The Wild & The Innocent

For Dazed Digital

Jordan Sullivan is a very proactive photographer. Last week he was in Tokyo showing his own work and this week he’s in New York showcasing other peoples. Ethereal and delicate, his photographs concentrate on the tension between human kind and nature. He likens the slopes of the female nude to the rolling hills of landscape while at the same time revealing the dual power and fragility of each. These are qualities he retains as he curates Clic Gallery's latest exhibition, 'The Wild & The Innocent'

Dazed Digital: Most images in 'The Wild & The Innocent' seem to have a delicate quality about them. Do you believe that fragility is inherent in both body and earth?

Jordan Sullivan: Yes. It's almost debilitating when I think how fragile people and nature are. My sister is a surgery nurse and one of the bravest people I know, and I love hearing her operating room stories - as terrifying as they can be. A wound a half a centimetre to the right or left makes the difference between living or dying. Everything can change so fast. All things are delicate and sensitive but it's so hard to remain aware of that and to uphold it.

DD: The tensions between humankind and nature seem prolific in your own work, why do you think that this is a theme that particularly interests you?

Jordan Sullivan: I'm constantly feeling connected and disconnected from the natural world, and I think that tension naturally comes into my work. Also, when I look at skin or a naked body I always think of emptiness or a desert. I love being in the middle of nowhere. I grew up in a small town in the mid-west, so I was surrounded by a lot of nature and I'm always interested in how being in nature can change someone. 

DD: Do you believe that man and nature can successfully co-exist or do you think that natural disasters and the way resources such as oil have been drained signal that we are destined to be opposed forces for, at least, the foreseeable future?

Jordan Sullivan: I think we will definitely be in opposition for a very long time and probably till our species is over. The way mankind treats the environment is definitely out of control. There would have to be a complete spiritual or moral change in the world before our relationship with nature would begin to improve.

DD: In what way do you wish to alter the exhibition-goers self-perception?

Jordan Sullivan: My first goal in this exhibition was to create a spiritual reaction in response to beautiful images. Photography for me is always about seeing. I hope people will look at these landscapes and portraits and get a sense of their own connectedness to the natural world. 

DD: The exhibition, in parts, explores the naked human form. Do you think that acceptance of the nude body, and its liberation from taboo, would bring us closer to nature? 

Jordan Sullivan: Cultures where nudity is not taboo generally seem closer to nature and more peaceful, but that is of course a huge generalisation. I think liberating the taboo of nude imagery would lead to a closeness and comfort with ourselves. I think one needs to examine and accept what he or she is made of on some sort of spiritual and scientific level in order to really feel closer to the natural world. I'm still figuring that one out myself.

The Wild and The Innocent opens today and runs until April 17th 2012 at Clic Gallery, New York.

Occupation and Protest.

For Dazed Digital

At a protest it’s easy to feel as if the event is just a passing moment in time, especially when the governments ignore your demands, and memories are quickly lost in the depths of the news archives. However, Guy Atkins, a Goldsmiths graduate from the MA in Arts & Politics, has found a way to tackle the transience of protest with his 'Save our Placards' projects. Almost exactly a year ago, March 26th 2011, the 'March for the Alternative' took place in London and saw the largest demonstration in the country since the Iraq War. Atkins and his team were there to collect donated placards, banners and costumes, as covered by Dazed Digital at the time. In their hands the momentary significance of these pieces was extended and they were transformed into important remnants of a major demonstration: they then became symbols of the individual’s voice, allowed to flourish at the hands of British wit and creativity.

The project has managed to get a selection of the most unique placards off the streets and into the permanent collection at The Museum of London. Here, they will also be holding a discussion on the topic ofOccupation and Protest and the documentation of Social Unrest on Monday evening. The panel speaking on the issue will include Turner Prize winner, Jeremy Deller; Kurt Barling of BBC London; Morning Star Journalist Rory Mackinnon and Dr Cathy Ross, The Museum of London’s Director of Collection’s. Held on the anniversary of the anti-cuts protest, the event will document the duty of the museum to document social unrest whilst also drawing attention to the fact that more demonstrations are to be expected as issues present this time last year have not yet been resolved.

“The Museum has a long history of collecting protest material, from the Suffragettes in the early 20th century to the anti-road ‘No M11’ protests in the 1990s. It’s a collecting area that raises interesting theoretical and practical issues for us as a city museum, and is particularly topical at the moment, given the debate around Occupy”, says Cathy Ross, Museum of London Director of Collection.

'Occupation and Protest: Documenting Social Unrest' takes place on the 26 March from 19.00 - 20.45 and costs £6

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The Wastelands of Berlin

For The Illuminator

At the moment Berlin is cultivating a distinct international presence. It has managed to establish itself as a new mecca for young people who are searching for a different kind of air to breathe. It is a city drenched in freedom and creativity hangs thick in the air; dripping down the buildings and manifesting itself in huge works of street art found on every corner.
There is however a much darker side to the city. Here, poverty is rife.
Between Alexanderplatz and Rosenthaler Platz a man with few fingers and even fewer toes begs up and down the rows of cars that stop at the lights. His skin stretches over the lumps of bone, unsettlingly bare without the usual protrusions. His two toes, curl upwards, balancing his tiny frame. He holds his empty paper coffee cup  in the crook of his wrist and when the lights turn green he delicately hops, as if he were walking on gravel, until he reaches the safety of the pavement.
On the platform of one of those stations on the way to Warschauser Strasse sat a boy unconscious, not quite a man, slumped against the wall. Like a Philip Pullman creation without its demon; his body present but his soul lost long ago. A dog or what is left of it, sits by his side.  Its body forms an uncomfortable shape, bones protruding and skin strained.
These kinds of scenes can be witnessed on a daily basis. It is however not only the people sleeping on the floor and begging in the streets who suffer as bankruptcy flows through the veins of the city, but the city itself. The city’s aesthetic reflects its state: struggling, reliant on tourism and yet to rebuild itself to a state of completion.
When seen from an aerial perspective, Berlin appears as if still ridden with the bullet holes from the war. Like wounds that never healed, vast and empty expanses of space stretch; sporadically scattered as the body of the city finds itself deprived of the architectural nourishment it craves.
Sparse and barren, miniature wastelands rest abandoned, nestled in the shadows of protective fences, shielding them from the intrusive eyes of the tourist.  Behind the criss-cross metal grid, mounds of rubble sit in the dust and the dirt as the cracked and broken windows look down on the graffiti artists who violate their vulnerability. The grass, not green and fertile but dry and drained of colour juts from the earth, overgrown and liberated by solitude.
The Illuminator’s photographer, Graeme Vaughan, asks through his photographs whether the presence of these voids are a signal of great potential and achievement yet to come or a mark of a struggling city hopeless and broke.

Marcos Covelo & The Image Generation
For The Illuminator

Marcos Covelo, who also goes by the name and signature of M8K8, is a truly modern artist. For him, research for all his paintings and projects begins with a Google image search and continues through the pursuit of the perfect image found in everyday life, captured on his camera phone. His paintings, drip with colour and stimulation, unsettling as bright reds, greens and royal blues take a violent turn. Capitalism is turned into a masked and maimed figure that is surrounded by expletives and murky splatters of paint which are infected as the brush strokes above trickle out of their confines. Onomatopoeic phrases leap from the canvas to speak to us, a collective who he refers to as ‘The Image Generation’. A member himself, he talks of how he has been brought up on a diet of TV for every meal, unable to separate information from the image. The Gulf War, Dolly the Sheep, The Twin Towers fall. The pictures spring easily to mind but, with the exception of September 11^th, can you remember the dates? The scientist? The soldier? As the images take precedence over the details which they illustrate, our real understanding is warped. Covelo speaks ofVis A Vis:  To him this is a painting which is ‘an amalgamation of images and concepts juxtaposed against each other, creating contradictory dialogues, ironic games and distorted realities. The result is not so far from the reality of the information we are bombarded with every day.’

Yamakawa Shintaro: Thank you and Hello.

For The Illuminator.

On May 2^nd 2008 Cyclone Nargis swept through Burma, taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The aftermath left survivors homeless, without food and at serious threat from water borne diseases. Burma, then under military rule (which was dissolved in 2011), resisted international help and supplies were held in Thailand as the Junta refused to issue visas to aid workers. 18 days after the cyclone hit, only a quarter of those in need had received aid yet the government’s focus remained on the upcoming military constitution referendum as opposed to the care of its people.

May 17^th was a global day of action for Burma’s Cyclone Victims. In London, people gathered in protest outside the French and US Embassies and the British Foreign Office. The protesters appealed to the UK and the US to help Burma, despite the Junta’s resistance. Many of the protesters were accompanied by placards, the images on which depicted homeless families, hiding under makeshift roofs, their brows furrowed with despair; bloated bodies floating face down in muddy pools or faces wrought with desperation, waist deep in water with their hands stretched towards the lens, desperate for escape.

It was these placards that inspired Yamakawa Shintaro to create the series of works entitled Thank you and Hello. He uses the pieces as a vehicle through which to express his anger at the exploitation of the images. The subjects of the photographs are stripped of their dignity for the world to look on with apathetic eyes, so used to the sensational images which litter our screens and newspapers. In his works Shintaro juxtaposes the images of death and desolation against the most banal, and overused words: hello and thank you. In this way he reminds us that for some, this desolation was the everyday. Aware of the double standards present, as he too uses these images to express his own personal beliefs, he tells The Illuminator of how he uses the photographs deliberately in order to feel empathy. He encourages the viewer to engage with the story behind the image, the person behind the portrait, urging us to untether ourselves from ‘the shackles of the everyday’ so that the placards transcend their status as just ‘pictures on a stick’ and become reality.

Networking for Young People - Interview for The Illuminator

When we think of the London riots we think of destruction, smashed windows and of flames licking the bricks of buildings until broken and scorched they crumble to the ground. As she walked around her South-London neighbourhood, Lashana Campbell saw not the ‘hooded youths’ as the papers ambiguously described them, but her neighbours and her peers, empowered by the disguise of the balaclava, taking back what they felt they were owed. In the aftermath she refused to be pigeon holed with a youth culture associated with apathy and ignorance and she adamantly rejected the title of the ‘Lost Generation’, a term thrown around by the media since last summer, angrily declaring that the term is nothing but an ‘excuse’. In the wake of such devastation, the charred ground proved fertile, and as a result of the riots, on January 31st 2012 N4YP was born into the hands of Lashana, not in London but in her new home of Berlin.

N4YP is a project that aims to create opportunities for young creatives based in London. Supplying selected individuals with the N4YP generation grant allows them to fly from London to Berlin to showcase their talents to a European audience. The generation grant is funded by events such as the recent N4YP animation festival, the first animation festival to be held in Berlin. The festival, which held screenings three times a week throughout February and March, raised enough money to fly musicians Dominic Apes (Apes) and James Tittensor (Seb Wildblood) to Berlin to play at the N4YP UK Bass Arrival Party.

We sit across the table from Lashana; softly spoken with a gentle London accent, her voice is laced with strength and genuine feeling as she speaks of her ‘passion for film and people’. Between sentences she takes a bite of käsespätzle: her favourite dish, which we are eating in her favourite restaurant. Surrounded by the luxurious rich tones and charming vintage knick-knacks of Boetzow Privat she speaks to us of N4YP, or Networking for Young People and her reasons for reaching out to London.

TI: What inspired you to start N4YP?Lashana Campbell: When high unemployment hit young people in London, I thought about starting a media site where young people could connect and help each other out in their chosen industry. Last year though when the riots were going on, that idea changed. I heard a lot of talk from people who condemned the rioters and others who tried to understand their actions. A lot of talk and no solutions, I got really frustrated at the reaction to young people and the ethnic minority community, both nationaTI: Why do you think the riots took place?

Lashana Campbell: There are a combination of reasons, there has been a long tension brewing in London, well before the riots. From the rise in education fees which make it almost impossible for someone leaving their degree to find a job, that will even make a dent in the debt, or centers like the Steven Lawrence centre being rumored to shut down because of a lack of funding, so programs that used to help kids have no support from government or it could even be the lack of control over their own lives and people go from being settled to surviving one day at a time.  However these are all theories, what the riots came down to was simply opportunity and giving into one’s materialistic desires. The position of a lot of people in London is clear, the divide between the rich and the poor is an ocean that very few successfully cross.

TI: You single out people in London as being in particular need for opportunity; why is this?Lashana Campbell: Well I come from an area of London which is described as the ‘ghetto’ a densely populated area of high crime and no prospects. But that isn’t true, every day you see people trying to make ends meet and do the best they can with what they are given, especially around people in my age group, they are fighting to get out of this vicious circle and if I can help by getting them a foot in the door, why shouldn’t I try?

TI: How would you compare the creative scenes in London and Berlin?Lashana Campbell: In London I was never really involved that much in the creative scene, but from the little I saw I knew that there were a few pop up galleries in my area that were providing spaces for young artists and a lot of other collective spaces that were working hard to promote London artists. In Berlin, I feel that even with a little you can do a lot just by being here and meeting people you never know what can happen if you just ask. I think the ‘scene’ is something that defines Berlin, a place where everything was shrouded in grey has become a blank canvas for a lot of people to express themselves.

TI: What is the N4YP Generation Grant and who can apply for it?Lasahana Campbell: The Generation Grant, allows people to apply for monetary aid, no matter what area of the creative industry they are from. For example, if a young fashion designer in the making is really talented, makes his/her clothes themselves, sells it in street markets etc and wants to go even further, they can apply for the grant. Depending on different criteria it will then be decided whether or not the person will receive the money and then an event will be planned here in Berlin for them to showcase their work.

TI: What are your plans for N4YP once the animation festival is over?

Lashana Campbell: I plan to make more music events, exhibitions and shows, which will raise more money. I also hope to collaborate this summer with another charity for AIDS in Africa. N4YP will be involved by flying a young African dance troupe from London to Berlin to come and perform at the event.lly and internationally and then when I went to a riot clean up day, I was inspired by the community there. They joined together to repair the damage that had been done. I wanted to do the same but repair the damage that had been done to the image of young people in London.

TI: What do you hope N4YP will grow to become?Lashana Campbell: I hope that N4YP will be the place that young people who want to go further can come and showcase their work on the site and be able to fly abroad with the project. I hope to fly out a lot of people from London this year to Berlin and hopefully when the 1st year passes, move onto flying people to different countries. If the project becomes an even bigger success then I can fly other young people from different countries to London by having a base in Berlin and one in London.

TI: You mention that N4YP was born from the riots in England which took place over the summer, was this an event that had a great effect on you?Lashana Campbell: My aunt’s shop was broken into while she was still inside and, for the first time in my life I was afraid of being in my own neighbourhood, for my family and friends who may be caught up in the chaos.