LILABSTRACTS

Ian Francis was born in 1979 in Bristol, England, and graduated from the University of the West of England with a degree in Illustration. His work concentrates on the particulars of modern experiences — things like television, world events, celebrities, and day-to-day living. He held his first US solo show at BLK/MRKT in 2007.

He spends a lot of time watching TV/films, reading books and looking around the internet... He saves loads of photos he finds interesting from all kinds of different places. He then flicks through them, and try to think about how ideas link together, and mock up roughs in photoshop. He likes combining different elements of photos of people with abstract sections of old paintings I've done. Once his got an idea of what he wants to do, he’ll try and figure out how to paint it... sometimes the final piece looks a lot like the rough, sometimes it changes drastically while I'm painting it. When I'm painting, I just switch back and forth between paint, drawing, collage or anything lying around.

He normally describes what he does as mixed media painting... the idea is to get different kinds of marks to work off of each other - so sometimes he'll paint/draw fairly accurately, then work quite loosely on a section, then break up elements of print on another section. At the moment he thinks a lot of the painting he does is too tight, “it should really be looser and more expressive”.

He also relies on his friends to come up with interesting things to do, because he’s been working a lot lately so he’s pretty boring right now (or, always)... he’d probably involve getting very drunk and going to a club to see a genre of music that ends in 'core'.

What he is really excited about now is, Lost season 4, going to All Tomorrow's Parties to see Portishead and various other people, and hopefully having a bit more time to work on some paintings for a show next year... there's some ideas that I'd really like to get down on canvas.

He is usually most productive at night, although his schedule's pretty random... He does artwork pretty much every day, but it can be anything from less than an hour to about 10 hours.

Diana Cooper - Mechanical Cloud 2004-05 [plastic, photo, paper, foam core, acetate, vinyl, felt, neopreme foam, Velcro, map pins]

“Sometimes I feel as though I am making flowcharts for an imaginary world.”

Her mind is like a filter constantly translating the world around her. Everything catches her eye: bright orange traffic cones meandering between the street and the sidewalk; an enormous building sheathed in black mesh from top to bottom; duct tape adhering a handwritten sign to a newly polished subway tiled wall. These are all urban works in progress, part of the transitory, the ephemeral, and the makeshift. These are the environments we inhabit everyday.

Diana Cooper - Orange Alert: USA 2005 [Acrylic, neoprene, acetate, felt, paper, coniugated plastic, map pins]

The act of mediating different worlds and creating unexpected juxtapositions is important to her. She transforms materials and insinuate them into unlikely contexts. She also creates the sense that they don’t quite belong but at the same time that they do. Often she likes to make something be what it shouldn’t be: scotch tape holds up a felt construction, plastic and pipe cleaners frame a heap of pom poms or a delicate felt-tip marker doodle covers an enormous canvas.

Diana Cooper - The Emerger: The Whitney Museum of Art at Altria, 2005 - Ongoing [Acrylic, ink, acetate, felt, paper, foam core, map pins]

She wants her work to provoke questions: how are limits determined (inside vs. outside)? How are values assigned (back vs. front)? What determines what a painting,  drawing and sculpture.

Diana Cooper - Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, All Our Wandering, 2007 [wood, vynil, pigment print, ink, acrylic, colored pencil, ball point pen, velcro, foam rubber, and felt]

She is also interested in how you can start with a logical system and through sheer repetition and excess create something that unravels and stops making sense. In her work, systems overlap, compete and contradict one another. She wants to expose the proximity of order to chaos and show how these two realms bump up against one another. Digital, biological and medical systems are our life support systems but they can fail us too. In their complexity they become unstable and sometimes quite fragile. Fragility is important to her because it underscores our own vulnerability. Like the makeshift improvisations on existing systems she works is fragile and grows organically. It depicts elaborate networks that suggest mysterious functions and unnamable machines.

Diana Cooper - Swarm, 2003-2007 [comugated plastic, paper, ink, acrylic, felt, foam core, photos, veltro and map pins, dimension variable]

When experiencing her work she wants the viewer to become aware of their own body, their own frailty and strength, for them to become sensitive.

Diana Cooper - Hidden Tracks Sabotage the Random 2001-2002 [Vinyl, foam core, acetate, poms poms and paper on wall and floor]

The viewer needs to walk between things, stand on their tiptoes or bend down in order to see the work fully. She wants the viewing experience to be physical, visual and conceptual all at once. She wants the work to be both vital and vulnerable, like an ice cream cake in the sun.

Bavari is what happens when Sodom and Gomorrah mixes with a surrealist modern Europe. He is a classically-trained painter who habitually photographs images from museums and on the street in Europe, intertwining them with concepts straight from ancient Biblical stories into grotesque, beautiful, and absurd computer-generated art.

A glimpse into Alessandro Bavari’s gallery conjures esoterically detailed Dali-esque nightmares tainted with Biblical perversities cited, (on his website), from specific verses.

His dismally manipulated photographs are influenced by the darker Biblical stories, architechture, Michelangelo, and his guitar, (which he plays in the classical style). He twists the style of Salvador Dali into his own creation in the “Tryptichon: Deconstruction of a Hero and Reconstruction of the Man” series, as well as images from Sodom & Gomorrah like “FOUR GREEN LIZARDS GOING TO SUCK MILK FROM A YOUNG MOTHER“.

“Headcleaner“, a scary short film set to industrial music “conceived and realized” by Alessandro Bavari, reminds one of a Tool or Nine Inch Nails video coupled with Dali’s surrealism.

A disembodied brain attatched to a spine becomes a heart and then an eeirie pitch-dark creature riding upon a mutant baby doll with razor-like arms digging into the earth. Amidst shrieks and a strange baby’s cry, another hideous creature rises from the ground to scream in your face. Cut to a man panting and sweating, sitting up in bed with some frightening figure behind him drawing circles in the top of his head with an instrument, a feverishly-pitched noise in the background.  It is rather disturbing but done very well!!

Those who have actually met Bavari, such as Paul Murnaghan, a guest on a radio program transcribed on Bavari’s website, will tell you he is not as mad as one would think. The quiet type, actually. His models are freakish – almost frightening – even in real life, and he extends his Biblical influence as far as the size of his photographs. Twelve is a Biblical number, he prefers using 18 x 12″.