INTERVIEW: VERA KOX

All images: Work by Vera Kox / Courtesy and copyright the artist.

Sticky, soft, damp, stony, crumbly, sleek – there is a whole range of opposing adjectives that come into mind when looking at sculptures and installations by Vera Kox. She employs a minimalist language, continuously playing with the antagonism of light and heavy, fluid and static material. Having finished her Master in 2010 at Goldsmiths College in London, the 1984-born sculptor translates her research in tangible preconceptions of materials into transitions of forms. Kox' objects often seem fragile, but they are also seductively encouraging a curiosity in the truth of their own tactility, while remaining untouchable and thus shattering expectations. In a short interview the German artist told us about her interest in this fluctuation and about her current show at GREEN IS GOLD in Copenhagen.

RYAN TRECARTIN: SITE VISIT

images from the top: (1) Ryan Trecartin, excerpt ANIMATION COMPANION (2014), Photo story originally published in Modern Weekly, Guangzhou; Courtesy Ryan Trecartin // (2-4) Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin SITE VISIT, 2014, Installation view, Photo: Thomas Eugster; Courtesy of the artists; both images courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery New York; Regen Projects Los Angeles; and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

"You know? I mean...this is just so..." A man blabbers into a shaky hand-camera. We can't follow what he says. HipHop beats merge with his electronically amplified voice. He wears a pink lace chemise, no trousers and folded down ugg boots. His hands either play with his pink wig or they wave a petrol can about, while doing tantalizing gestures with his rouged mouth and eyes. He is a character playing in Ryan Trecartin's six-channel video work SITE VISIT, which was produced for KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. The film belongs to a series of four previous projects, which are all starred by the artist and the same group of actors. In all of these movies Trecartin's post-apocalyptic universe typically consists of guys and girls like the pink-lace one: its transgender, chaotic, loud, shallow, screeching. Its a hypnotizing outburst of digital dystopia.