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JAI STREET
RETURNING TO QIONGLAI
BY JULIEN TELL
In February 2024, Auguste Schwarcz followed photographer Julien Tell on a trip to southwestern China’s Sichuan Province to document the life of close friend Jiong amidst the Lunar New Year. Displayed in a non-hierarchal order, the photo-series paints a picture of the contrast between China's rural and urban environments, focusing on life in the mountain region of QiongLai and and the alternative techno club scene of Chengdu Jiong grew into. The sequential photographs usher into a contrast of the Chinese plurality of life forms.
DIMENSION ZERO:
ISAIAH BARR
Isaiah Barr rose to prominence in New York’s burgeoning downtown jazz scene as a saxophonist, composer and co-founder of jazz and art ensemble Onyx Collective. Today, he continues to explore other creative mediums, namely photography. In conversation with Renata Periera Lima, Isaiah Barr discusses the ethos behind his photos, exploring as a creative act, Mexican multi-instrumentalist German Bringas, and the convergence between storytelling and documenting.
YOPE PROJECTS
Oaxaca’s Yope Projects is spreading its wings. An art collective founded to platform young artists in the southern Mexican state, the group has garnered a large amount of attention from outside of Oaxaca’s borders in the last few years, participating in and curating shows in Los Angeles, New York, and Mexico City. Though their artistic ethos is ever-evolving, Yope Projects is generally interested in the global language of digital culture, and, more recently, attempting to relate it to the traditional art histories that contextualize it in Oaxaca.
DESHION MCKINLEY AND
JABARI WIMBLEY
Wimbley, a textile artist who crafts strikingly textured portraits, and Mckinley, a painter who unleashes onto large, abstract canvases, have a sibling-esque artistic relationship. Their work feels eerily connected, as if it was born from two intertwined unconscious minds. Their relationship thus feels like some predestined act of fate, if you indulge in that kind of magical thinking, which it seems, at least from afar, that Mckinley and Wimbley do.
STUDIO VISIT:
BRANDON WHITE
Painter Brandon White is driven to create art that resonates deeply and challenges conventional perceptions. His work explores the complexities of human existence and the subtleties of space and time. Feeling uninspired by the repetitiveness of our consumption, White is pushing to craft pieces that provoke thought and provide incisive commentary.
LILY RAND
Lily Jane Rand, a painter splitting her time between Tacoma, WA and Brooklyn, NY, draws on her obsession with history to preserve and archive symbols from the depths of the internet. Digging into dossiers downloaded from alt-right chat groups, or screenshotting live videos from the Citizen App, Rand seeks to portray the ambient violence of living, to imbue internet ephemera with aura, to give soul to the unflinching blue-screen glare of our online existence.
FATIMA NIETO'S
NOSTALGIC REFLECTIONS
Fatima Nieto, a Los Angeles based fiber glass artist who crafts acrylic mirror-scapes, has developed a sizable online following. The ethos of spontaneous curiosity is part of what makes her and her art-practice so special. She has also shown at multiple galleries around Los Angeles and been commissioned to make work by some of the biggest names in the music business. At the time of her conversation with Theo Meranze, Nieto was in the midst of a project destined to be in Anderson Paak’s home. She has also done work for the likes of Brie Larson, Raveena, and The Smokers Club.
MAGIC'S PLAYPLACE:
GOGY ESPARZA
Based in New York City, Gogy Esparza (b. 1987) is an Ecuadorian-American artist with foundations in photography and video. In 2013, Esparza founded Magic Gallery, a gallery and project space that would evolve into a staple of downtown New York art culture and a meeting place for creatives and artists worldwide. Following his latest show "Magic's Playplace," we talk creative origins, his role as a curator, his relationship with painting as a medium, embracing New York in his work, and close friend and collaborator Isaiah Barr.
COLE MASUNO
For Los Angeles based artist Cole Masuno, the world of Architecture is home. Masuno attended the radically oriented and esoteric SCI-Arc, a warehouse Architecture institute hidden in the gentrified depths of L.A.’s Arts District, down the street from art-compounds and social malaise. The repercussions of this social dissonance rings through his work in the form of its clever yet critical orientation: reverse headphone earrings, a urinal screen sculpture, the gutting of an architecturally inclined dance-dance revolution controller.
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