Zac Hacmon’s AFTERLIFE series hints at the ‘in-between’ spaces

Artist Zac Hacmon is known for utilizing architectural design and ubiquitous materials to develop simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable non-places: spaces without history or identity, yet are entirely familiar. His work elevates and bends traditional architecture and material usage, focusing on techniques and elements both from the old and the modern, creating “super-modern” architectural models for space-age, futuristic and imaginary worlds. He aims to challenge accepted notions of necessity, functionality, and memory.

Afterlife, a series of tile-based sculptures consisting of 4×4 inch white industrial tiles, encouraging viewers to consider  memory, time, displacement and altered states of ‘being’. The artist began to consider this portal-like concept with the recent loss of a loved one.

The tiles are representative of the artists’ everyday surroundings; subway stations and domestic areas. Public spaces relating to and reflecting the private, each influencing the other. One of the sculptures is equipped with 16 grab bars suggesting safety and security, yet defective.

Several forms are sealed with transparent glass acting like filters or triggers, capturing the space inside these structures, giving a false sense of depth and the notion of another dimension within the form. Viewers are momentarily disoriented by what seems familiar and logical, yet they eventually realize the opposite is true.

Hacmon describes the individual pieces as “devices”, operating with efficiency rather than as a passive object. These “devices’ can be considered, portals; a gate or gateway to somewhere unknown. Shown together, the series of sculptures can be seen as multidimensional or shrine-like.

“I’m interested in the ‘in-between’ spaces, like corridors, borders, transit hubs. There’s something fascinating that draws me to this, like the psychological shift that occurs between places, between a person’s role in one location to another. In my work there’s an attempt to catch the moment of the shift itself. The fragments in my work come from these places, like the ceramic tiles, reminding us of a subway station that is in-between destinations. These places, and alterations of role can offer a sense of freedom.” Zac Hacmon

Zac Hacmon (b. Holon, Israel) is an artist based in New York.  Hacmon uses architecture as a mediator and is interested in notions of the non-place: spaces without history or identity. His work operates with the efficiency of a device rather than as a passive object.

Check out his work at www.zachacmon.com

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This is the mysticism of Joe Roberts

San Francisco-based artist Joe Roberts will be releasing his second book, We Ate The Acid (61)A3HT3TA3), this December. The book features a foreword by journalist and documentarian Hamilton Morris (Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia on Viceland) as well as a conversation with gallerist and actor Leo Fitzpatrick (director of Marlborough Contemporary).

Roberts, who creates works which guides viewers through psychedelic scenery that tends to spiral into a cacophony of shapes, colors, pop culture figures and mystic symbolism. Existing somewhere between fear and curious euphoria, Roberts’ trips wind through various terrain and media – incorporating collage, diorama, drawing and painting evocative of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joseph Cornell.

Roberts boasts an impressive stable of collaborations with musicians, filmmakers, and streetwear companies – most notably to date with Supreme for their Fall 2017 line, producing a line of signature t-shirts. We Ate The Acid features distorted pop culture references in increasingly phantasmagoric scenes where countless arches and pathways serve as portals to Roberts’ psyche.

The book chronicles UFOs and chemical constellations as they appear in city and nature scenes alike, while alien faces and indigenous symbolism rest at the center of geometric mandalas. Fluctuating between dark landscapes and the tunnelling, termite-like architectural surges of smiley faces, Roberts prefaces the book’s disorienting journey with an unpretentious declaration: “The way you choose to explore it is the way you choose to explore it. Make sure you take notes.”

We Ate The Acid likens an art object itself, using various paper textures bound in a “skeleton” manner exposing the worn, traveled nature of its subject matter. As part of the first edition, an undisclosed number of artist prints will be placed inside a handful of books available on the publisher’s website.

Published by Anthology Editions, We Ate the Acid is slated for release December 4th, 2018.

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Playing with paint, Carly Silverman’s Sartorialist Style

For artist Carly Silverman, taking paint off of the canvas is just as crucial as putting it on. Her artistic process involves placing strokes of paint down and then wiping them away with a cloth to blur the lines of her images and reveal the multiplicity of layers underneath. the gradual accumulation of oil paint washes creates a gauzy, dreamlike environment in which Silverman’s figures are depicted stealing a moment of self-awareness amid the endless bustle of city life.

Using a combination of figurative and abstract painting styles, Silverman captures her subjects in a fleeting moment of time. Perpetually in motion, figures seem to be transfixed by their destinations; their current settings merely passing by, a means to an end. Their blurry, washed out surroundings threatening to disappear behind them serve as a constant reminder of their outside concerns, the unshakeable need to keep moving forward and remain productive, lest they cease to exist. However, amidst the fast-paced commotion of their cosmopolitan lives, subjects are depicted as having found a moment, however briefly, to take pause and remember themselves; the loose strap on their sandal, their hair coming undone.

Silverman manages to find moments of meditation and serenity even in the hectic surroundings of metropolitan life, and brings them to life with a series of brush strokes placed on the canvas and then wiped away, just as the transitory moments captured in her compositions come and go like waves.

Deeply inspired by fashion and the aesthetics of clothing, the garments depicted in her compositions offer hints into the lives and personalities of the subjects, accounting for the absence of facial features. The faces of the women depicted are either turned away from the viewer, or blurred to the point of abstraction. Silverman intentionally omits these details from her figures so that her expressive brush strokes and dynamic configurations, and surroundings can tell the story of the scene for themselves.

The layers of paint on each canvas echo the infinite layers of culture and stimuli found on the streets of New York, which bleed into each other as they move out of one’s focus and into their peripheral vision. As Silverman’s figures are swept up in the frenzy of their ever-evolving metropolis, small gestures are able to remind them of themselves, that they are individuals as well as faces in a crowd.

Check her work at Bee in the Lion or on her website here.

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