Local Ecology – Kastellorizo

A portrait of the cohesive community of women artists in Frogtown, Los Angeles, including Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner.

The Glover Group: A Los Angeles Story narrates the journey of an extraordinary group of artists who have nurtured their unique artistic voices within the same studio complex in Frogtown, Los Angeles. The Glover Group includes Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner, a coincidental yet cohesive community of women artists sharing a unique bond through their interconnected workspace.

This catalog, designed to document their collaborative exhibition held at MASSIMODECARLO in Milan during July and August 2023, features interviews to the artists by Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Justine Ludwig, Marta Papini, and Heidi Zuckerman, together with photographs by Tracy Nguyen.

Contributions by Ruby Neri & Alison M. Gingeras, Hilary Pecis & Cecilia Alemani, Megan Reed & Marta Papini, Lily Stockman & Heidi Zuckerman, Austyn Weiner & Justine Ludwig.

Upside-down trees with roots reaching toward the cosmos, glasses, pitchers, transparent vessels, and bodies blending human and animal, male and female features populate Jacopo Pagin’s works. These figures reveal themselves in their decadent and symmetrical being, caught within a web of references centered on the evocative power of the gaze.

The first monograph dedicated to Jacopo Pagin, designed and edited by Ismaël Bennani and Orfée Grandhomme and featuring a critical contribution by Alessandra Franetovich, brings together over 200 drawings and paintings to explore the visionary, obsessive, and hypnotic qualities of the artist’s work and its profound connections with exotic, mediumistic, and new-age practices.

The book is co-published with Make Room, Los Angeles.

The ultimate ambition of this book-tool is to “disappear on the street”. Its pages collect words and stories of people whose right to exist and be visible in public spaces was forced to confront the concepts of “legality” and “justice”.

Considering the assumption that the law is a fluid parameter, which changes depending on where we are in the world, the historical period in which we live and the sort of privileges we enjoy, the law defines what is considered moral, licit, in other words, what is right. It distributes power and the perception of power in society, defining, categorizing, dividing and controlling.

WILL YOU MARRY ME? is a public lecture and an artist’s book by Sara Leghissa and Marzia Dalfini, investigating a specific portion of the spectrum of illegality, namely the relationship between illegal acts and public space. It explores how we can act disobedience before everyone’s eyes, suggesting possible forms of complicity and public resistance.

All the content was collected by the artist during meetings and conversations that took place in Prato, Milan, Ramallah, Marseille, Madrid, Nyon and Lausanne and with this book-tool their words become manifestos that the reader is invited to detach and relocate into the public space.

Designed by Marzia Dalfini. Published by NERO with the support of L’Altra.

Format: 42 x 29,7 cm
Pages: 28
Language: IT / EN
Year: 2021

There is no pause without prior exertion, and this issue of the magazine explores rest and all its associated contexts and contradictions. Amidst increasing environmental pollution, a tenuous global political climate, and a performance-oriented society demanding ever greater productivity, the balance between rest and labour becomes skewed. Pausing carries the risk of falling behind, but this risk can be mitigated by knowing when to rest. This issue examines rest as activity and as resistance. It questions how the individual body, in cohesion with a community, can generate weight through relaxation and distribute it. 

Contributors: Asma Ben Slama, Camila Cañeque, Christiane Blattmann, Eileen Myles, Federico Tosi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Hanne Loreck, Hans-Christian Dany, Hyemin Yang, Ingrid Jäger, Jenni Bohn, Jochen Lempert, Julia Schulze Darup, Mariona Berenguer, Matthias Schubert, Mikołaj Sobczak, Mirene Arsanios, Nat Raha, Nicholas Grafia, Niclas Riepshoff, Omar Hahad, Sarah Drath, Stacy Skolnik, Thomas Laprade, Vir Andres Hera

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.

A contemplative photographic series by Jochen Lempert, created during a residency at the Moulin des Ribes in Grasse, a former mill nestled in the Provençal landscape.

Known for his background in biology and his distinctive analogue black-and-white photography, Lempert brings a scientific sensitivity and poetic restraint to his exploration of the site's immediate environment.

Shot entirely on location, the images focus on subtle interactions between natural forms and their surroundings. Rather than constructing grand ecological narratives, Lempert observes everyday life in and around the mill, drawing attention to the interdependencies and ephemeral presences that define a place.

With the intimacy of field notes and the tactility of silver gelatin prints, Local Ecology. Moulin des Ribes is both a document and a meditation. It reveals the overlooked ecologies that persist on the periphery of human attention, transforming the act of looking into a form of ecological engagement. In the silence of these photographs, Lempert proposes a different kind of knowledge—rooted in slowness, attunement, and care.

The photographs included in this publication were taken in the summer of 2021 during a residency at La Società delle Api, Moulin des Ribes, Grasse, based on an idea by Cristiano Raimondi.

Jochen Lempert (born 1958 in Moers) is a German photographer. Trained as a biologist specializing in dragonflies, he began his career as a photographer in 1989, at the age of 31, developing an artistic practice based on this scientific heritage, marked by images of nature where the animal and vegetal go hand in hand.

Renowned Japanese photographer Takashi Homma observes his daily life through the poses of his cat.

A cat wanders, perches, and lounges in various spaces around a humble Tokyo apartment. It is perfectly tranquil in its surroundings, simply going about its daily life. In one image, the cat lays serenely amidst pot plants on the balcony, squinting in morning sunlight; in others, it balances precariously on the edge of the bath, snuggles beneath a sleeping bag, plays in a cardboard box, hides beneath an open umbrella. Here and there, evidence of the cat's fellow inhabitant in the apartment—a man, who also happens to be the internationally renowned photographer Takashi Homma—creeps into the frame. A knee, a foot, a shock of blonde hair, half of a face. There are artefacts of his life and practice too. Framed photographic prints draped in bubblewrap lean against a wall; a tangle of musical effects pedals make for colourful constellation against the cool blue of the carpet.

Many have written of the unique atmosphere and energy of Takashi Homma's pictures. His photographic mannerisms are so light, so subtly empathetic to his subjects, that we all but dissolve into the world he creates. The photographs that populate This Is Not My Cat are no exception. Unencumbered by a sense of fussiness or perfection, these images are casual, diaristic, and quotidian. As viewers, we become part of the images and their atmosphere, rather than poring over their details. They are about feeling as much as they are about looking

The title—This Is Not My Cat—seems multipart. Whereas the anomaly imbedded in Homma's iconic photobook Tokyo and My Daughter is that the girl pictured was not in fact his own child, here, his own cat is recast as belonging to another. Or perhaps it is that a cat's independence cannot be truly curbed. They quietly live, play, and exist alongside us. They move through life in our shadow, but forever in their own world. 

Takashi Homma (born 1962, lives and works in Tokyo) is one of the most internationally recognised Japanese photographers active at the front lines of contemporary photography today.

Se Te Subió El Santo is a collection of self – portraits taken by the artist directly after she awoke every morning while away on a week-long residency in Iowa City, IA at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Spring 2016. This daily practice confronts notions of the artist’s interests in rendering a full self implicit of gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality while challenging and collapsing the intersections of each identity as well.

The title of the work is taken from Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A critical study, 1969 through 1977 where Julia Ann Herzberg writes in the dissertation:

Ana and Raquelin Mendieta’s vocabulary contained many Afro-Cuban idiomatic expressions. For example, they would often respond to a friend who was acting in an unruly or hyperactive manner by asking” “Se te subió el santo? (“Are you in a trance?”) In the Afro-Cuban context, the expression “subirse el santo” is used in religious ceremony when the orisha/saint takes possession of the believer.

The monograph also includes an essay by author Akwaeke Emezi.

First edition, 94 page, black and white, leather bound hardcover with white foil embossment 

TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN is an interdisciplinary research-based conceptual artist, filmmaker and curator whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden’s films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography.

An artist's book presenting a photographic study of onions.

On Onions is a photographic study of onions by artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry's selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry's first artist's book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fruitful use of "the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph" (as the artist has described his practice in general).

Composed by the artist and arranged by Stuart Bailey, the book includes an essay written by Angie Keefer about the effects of sliced onions on human tear ducts.

FUGUES is a study of objects. Elements repeat and imitate one another like a polyphonic canon of voices narrating stories of domestic confinement in looped time.

With images by photographer Nicole Maria Winkler & texts by artist Issy Wood, writer Ella Plevin, model Freja Beha Erichsen and curator Elaine Tam.

This eponymously titled publication by fierce pussy brings together thirty-nine of the legendary art collective’s posters, from works made in the urgent early days of the AIDS crisis to present-day advocacy for Queer and Trans rights. In keeping with fierce pussy’s activism in public spaces, the publication is designed to allow readers to tear out any of the posters to share, wheatpaste, scan, photocopy, and distribute or to easily open the book to any page to hang it on a wall. Combining calls for political and social action, proud reclamations of derogatory language, and pointed questions, the posters in fierce pussy address pressing sociopolitical issues in the group’s distinctive voice.

Emerging during a decade steeped in the AIDS crisis and LGBTQ+ activism, fierce pussy brought Queer identity directly into the streets in a manner characterized by the urgency of those years. In recent years they have expanded to also present their work in galleries and museums, while continuing to intervene in the public space, always working with an economy of means and a collective ethos of inclusion and solidarity.

This publication was originally published by Printed Matter in 2008 to coincide with a retrospective exhibition of the collective’s work. This new expanded edition includes twenty-five additional posters.

fierce pussy is an art collective formed in New York City in 1991. Originally composed of a fluid and often-shifting cadre of dykes, the collective was active through 1994. In 2008, the four core founding members Nancy Brooks Brody (1962–2023), Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka began working together again. Adamantly low-tech and low-budget, fierce pussy has always relied on modest resources: old typewriters, found photographs, and their own baby pictures. In the early days, much of the work was produced using materials and resources they had on hand and the equipment at their day jobs. This publication exemplifies the ethos of the group—to share their work and messaging with the masses.

Managing Editor: Jules Spector
Designers: Garrick Gott and Bryce Wilner