We are exactly how we were always meant to be, “perfect” only because our imperfections define us as so. Literally and figuratively, where we stand now is a product of what we have done to bring ourselves here. What is and what will be seen by our eyes and our eyes only exists for our viewing. Why we are attracted to certain things and not others is beyond our control, but falls under the same obvious circumstances.

I find myself fascinated with the persistent aesthetic of life: The personalities that both drain and invigorate one another, the hues which can amplify and dull the entirety of a moment, the creators versus the passivists, the unidentified gray area, and all of the tokens along the way. Brazilian artist Douglas Carlos wondered too about the furious life, craving its innumerable imperfections.

This became a recurring subject matter, an infatuation with the impure and even the ugly. Empty pages of an empty notebook flooded with sketches of emaciated figures, some gender unidentifiable and more deemed sexuality questionable. Over to the pile of underexposed photos that lay strewn out across a concrete ground, the piecing together   of some kind of dirty block party. A communing of half smiling faces under an overcast sky, dancing in the thick of a technicolor wave. It may not be “pretty,” but oh is it perfect. Save these ones for the scrapbooks, because this kind of beauty is rare.

Spy by trade+ black sheep by society+ artist by self-definition: Douglas Carlos=“Perfect.” Wherever he came from and wherever he will go planted him wherever he is behind whichever odd pair of glasses cloak his eerie eyes. If no one else could see, he could: The spectrum of beauty ostracizes none. Let the technicolor flow and keep the block party dirty, because Douglas Carlos wants to keep dancing.

Ah, the many joys of being young.

When today factors in no account of tomorrow nor yesterday

The only reality is that of this moment

Right. Now.

When the act of living is in its primal

but the concept of life remains pending

Blank is the mind; A tabula rosa

Morphed by experience and reason chosen by he who endures

Identity.

A constant quest down a path split in two

Guided by the will of oneself or the temptations of another

Rights will be rights and lefts will be lefts

Awareness speaks on the inside, Destiny questions from the outs

But for this very moment- Right. Now- the curiosity invested in the quest relies on the purity of

existence; for that in itself is the youthful salvation

Photographer and collage artist Fallon Pfeiffer yields a peephole into her youthful soul. 

Photographically documenting The Life and Times: A blissful pilgrimage to adulthood while

embracing the Now.

Internally self-defining through collage art, recognizing a world greater than her own.

Beyond the haze of the vista, her mind’s eye encompasses a curious awareness of a world not so pure

Occupied by Sinister Misters and decided by weather’s sway

Fallon Pheiffer may be young, but never to be taken for a fool.

Welcome to the Unlikely Diary of a Happy White Girl.

Paved by the old and trudged upon by the present are the streets that stand for the sake of our heavy footsteps. The new world is what has become of the old; the present, a representation of the evolution, or maybe antithesis, of the past. Either way: what and whomever has at one point walked, breathed, or merely stood upon its grounds  still remains… always have and always will.

But what happens when the two worlds meet? Will the disciples fight back in a silent protest or conjoin in the resurrection of a peace and harmony that once was? Amsterdam photographer-turned-collage-artist Mark Boellaard devises his personal interpretation through a series of pastiche pieces  lined with Biblical allusions, Greek mythology, and a world turned upside down -or right side up. Who’s really to say?

Boellaard is resourceful in achieving his purpose in a visual easily likable, yet imperatively puzzling.

Boellaard introduces Sinner to Saint.

& Boellaard is ever so witty in his message:

Man must face himself at one point or another. But does he understand or agree with what he sees, knowing that his reflection is a product of he and himself only? Aware his footsteps have veered off of the “intended path,” does he cloak himself in shame or continue to walk? Boellaard arises a subject not often arisen, but whose relevance is something that should be pondered. Judging upon where we stand now, he seems to think the rhythm of a simultaneous existence is, like all else, based upon what we make have and continue to make of it.

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This is ain’t even about the sex. That’s just the first thing you notice. It’s more about fetish and our society’s obsession with knowing everything about everything. Male gaze, female gaze, we all look, even the most prude of us stare. Tom Gallant takes from low-brow source material, vintage pornography and turns those into intricate cutouts. He’s as skilled with precision as a surgeon.

Tom’s work is intriguing. Here you have the porn queens of Hustler and Playboy doing a very natural act, that has been co-modified for profit. And Tom turns this notion on it’s ass, no pun intended. Tom’s new porn queens are reborn, amongst blossoming flowers and nature. We know you want to look. So take a closer look at Tom’s work below.

Issue 4 cover artist Greg Gossel is unstoppable. In his latest exhibition at Together Gallery in Portland, OR, the aptly titled Paper, Minneapolis based artist the artist presents 24 new mixed-media works in his now iconic style which includes a bevy of techniques and styles.

Paper opens tonight, July 28 at Together Gallery in Portland, OR. Click here for more information. Take a closer look at images from Greg Gossel’s Paper below.

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