The Last Selfie / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — It’s the end of selfies as we know it. Dearest selfie fanatics, this will be my last story for the Hyperallergic selfie column; after one year of chronicling the selfie’s rise to fame, we collectively decided to let this investigation go off into the...
It’s a Bitchy World / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — The self-titled exhibition and zine release Bitches Rule, Cycle 3 is nestled in the back of & Pens Press, an art bookstore in Culver City set to become a roving/pop-up shop and online gallery come June 2. The show marks the third effort of the...
The Other LAPD: The Los Angeles Poverty Department on Skid Row / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Poverty Department is deliberately named to evoke associations between police, the criminal justice system, and how people living in poverty are treated. Concentrating on LA’s Skid Row, which has the highest concentration of homelessness...
The Decisive Vernacular Photograph / Hyperallergic
TULSA, Oklahoma — In the exhibition Unexpected at the Philbrook Museum Downtown, we see a series of 40 anonymous vernacular photographs from the collection of writer and photography collector Marc Boone Fitzerman, curated by the museum’s director Rand Suffolk, that...
Lesbian Noir with Hard-Boiled Wooden Puppets / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — It was a hot Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles. Too hot. I dragged myself to a friend’s gray Volvo station wagon and prayed as I turned the key. The car started. As the engine purred, I cringed at the heat glowing off of the leather seat. I gunned it to...
Alice’s Technosurreal Wonderland / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — “You would have to be half-mad to dream me up,” the Mad Hatter said to Alice during her romp through Wonderland, that place where her body and state-of-mind regularly changed shaped. In this fantastical landscape from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novelAlice’s...
Flying High with Selfies / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — I was on an airplane flying back from Tulsa when I happened upon the phenomenon of mile-high selfies. Wifi is available up high, so why not take a selfie? Flight attendants are filling the skies with hashtags like #crewlife and #airhostess. Somewhere in...
Meditations from the Middle / Hyperallergic
KANSAS CITY, Missouri — There is nothing in the center, because it’s the middle and the middle doesn’t matter. At least, that’s what interest in smaller non-coastal American cities historically tends to be. Detroit pops up on the art world’s radar when it comes...
Keeping Up With the Selfies / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — The biggest selfie news of the past week comes from drones, which have spawned a new selfie category: the dronie. To shoot them, people program their drones to take short videos of themselves that operate like extended selfies. Most dronies begin with a...
Hollywood Counternarratives: A Fictional Female Warner Brothers / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Phyllis McGillicuddy strode out of the bathroom, heading toward a podium that overlooked a room packed with fans and friends alike. It had been a while since Phyllis left her home in suburban Glendale, where she lives with multiple cats and manages the...
Franco’s Playhouse / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — For all of James Franco’s talk about being James Franco, it’s pretty lame that he’s now trying to glean a bit of Cindy Sherman’s fame by recreating her photographs in drag. This marks a new low point for the acceptance of Franco as a celebrity performing...
Don’t Turn Your Back on Selfies / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — A selfie says a thousand words, especially when it’s taken with a longtime friend. We’ve all taken selfies to commemorate something together; it’s as if the moment doesn’t exist if we didn’t take that photo. Some selfie situations are more intense than...
Mind Your Awareness / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — When we turn our minds to the present moment, rather than focus on the past or the future, we receive unexpected gifts. The present is a gift. Pop-spiritual teacher and public speaker Eckhart Tolle explained the idea of this “inner state of...
An Androgynous Suffragette Portrait, Rediscovered / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Mind-altering conversations happen by chance, randomly, when we are least expecting them to occur. Liv Bugge and Sille Storihle’s roaming curatorial/publishing/salon-hosting platform FRANK slipped into a dialogue when Storihle discovered a gender-bending...
When Depression Strikes / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — It was 4:20pm when I walked into Depression and encountered Andrea Ursuta’s piece “Stoner” (2013). A batting-cage ball-throwing machine creaked on, spun once, and died before it could eject anything from its quarantined-off belly. It is located inside a...
This Is Your Selfie Reality / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — What’s the best thing about selfies right now? That they are everywhere, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. According to the internet, selfies are both the cause and effect of many social issues today. Can a selfie make you skinnier? Of course...
The Curious Thing about #Hashtags / Hyperallergic
The new web series #Hashtag follows the lives of young queer women in Chicago whose dating patterns and attractions are significantly affected by the technologies that they use and, at times, abuse. The drama takes place on the mobile devices of Liv and Skyler, two...
Duh, It’s Postmodern Poetry / Hyperallergic
Jon Rutzmoser’s thin book of poetry packed with thick descriptions of dicks, dire and dramatic Oedipal complexes, heavy-petting psychoanalytic theory references, and Disneyland descriptors made me laugh, pissed me off, had me rolling my eyes, and had me wondering what...
Selfie Illusions / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — How do we talk about real shit online? In the selfie world, where we become two-dimensional representations of ourselves as we would like to be seen, it’s sometimes not possible to do more than just like, reblog, retweet, ignore, or simply comment. It is...
Seeing Past Portland’s Whiteness / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — In journalism, Betteridge’s law of headlines states that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with the word “no.” Such is also the case for the Safe & Sound?, a video project by Portland-based artists, activists, and community...