Estelle Hanania’s images explore otherworldly spaces, the sharp realness of her photographs a startling contrast to the ethereality of their subjects — burning hands, glittery crystals, spookily-real human scarecrows, and men dressed as eery, totem-like birds. Exploring the allure of ritual, costumes, and folk traditions, Hanania’s photography is a beautiful reminder of a certain eccentricity inherent to all cultural beliefs and behaviors.
     Hanania tells us, “I don’t take pictures on a daily basis, and everyday life is more visually boring to me than inspiring, most of the time. Visually, I like when strange things collide and provoke questions.” Of her photographs of costumed men at carnivals (which she’s been taking since 2006) she ways, “I’m attracted by a feeling of disorientation and excitement that you can find in these gatherings and costumed traditions…. I loved this kind of situation where everything gets confused and uncertain, but you still can define the most familiar shape which is the human figure, vanishing.”

Associations with “steel” might be “cold”, “hard”, and even the bitter mortal sound of the word “slab” — but Spanish architecture and design studio MSB brings us something entirely different. MSB estudi-taller d’arquitectura i disseny (”MSB architecture and design workshop-office”) was established by architect Miquel Subiras in 2008. MSB’s 2010 ESSENCE collection of furniture is “made entirely in carbon steel, strictly selected for each piece, finished with varnish, preserving its unique materiality and personality”. The sleek, spare design shows the soul of steel to be that of a living, expressive, and even warm material.
     MSB created ESSENCE with the goal of exploring the essence of steel — the finish of the varnish coating each piece is selected to display the grain particular to it, as well as to allow the differentiation in shade and color that naturally occurs in steel over time to show through. The collection also takes advantage of steel’s extraordinary strength, as many of the designs form shelves and seating that have the potential to carry weights much heavier than their sleek, minimalist lines would suggest.
     Of the collection, Subiras writes, “When you feel [steel's] density, you realize it is an earth’s son. When you see its expressive skin, you think about the influence time has had. When you know its possibilities, you discover a raw material with a richness of endless nuances, and surely you would have never thought its presence could provide so much warmth.”

Tonight sees the opening of BOY, an exhibit by Cody Critcheloe and his band SSION (think “percu-ssion”) at The Hole — the gallery run by former Deitch Projects directors Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman. SSION, a self-described “queer punk performance art band” comprised of artists and musicians from Kansas City, has just released BOY — a feature-length film documenting Critcheloe’s “life as a small-town punk kid addicted to junk food, dreaming of stardom, who becomes a glamorous pop star with the help and hindrance of a gaggle of crazy dames”.
     And if that hasn’t piqued your interest, perhaps the “shitty green screen and handmade cardboard props” will, or the added bonus of “outrageous spandex conconctions” by fashion designer Peggy Noland. Noland will have a fashion boutique installed, and Critcheloe’s contribution to the show will be “like a sweet hangout zone”, plus video lounge. Be sure to come back for Nolan’s runway show on September 10 — maybe even stay for SSION’s one-night-only performance on September 11.

CODY CRITCHELOE & SSION – BOY opens tonight, 6-9pm, at The Hole, 104 Greene St., New York.

Sally Mann’s photography is simultaneously nostalgic and startlingly real, a beautiful depiction of the contemporary South and the more immediate space of the family. Mann’s preoccupations with growth, time, death, and decay are captured in her images of her young children, the old Civil War battlefields that surround her, and the way in which the people and the wild landscape grow, die, and merge together. Her first solo exhibition in the UK, The Family and the Land: Sally Mann looks at her long career in light of her impulse to focus on the physical world surrounding her as her primary subject.
     The show draws from perhaps her most well-known series, Immediate Family, as well as Faces, Deep South and What Remains. The exhibition first focuses on her portrayal of her young children in all their innocence and immediacy. Faces and What Remains follow with Mann’s unflinching look into the physicality of being, ultimately demonstrating the bare fact of decomposition after death — the literal merging of bodies back into the earth. Finally, the images in Deep South explore the landscape of the South, focusing on the physical and metaphorical Civil War scars that still mark the land. Displayed in a European context, Mann’s photographs take on a more sharply American sheen, their location abroad more directly connecting to them to life within the intricate, complicated space of the rural American South.

The Family and the Land: Sally Mann is on display at The Photographer’s Gallery in London through September 19.

We recently came across Samantha West’s photography and felt the need to share it. Born and raised in New York City, West is inspired by “the curious combination of vintage nudes, birds, Fred Astaire movies, bus rides, mermaids (and their long mermaid hair), horses, barefoot cooking, and planning trips she can’t afford quite yet.”
     Published across Europe, Asia and North America, she’s been featured in publications ranging from Vanity Fair Germany to The New York Times. Currently shooting lookbooks for several different fashion designers, West is also making time for her personal project, Musings. She writes, “I love to photograph my friends in their most personal spaces — their bedroom and bath, where intimacy and femininity reign. My focus has always been on the face, skin, pores, lips, hands. I love a unique visage. I love intimacy and honesty.” Finally, she tells us, “I love being able to see a person shine through.”
      Her gorgeous, artful images are testament to her firm belief that in photography, “it is all in the eyes.”

The collection of works in SHRED, the comprehensive show currently on display at Perry Rubenstein Gallery, explores an artform often maligned: collage. Carlo McCormick, the show’s curator, is not only the senior editor of PAPER magazine but also a longtime defender of New York’s downtown art scene. In this show, from simple, layered newsprint cut-outs to videos comprised of animated paper silhouettes, works by such artists as Bruce Conner, Gee Vaucher, Jack Walls, and the late scene darling Dash Snow demonstrate the powerful potential of collage as a medium even as they push it to its outermost boundaries.
     Many other artists created pieces specifically for the exhibition, including Shepard Fairey, the collective Faile, Mark Flood, Swoon, Erik Foss, Leo Fitzpatrick, and Judith Supine. The show also features video works by Martha Colburn and Tess Hughes-Freeland, and a video premiere by Malcolm Stuart and Bec Stupak.

SHRED is on display until August 27, 2010 at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York.

Swiss photographers Matthieu Lavanchy and Jonas Marguet met while studying at the University of Art and Design Lausanne. In collaboration with others, Marguet founded the publishing house Aplustrois in 2008 as a side project. The publisher “considers the editorial object (book, booklet or other format) as an essential complement to any artistic event. The aim is not to document or comment on the event, but rather to push it further and explore new forms starting from it”.
     When Aplustrois was approached by a theater troupe that was working on a play that dealt with themes of the public perception of obesity and the concept of BBW — “big beautiful women” — Marguet and Lavanchy created a book of still-lifes about Western society’s complex relationship toward food, and “the tension between seduction and repulsion”.
     Grotesque towers of chocolate cake and a strangely melded pair of dining room chairs pull our associations with food and dining to their absurd extremes — and pseudo-scientific beakers and equipment seem to allude to our desire to measure out portions and study our food while simultaneously attempting to ignore the baseness of the instinct to eat. Curiously absent of human figures, Lavanchy and Marguet’s images manage to be funny, strange, and disturbing through their objects’ startling manipulation.

Neuf Veltes Remplissent un Quartaut is available for sale here. It is also on sale at Dashwood Books and Capricious Space in New York.

Two weeks before the release of his latest film, The Extra Man, Paul Dano is back in his hometown for a week to promote the movie before flying back to New Mexico to continue filming alongside the likes of Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig (in the not-so-subtly titled Cowboys and Aliens). The Extra Man, in contrast, seems to be more in line with Dano’s previous work. The film is a quietly quirky adaptation of a novel by that quintessential young New York writer, Jonathan Ames.
     I meet Dano in a garish, orange-and-pink room in a SoHo hotel. The room was likely picked by a publicist but seems as though it could have been a set piece in the new film. After some conversation about the décor, Dano asks my permission to make a quick phone call to his girlfriend, Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of Elia). Since his break-out role in 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine, the young actor has worked with a string of A-list actors (Kevin Kline, Katie Holmes, and John C. Reilly star with him in The Extra Man). Still, he considers himself “a very normal dude”. We caught up with him to talk about how he picks his distinctive roles, how much he identifies with his characters, and his plans for the future.

Coinciding with the Capital Fringe Festival 2010, INTERWOVEN kicks off tonight at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC. Sponsored by the Danish Embassy and DC’s NPR affiliate, the two-night event will push the boundaries of both textile and performance art through a melding of the two.
     INTERWOVEN will feature the first-ever American appearance by designers and artists Henrik Vibskov and Andreas Emenius, whose previous work, The Fringe Project, explored the nature of physical surfaces and movement, all through fringes. The pair claimed their inspiration came after watching the film Solaris and “staring at a New Years Eve party hat”. Additionally, avant-garde fashion label threeASFOUR will perform, as will fashion designer Peggy Noland. Screenings by artists such as Hrafnhildur Arnardottir, a.k.a. SHOPLIFTER — who is perhaps most widely known for being the mind behind the cover image of Björk’s 2004 album, Medulla — will most definitely be highlights.

INTERWOVEN: Evenings in Performance will be at the Textile Museum, 2320 S Street, NW Washington, DC on July 23 & 24, from 8 to 10 p.m.

Monday at 4:53 p.m. marked six months since a massive earthquake devastated Haiti, and the moment passed with relative media silence. In the half-year since the destruction, western media outlets have turned their eyes elsewhere while Haiti still grimly struggles to recover. Now, with the threat of hurricane season looming, the lingering effects of the disaster — 1.5 million people are living in temporary camps near Port-au-Prince, and services are reportedly unable to reach large portions of the affected population — threaten to become even worse.
     In response, Thomas Beale of Honey Space has organized an event alongside leading NGOs, artists, and grassroots organizations working in Haiti “to share their insights into what’s happening on the ground, what projects are really making a difference, and how we can support them”. Presentations and discussions about the current state, and future, of the relief effort in Haiti start at 7 p.m., to be followed by a silent auction and DJ.
     When asked what prompted the effort, Beale responded, “We organized this event to at least try to understand what life is like six months after such an apocalypse, what many are doing to help, what we can do.”
     A PICTURE OF HAITI: 6 MONTHS LATER opens tonight at 6:30 p.m. at Honey Space, 148 11th Ave. (btw 21st and 22nd), New York. RSVP for the event here.