Hook and Eyes, LucyandBart - a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess

Lucy McRae and Bart Hess have been bending and revising the body with simple low-tech alterations. Their works builds on fashion forms combining it with everyday technologies like safety-pins, Q-tips.

Bart Hess has been exploring the effect of new materials on the body using animation and photography. And Australian artist, Lucy McRae was trained as a ballerina, which has helped her to become a visual architect of the body, playing with its symmetry to create alien yet organic deviations. Together they play with the human silhouette, the body grows fur or gills, attenuates, hyper-extends, balloons or shrinks. Their work is also inspired by new developments in genetic manipulations & plastic surgery.

Evolution, a Lucy McRae and Bart Hess collaboration

Hunt For High-tech (above)

Chlorophyll Skin is a film experimenting with color, movement, absorption and the body – using Q-tips

A mini music video made by Lucy McRae for a forthcoming book and DVD entitled Black material with music by Spencer Product in collaboration with Champagne Valentine

Dripping Color, LucyandBart - a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess

Bart Hess presents a performance inspired by the Photoshop filter that allows you to “liquify” images at Exit festival in Paris. 2012

Germination Day One, LucyandBart - a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess

Germination Day Eight, LucyandBart - a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess

Lucy Mcrae at 2012′s TED conference

Lucy McRae was invited to participate in 2012’s TED conference in California, where she spoke about using stockings, safety-pins and simple everyday objects to transform or grow a second skin to create animal textures and change colors, chameleon-like. Wanting to blur the edges of her skin, she sprayed her arms with a garden hose to watch how the water dripped and was inspired to create a textile made out of water tubes with different colored waters. She has worked on commercial projects for companies, one of which involved developing ideas on swallowing a perfume pill that would alter the body’s scent.

A collaboration between stylist Alister Mackie, artist duo LucyandBart, and Nick Knight

For more information:

http://lucyandbart.blogspot.com/
www.barthess.nl
www.lucymcrae.blogspot.com

A piece by Indian-born artist, Raghava KK

On Friday, February 26, 2010, life as Raghava KK knew it, changed forever. It was 12pm and we were meeting for coffee, a mere two hours after his much-hyped TED talk went live on the web. Earlier in the month, KK had given a talk to a group of self-proclaimed “nerds” in the ongoing series of interactive talks presented by TED. His talk is now considered one of the most engaging and engrossing in the organization’s history. He speech touches on living and painting in his native India, becoming a gallery sensation at a very young age, and having it all ripped away as the government’s draconian censorship slipped between him and his collectors. Slipping in the art community and inching closer to being flat broke, KK stopped painting for himself and started pandering to his audience. “They called me a sellout, and no one bought my art,” he told me, reflecting on a very dark time. “I don’t have to censor my art now that I’m in the US.”

SPREAD ArtCulture made the trek over the bridge during last week’s blizzard to speak to Raghava, who we’re quite certain will be on all of your radars very soon.

SPREAD ArtCulture: What do you hope to accomplish with your art in the US?

Raghava KK: I want to be a grassroots artist. I want to start with Brooklyn, then go to New York, LA, and then I want to make a difference. I’m giving myself three years (in the US), and if I haven’t reached people by then, I’m going to leave. Three years is a fair deadline. I’m just trying to be myself, as simple and mundane as that is, it’s honest. I’m just trying to be raw and unadulterated. I know that I appear to be civil and decent, but I’m really capable of anything. I don’t censor my thoughts and my artwork reflects my thoughts. I think uncensored, honest thought has tremendous value.

There will be much more from this artist to come very soon. In the meantime, be sure to check out the link for his TED interview below.

Raghava KK

Raghava KK at TED