Latest news with #Trance
USA Today
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Young Thug headlines Summer Smash 2025 lineup in first show since prison release
Young Thug headlines Summer Smash 2025 lineup in first show since prison release In what could be his first performance since being released from prison last year, Young Thug is among the headliners for the annual hip-hop festival Summer Smash. The "Trance" rapper will headline alongside Future, Don Toliver and Yeat during the festival at the SeatGeek Stadium in Bridgeview, Illinois scheduled for June 20-22, 2025. Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Lamar Williams, will headline the third and final day on Sunday, June 22 which includes acts like Chance The Rapper, Quavo and Lil Yachty. The Atlanta rap star was jailed between May 2022 and November 2024 on several charges relating to alleged street gang involvement with Young Slime Life (YSL). Yet he avoided more time incarcerated after pleading guilty in November returning home on probation. On Wednesday, the rapper posted on Instagram a photo of himself performing, a treat for fans who've highly anticipated his return to the stage during the festival's 7th edition. "I feel lucky to be able to throw the party of the year with my best friends," Summer Smash Festival co-founder Cole Bennett said in a news release. "May this be the best one yet. Lucky No. 7." Music news: Ye sued for copyright infringement by German singer angered over antisemitism Summer Smash 2025 lineup Lyrical Lemonade unveiled its Summer Smash 2025 lineup Thursday featuring some of the biggest names in hip-hop. Don Toliver and Yeat will collectively headline Day One on Friday, June 20, while Future leads Day Two on Saturday, June 21. Young Thug will serve as the final headliner Sunday, June 22, with the day also including a special performance by Chance the Rapper. See the full lineup below. Summer Smash 2025 tickets Three-day passes for Lyrical Lemonade's 2025 Summer Smash festival will go on sale Friday, March 28, at 12 p.m. CT on the event's official website. Ticket prices will start at about $370 with parking passes priced at about $135. Contributing: Edward Segarra, USA TODAY
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Paul Mpagi Sepuya's Photos Reverberate With Scenes of Their Own Making
In Paul Mpagi Sepuya's new photographs, there is no mistaking where we are: Camera tripods stand like machinic bodies, studio lights cast their lurid shine upon things, and the walls are busy with what appear to be the artist's photo prints. The fourth wall between the photographer's studio and the art gallery has come down, and we are peering into the womb from which images are born. Such disclosures are the animating principle behind the 13 photographs on view in 'Trance,' Sepuya's second show at Bortolami Gallery in TriBeCa. Shot with digital cameras, Sepuya's scenes depict the process of image-making, revealing his world of cameras, curtains and other equipment. Sepuya also turns his incisive lens upon the realm his pictures enter once they leave the studio; seven images in the show were taken in the very gallery in which they are on display. Our own space of viewing is reflected back at us. Sepuya, 43, became a force in the photo world after the 2019 Whitney Biennial. He is known for his meticulous interrogation of photography, using myriad techniques to explore how images are constructed — an inquiry that leads, ultimately, to an exploration of seeing itself. Mirrors and other reflective surfaces mediate the view of the camera, opening up a world of layered reflections. In 'Photographing (DSF4950),' a man reflected in a mirror holds a camera to his eye, and it is as if we are being photographed; a sliver of his back is shown in another mirror. On the wall behind him is a framed photograph by Sepuya in which a pair of embracing arms holds another camera, creating an echo of images inside images. The result, which demands a visual deciphering that is both delightful and maddening, recalls art-historical traditions, including Velázquez's celebrated 'Las Meninas,' in which the king and queen of Spain, whom the artist is painting, appear in a mirror behind him. It also calls to mind contemporary work, like Jeff Wall's 'Picture for Women,' which shows Wall at work in his studio gazing at the subject he is photographing. But Sepuya's images do more than invite the viewer behind the scenes. They become an instrument with which the artist, with forensic precision and delicate vulnerability, dissects the inner life of his medium. Sepuya's previous work in the Whitney Biennial, as well as his 2019 solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, lavished attention on the body and its expressions of queer desire (in particular, his own body in intimate positions with friends and lovers). In 'Trance,' however, many of the photographs seem to be absent of people. At times, this specificity of attention, to the medium of photography, can begin to feel repetitive and limited. But the mystery in Sepuya's photographs keeps this seriality interesting. For example, when Sepuya's body does come into view, his presence is uncertain. In 'Night Studio Mirror (DSF1073),' Sepuya makes use of double exposure, rendering the contours of his body a blurred rush. In 'Gallery Mirror (DSCF1114),' 'Gallery Gazing Ball' and 'Gallery Gazing Ball Negative,' shot inside Bortolami, we see only his hands. Elsewhere, he appears as a barely discernible reflection. The artist's presence becomes an unstable fact, or even an unresolvable question. Another clever and strange optical contrivance recurs in 'Trance': mirrored gazing balls. In them, we glimpse distended, fish-eye-like reflections of the studio or the gallery, redoubling and widening our view. It is almost as if we've gained a third eye. In 'Gazing Ball Position 02 (DSF2658)' and 'Gallery Gazing Ball Negative,' the balls sit atop tripods, as if ready to capture us. It's an almost uncanny substitution: It seems this other device for looking has usurped the camera. 'Gallery Gazing Ball Negative,' which depicts the empty interior of Bortolami and its cavernous reflection in the gazing ball, involves another kind of revelation: the photographic negative. Here, and in three other negative images in the show, Sepuya brings to the surface the technical foundations that lie beneath the developed picture. The triumph of the show is 'Studio Mirror Diptych (DSF3596 ),' an architectonic photo-installation mounted on a wheeled frame called a mobile flat, a device Sepuya often uses to mount mirrors in his studio. A series of self-reflexive maneuvers unfolds from there: A mobile flat almost identical to one in the gallery appears in the right panel of the diptych, as if the very object before us lives in the image itself. This view is reflected in a free-standing mirror in the left panel. The entire scene is shot in a different mirror, textured with smudges and dirt, in which we see part of Sepuya's reflection behind the camera. In this diptych the construction of the image and its reception — the studio and the gallery — bleed together. The universe inside the frame and the one beyond its edge seem to swallow each other, and the act of looking at an image slowly folds into the feeling of being a part of it.
