Hasta La Ideas

Dotée d’une sensibilité palpable, l’artiste française Sarah Seené basée à Montréal fait de la lumière et des émotions ses principales alliées. Qu’elle travaille à l’argentique ou au Polaroid, qu’elle immortalise des paysages naturels ou des visages captivants, ses oeuvres se dévoilent éthérées et enveloppantes. Parcourir les nombreux projets de la photographe se comparerait presque à lire un recueil de poésie. Nous lui avons posé quelques questions.

Bonjour Sarah! Peux-tu nous parler un peu de ton parcours et de comment tu es devenue photographe?

J’ai appris la photographie argentique à l’âge de 16 ans aux cours du soir des Beaux-Arts de Belfort, la ville dans laquelle j’ai grandi. J’ai particulièrement aimé découvrir la magie du développement de la pellicule et des tirages papier. Après le lycée, j’ai fait des études de littérature et de cinéma, mais je continuais à faire beaucoup de photographies, en pellicule toujours.

En 2011, j’ai participé à un concours lancé par une librairie parisienne consistant à réaliser un triptyque au Polaroid. Je n’ai plus quitté le Polaroid pendant des années suite à cela, il est même devenu mon médium de prédilection. S’en sont suivies les premiers projets, les premières propositions, expositions, publications et la photographie s’est alors naturellement placée au centre de ma vie. Maintenant, je réalise des projets personnels et je travaille pour des artistes, des musiciens.

Comment définis-tu ton univers artistique?

Mes images sont souvent décrites comme oniriques et poétiques. Personnellement, j’y perçois davantage du sensible et de la sensualité. Mes différents projets ont en commun l’humain, son émotion et son énergie de vie. Mon fil conducteur est lié à une certaine forme de douceur qui est liée au regard que je pose sur celles et ceux que je photographie. J’ai un amour incommensurable pour les visages, la peau, les yeux et surtout pour la lumière. C’est elle qui me guide dans mes choix. Elle doit toujours être naturelle, je ne travaille jamais avec la lumière artificielle.

Je définirais donc ma volonté comme étant celle de réaliser des photographies lumineuses, notamment lorsque je traite de sujets qui pourraient paraître difficiles au premier abord. Toutefois, il n’est pas exclu que la lumière soit traversée par des zones d’ombres… En effet, je dirais qu’il y a aussi parfois une étrangeté, une inquiétude, un frisson qui parcourt mon travail et qui fait cohabiter la douleur et la vie.

Quelles sont tes principales sources d’inspiration?

Encore une fois, c’est l’humain qui est au cœur de mes inspirations. Les femmes et les hommes qui font preuve de résilience, qui témoignent d’une force exemplaire. Le vivant, dans son ensemble, mais aussi la mort peuvent me fasciner. Souvent, c’est davantage une émotion personnelle qui est le point de départ d’un projet et qui m’amène à réaliser les images, puis ensuite à développer un discours sur mon projet. Il y aussi la musique qui m’inspire, plus que la photographie elle-même.

Tu travailles actuellement sur ta série «Fovea» qui s’intéresse à plusieurs jeunes Québécoises et Québécois atteints de déficience visuelle.

Fovea est mon plus projet le plus important à ce jour. La fovea définit  »la zone, située dans le prolongement de l’axe visuel de l’œil, où la vision des détails est la plus précise. » (Dictionnaire Larousse, 2018)

Fovea est une série de photographie documentaire, réalisée en argentique Noir et Blanc, qui met en lumière ces jeunes.

Qu’ils soient malvoyants à cause d’une maladie dégénérative, d’un accident de voiture, d’un AVC précoce ou qu’ils soient nés aveugles, ces jeunes ont un parcours de vie saisissant qui témoigne d’une résilience hors du commun. Loin des cannes blanches et des lunettes fumées, les portraits de Fovea se construisent aux antipodes des clichés sur la déficience visuelle. Ils illustrent le rapport tendre et poétique que les jeunes malvoyants et non-voyants entretiennent avec le monde qui les entoure. Au moment des expositions, chaque photographie est accompagnée d’un texte descriptif sous forme de poème en Braille. Le projet comporte aussi des documentaires sonores qui présentent les jeunes par la voix et un film en Super-8.

Quel serait ton projet de rêve?

Sans hésiter, faire la pochette du prochain album de Bjork! Le rêve ultime!

Suivez Sarah Seené sur Instagram.

The Irthi Contemporary Crafts Council has paired Bedouin craftswomen in the UAE with international artists to create items that can be sold to a global market.

From its base in Sharjah – one of the seven Emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates – the Irthi Contemporary Crafts Council oversaw the creation of the collection to give local female makers the means to support themselves through their craft.

The collection consists of items made by collaborations between 12 international designers and studios to create 12 distinct product lines.

“We worked with around 40 artisans, Bedouin women living on the east coast of Sharjah, but they only know their craft. They don’t really know anything about product design,” said the Irthi Contemporary Crafts Council’s curator Farah Nasri.

“We thought the best way to impart that knowledge is to really get designers on board and get them to share ideas and skills,” she told Dezeen.

One of the collaborations saw American weaver Jennifer Zurick and the Emirati artisans apply the generations-old technique of safeefah – where palm leaves are woven together to create baskets and rugs – to a range of earthy-toned, bohemian handbags.

Zurick, who usually works within the Native American tradition of weaving black willow bark, previously cast her designs in leather for luxury fashion house Loewe.

She brought this same principle to the Irthi project, where instead of palm fronds the bags are made from camel leather, held together by waxed linen threads, to give a more contemporary finish.

“We chose camel leather as it is locally and sustainably sourced. It is a by-product of the camel meat industry in the UAE, is chromium and metal-free, and biodegrades in four months,” said Nasri.

A different collaboration reinterprets safeefah by dying the weave in purple and orange tones and using it to adorn sculptural totems which can be deconstructed to become a set of stools and tables.

The totems were handmade by Irthi’s artisans, and designed by Barcelona ceramicist Pepa Reverter together with Dubai architect Abdallah Al Mulla, who brought his technical knowledge of creating large scale clay forms to the table.

The individual units that make up to totems are up to 60 centimetres wide and one metre high, “pushing the limits of clay design”.

“It is very challenging to hand-build and fire pottery forms of this scale, as they tend to crack and warp,” Nasri explained.

Elsewhere, the Sharjah artisans worked with Lél, a Pakistan-based artistic collective of displaced Afghan craftsmen, to reimagine prayer beads, or misbahs, in two different ways.

In supersized form, the massive, multicoloured orbs are emblazoned with Emirati door motifs such as the hand of fatima, and strung together by braided ropes to create sculptural homeware pieces.

Between three and eight metres long, they can be places on a dining tables, draped over furniture and architectural elements, or simply placed on the floor.

At the other end of the spectrum, the misbahs are turned into jewellery with threads and dainty spheres made from gold and silver. “Usually they consist of a closed loop of 30 beads. But here, they are split to have ten beads on one side and 20 on the other to create a more sculptural pattern.” said Nasri.

For both variations on the theme, the stone craftsmen contributed their method for cutting marble, wood and semi-precious stones such as lapis lazuli into beads, as well as engraving and creating inlays. The Irthi artisans meanwhile used talli, a braiding technique similar to bobbin lace, to string the beads together.

The Emirati women also collaborated with designer Dima Srouji and a group of Palestinian glassblowers to create a line of abstract oud bottles and incense burners using the ancient Middle Eastern craft.

Their non-traditional, organic shapes reference the natural flora and fauna of the region, from spiky cacti to bulbous jellyfish.

“The Palestinian glass blowers taught our artisans to shape molten, borosilicate glass using a blow tube and a torch,” Nasri explained.

The Emiratis also drew on the country’s tradition of oud making to create a series of scents for the collection in collaboration with local parfumeries.

Among the other projects featured in the Irthi collection is another series of incense burners, this time cast in metal and created with Israeli designer Adi Toch. Meanwhile a selection of washi paper tapestries made in tandem with needlework artist Kazuhito Takadoi were embroidered using Japanese grass weaving techniques alongside safeefah.

Collaborations like this impart more than just practical skills, Nasri explained: “They give the Emirati artisans access to new sustainable markets and international platforms for exposure, while preserving and protecting the UAE’s cultural heritage for future generations.”

Proceeds from the sale of the made-to-order pieces go partly to the Irthi artisans themselves as well as being reinvested into Irthi’s range of programmes meant to empower women through craft across the Middle East, north Africa, south-east and central Asia.

This latest collection was presented as part of London Design Fair – where Sharjah was this year’s guest country – and will go on a roadshow of Dubai and Milan Design Week over the next half a year.

Other notable projects presented at the Design Fair include a collection of un-Swedish design curated by Paola Bjäringer.

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Le plasticien Randy Hage partage avec son public, la beauté des structures vieillissantes. Pour ce faire, il construit d’incroyables miniatures de devantures de magasins. En plus de constituer une œuvre esthétique, il souhaite, par le biais de ses créations, « attirer l’attention sur la perte de quartiers diversifiés et bien établis, parceque la rénovation urbaine et la gentrification déplacent les propriétaires de magasins et les résidents de la région. Ceux-la même qui composent la ‘tapisserie de ces communautés’», explique-t-il. Au cours des 14 dernières années, 450 devantures ont été photographiées, et plus de 60% d’entre elles ont été fermées ou ont été démolies.

Tout a débuté quand, à la fin des années 90, Randy Hage a commencé à photographier les façades en fonte de la région de SoHo à New York. Si cette démarche a eue pour but initial la recherche de sujets possibles pour des futurs projets artistiques, elle est vite devenue un projet documentaire. «Ces devantures de magasins de quartier fermaient à un rythme alarmant et étaient victimes d’un réaménagement à grande échelle dépassant le rythme normal du changement de quartier», explique-t-il. L’occasion d’acter un temoignage artistiaue de ce qui fut, et qui n’est plus.

Three years ago, Ella Hall was on the phone with yet another interior designer griping about a failed custom upholstery project. In her then-role in client services at Homepolish, a design company connecting end clients to interior designers (which, as of this month, has shuttered operations), her job was to act as the middle-person – a position that primarily involved troubleshooting projects before crisis struck.

This call, like so many others she regularly fielded, was due to a miscommunication of material specs from client to designer to textiles fabricator. Lead times would in turn be extended, build-outs incomplete, photography dates pushed, clients unhappy. She was fed up.

Hall finally started offering to fulfill custom upholstery orders herself. She had a sewing machine, and it made her day job incredibly more efficient to absorb the workload of super simple (though precise) projects like custom-sized pillows or bench cushions. The designers she worked with loved the idea, so she continued offering it, essentially keeping the operational step “in-house” by just doing the work herself. The burden of the complaint phone calls slowly lifted as she found more and more designers lining up for her services, which all around met their needs, made them look better in the client’s eyes, and expedited their projects.

Custom pillows developed by Stitchroom. Photography by Claire Esparros.

Eventually, she was sewing nights and weekends to keep up with the orders – and an epiphany struck. “I saw the complicated process of getting custom products made, and an opportunity to solve a widespread problem,” Hall said. The need for easy, transparent upholstery customization was overwhelming, and she had the skills and the chutzpah to officially do something about it. “I just had to take action,” she recalls.

Ella Hall

Hall was living in the East Village with her now-husband and another roommate at the time. The industrial-grade sewing machine she’d acquired, along with the piles of pillows and lanky rolls of fabric, was consuming her apartment. She soon moved to Brooklyn, where she found a place with a nook that accommodated her machinery and fabrication materials, and built Stitchroom out of her apartment. Not too long after, she moved operations to the company’s first studio and office space in an industrial building in Greenpoint. Stitchroom has since expanded to take over two spaces on one floor, and next week is moving to an even bigger space in the same building in order to rejoin operations under one studio roof.

Stitchroom team on the job

Custom cushions and upholstery for a sofa project, by Stitchroom. Photography by Claire Esparros.

One of the biggest innovations Hall implemented was a technology-driven system of transparency. What Stitchroom digitized “would allow clients the ability to value engineer their custom projects” through formulated systems of information captures (such as custom dimensions requests) and live price updates. “Transparency in communication, pricing, and lead times are very important for me,” said Hall, and she brought that priority to life in the Stitchroom platform. Through it, clients create an account online, upload their product specs, and can live track their project every step of the way through order draft to fabrication progress through payment and shipping.

What essentially began as a pillows side-gig has now also grown to include the rest of the upholstery industry: Hall recognizes that there are existing textile fabricators who have been around for a while and may have outdated client services models. Though her whole mission is to update the process of customization so it’s entirely unintimidating, she by no means wants to displace these older-school businesses.

In addition to its staff of sewers, Stitchroom has recently rolled out a contracting system where the company acts as the relationship manager, bringing new work from new client bases to existing upholstery studios. Through this model of relationship management, which is designed after her position at Homepolish, Stitchroom is applying the conveniences of communication-through-technology to the traditional fabrication studio model, so that project statuses are available to maker, intermediary, client, and end user in one fell swoop.

Hall shared that Stitchroom’s services have been particularly useful for millworkers and furniture makers who are incorporating textiles into their designs. She offered up a story of a millworker-architect team, who before now hadn’t even considered conceptualizing upholstered surfaces into their build-out designs because sourcing reliable vendors had been a pain point in the past. “Once you realize that you have full control over the process of creating custom upholstery, it changes everything,” Hall says of the design process. Now, the boundaries of how the millworker and architect can together envision a space – and, in turn, present it within the scope of a project – are incredibly expanded. For a recent project, they pitched banquette seating to a client, and were able to offer the upholstery element as a joint line item versus a separate vendor cost. They spec’d the cushions through Stitchroom, received them in-shop, and joined them to the seating, conveniently delivering a finished product custom built to the client’s space.

Custom banquette bench and backing cushions for a commercial project, by Stitchroom

Stitchroom is still a relatively new company, so its services have their limitations. For example, the ability to work on larger-scale upholstery projects, such as unconventional sofa or bigger lounge chair designs, is sometimes dependent on geographic location and accessibility to the New York studio.

Bluestone Lane cafe – Photo credit Nick Glimenakis

The company has come a long way, though, since 2016, with Hall’s fabrication equipment displacing her roommates from their shared living area. As Stitchroom continues to grow, and continues to respond to designers’ needs, it’s moving the industry further from avoidable miscommunication, unnecessarily extended lead times, and unhappy clients. Stitch-by-stitch, it’s forging ground for an altogether seamless upholstery process.

Graffiti artist Banksy has launched his own merchandise line, with items on sale for as little as £10, to protect his brand against a greeting-card company that is trying to “seize legal custody” of his name.

Banksy unveiled a pop-up-shop installation, named Gross Domestic Product, in Croydon, UK, to announce the launch of the merchandise range.

According to claims from the artist, he has been forced to release the branded merchandise following legal action from an unnamed greeting-card company.

 

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A post shared by Banksy (@banksy) on Oct 1, 2019 at 7:00am PDT

“GDP is the homewares brand from Banksy and this is our first and only store,” said Banksy on Instagram. “The showroom is for display purposes only and the doors will not open. All sales will be conducted online when the website opens soon.”

“This shop has come about as a result of legal action,” the statement continued. “A greetings cards company are trying to seize legal custody of the name Banksy from the artist, who has been advised the best way to prevent this is to sell his own range of branded merchandise.”

Legal proceedings against Banksy began a year ago

According to news channel ITV, Banksy made the decision after taking advice from lawyer Mark Stephens, following the greeting-card company starting legal proceedings around a year ago.

“Banksy is in a difficult position because he doesn’t produce his own range of shoddy merchandise and the law is quite clear – if the trademark holder is not using the mark, then it can be transferred to someone who will,” Stephens is reported as saying.

According a to statement made by Banksy, many of the items for sale have been made especially for the online store.

“Sometimes you go to work and it’s hard to know what to paint, but for the past few months I’ve been making stuff for the sole purpose of fulfilling trademark categories under EU law,” he said.

This merchandise will be sold online, with items own sale for as little as £10 said the artist.

A website has been created at – grossdomesticproduct.com – where the products will potentially be sold. Currently the site displays a static image saying: “Gross Domestic Product. The homewares store from Banksy. Opening Soon.”

“So here it is – we hope to offer something for everyone, prices start from £10 but availability will be limited – all of the products are handmade in the UK using existing or recycled materials wherever possible. Including the ideas,” continued the statement.

Installation contains Stormzy stab vest

The installation in Croydon consists of a series of window displays beneath a fitness chain near East Croydon station.

Each of the shop-window displays contain numerous works of art created by Banksy, including the stab vest worn by Stormzy during his headline set at Glastonbury this summer.

Banksy announced the installation with a picture on Instagram, along with a caption stating that the shop was “for display purposes only”.

Banksy is a British street artist whose identity is unknown. He has created numerous satirical and political pieces of work including art-filled Walled Off Hotel on Israeli West Bank barrier and an EU flag being demolished in the town of Dover.

Earlier this year one of his works was sent through a shredder at the moment of its auction sale.

Image courtesy of Getty.

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