Philadelphia-based artist Erin M. Riley originally envisioned herself a painter, but after crafting some tapestries in a freshman year weaving elective at Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art and Design, she realized she “just liked making images with yarn,” she says. “It started out a little abstract, using text, but as my skills progressed, I got more comfortable making images [from photos].”
Over the past decade she’s sublimated those images into woolen icons of louche hipsterdom via news clips of auto accidents, candids of her sisters’ drug exchanges, and sexy snapshots (of lesbian fumblings on beer kegs, iPhone teaser pics, and naked girls wrapped around toilets or smoking bongs in Sublime t-shirts) ripped straight from Facebook, Twitter, and countless fetish-y tumblr blogs.
Through May 5, the 26 year-old weaver currently will have nearly two dozen new tapestries up at San Francisco’s Guerrero Gallery that confront life, death, and our increasingly public courtships in the era of Instagram-lensed exhibitionism that combine the fearlessness of Richard Kern portraits tempered by Philomela’s sense of narrative irony. Fresh from a six-month residency in Nebraska, Riley sounded off on her adventures in the heartland, her favorite blog inspirations, and the would-be suitors who might become the subjects of her next series.
—Michael Slenske
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Bob Costas got an 11-minute interview with him about all of it.
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FATE AWR MSK gets involved in a funny interview with James Lipton.
We caught up with Todd James to talk about his current show King of the Wild Frontier at Gering & Lopez.
A rare conversation with Phil Frost in which he talks about how his work and life has been influenced by Bob Marley.
via, hustlerofculture
Whitewall magazine’s Winter issue features Walton Ford in one of the more interesting artist interviews I’ve ever read. Unfortunately, it’s only excerpted on their site. Meaning that you’ll have to buy the magazine to read it all, but let this snippet below entice you to find a distributor:
WW: Is the human in your work?
WF: It’s always there. There are cultural references in every single painting. Almost all the monkeys I’ve painted were peoples’ pets. I’ll have read a story about, say, a famous person — like Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples in the 18th century. He had a pet monkey named Jack who died and was mourned like a human being. Jack’s role in Hamilton’s life was that of a sort of out-of-control court jester. He would grab male visitors by the testicles and then smell his hand. Here’s this man [Hamilton] who has to function as a courtier, with impeccable manners and diplomacy — but here’s his monkey, acting out in the wildest possible way. He loved Jack as much as he loved any person in his life. I’m not painting a monkey in nature — he likes to eat bananas or something. I painted Jack on his deathbed, this figure of 18th-century decadence, like he’s a dandy dying of syphilis. There’s a Greek sculpture of a naked boy on the table next to him, there’s a snuffed candle — a symbol of a life cut short — all this romantic imagery around him . . . and then Vesuvius is erupting in the background. I paint him as he was created by William Hamilton. It has nothing to do with the monkey. There isn’t a single painting that isn’t painted from a point of view similar to that, you see. And that’s where it drives me crazy when people think that I’m going to be some sort of person who loves animals, is [into] PETA or something. No, I’m only interested in people! King Kong isn’t a story until the chick shows up.
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