Shot by Terry Richardson

Kobi Levi’s heels are “wearable sculptures” that verge on fetishistic with an ironic, seemingly dadaist, wit. If Roger Vivier, 20th century French fashion designer credited with revolutionizing the stiletto heel, is considered the “Fragonard of the shoe,” than you might call Kobi Levi the the “R. Mutt of the shoe.” R. Mutt is of course the name signed on Dada artist Marcel Duchamp’s iconic and ridiculous 1917 ready-made sculpture entitled “the fountain” – which was simply a found urinal. Is it genius or asinine? Levi, like Duchamp, is certainly making a statement. Levi’s pieces are “…humoristic with a unique point of view about footwear.” Throughout the history of civilization, women’s fashion has taken turns as bondage and liberation.  Levi’s constructions might be both, or the handiwork work of a batty sculptor with a foot fetish.  From semi-blatant sexual innuendo to slingshots to banana peels, Levi’s shoes are cartoonish, bombastic, and in their magical kitschyness there is a beautiful complex brilliance which makes them insanely cool. www.kobilevidesign.blogspot.com

Vija Celmins – Man With Gun

Vija Celmins – Burning Man

Painter Vija Celmins, born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, has lived and worked primarily in New York since 1981. She immigrated to the United States at the age of ten with her family, settling in Indiana. After attending the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Celmins completed her MFA at the UCLA in 1965.

With a palette focused on the gradations between black and gray, Celmins has been known as a painter of refined representational images of night skies, ocean waves and spider webs. But her first subjects were war planes, smoking guns, and other images of death and disaster. In all of her work, the precisely rendered paintings suggest the importance of patience – the artist’s, in making a precisely rendered painting, and ours, in viewing it.

Organized by the Menil Collection and consisting of approximately 20 paintings and two small sculptures, Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster will be the first exhibition to concentrate on a specific time (1964-1966) and subject matter – including violence in America, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and the news media. While several early images derive from the artist’s own interest in common objects from the studio, such as a television set or a lamp, this exhibition also concentrates on images of war – and televised images of conflict. Celmins’s work from this pivotal time reflects on the moment when the printed image began to give way to the television screen.

This exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art March 13–June 5, 2011. www.menil.com

Photography by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Model: Adarsha Benjamin

I’ve dreamed of you so much you’re losing your reality.
Is there still time to reach that living body and kiss
on that mouth the birth of the voice that’s dear to me?
I’ve dreamed of you so much that my arms, used to crossing on my chest
as I hug your shadow, couldn’t fold themselves around the shape of your body, maybe.
And faced with the actual appearance of what’s haunted me and ruled me for days and years,
I would probably turn into a shadow.
O what a sentimental pair of scales.
I’ve dreamed of you so much there’s probably no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep standing up, my body exposed to all the appearances of life and love and you,
the only thing that counts for me today. I’d probably reach for the first lips and face that came along,
than your face and your lips.
I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked so much, talked, slept with your phantom
that maybe there’s nothing left for me to do but be a phantom among the phantoms
and a hundred times more shadow than the shadow
that strolls and will go on strolling cheerfully over the sundial of your life.

~ Robert Desnos

detail of Love is Strange Tee by Pas Un Autre and Adarsha Benjamin

‘Love is Strange” tee is available till the end of February exclusively on Pas Un Autre. There are only 100 in existence and they will never be reproduced again. Each tee is numbered per edition. It fits, looks, and feels like a vintage tee!  Only $156 bucks.  Grab a hold of one in the new Pas Un Autre shop here.

‘Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’ Tony Frank ©

Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg – J’taime Moi Non Plus

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“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”

#1591 160x243m/m

#1554 143x218m/m

Artist Yamamoto Masao describes is work, albeit obscurely and poeticly, with these words: “Kawa = Flow is about the world where we are and the world where we go in the future. Although we seem to be connected continually there is a rupture between us in the present and those that went before us or that come next.” “Kawa” means river or more precisely flow.  Masao’s photographs are like microscopic imagery of the cellular structure of enlightenment; tiny snapshots of those beautiful moments where everything rushes too close and spills over the edge of the mind into pure ecstasy – and everything is crystal clear, if only for a tenth of a millisecond. Oblivion = Eternity. You can see some of Masao’s work at the Maerz Gallery in Leipzig February 26th. www.maerzgallerie.com + www.yamamotomasao.com