Latest news with #visualartist
New York Times
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Robert Wilson, Provocative Playwright and Director, Is Dead at 83
Robert Wilson, the acclaimed theater director, playwright, choreographer and visual artist who mounted wildly imaginative stagings of his own works — including collaborations with Philip Glass, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lady Gaga — as well as contemporary operas and classic plays from the standard repertory, died on Thursday at his home in Water Mill, N.Y. He was 83. His death was confirmed by Chris Green, the executor of his estate and the president of the Robert Wilson Arts Foundation. He did not specify the cause, saying only that Mr. Wilson died after a brief illness. Tall, soft-spoken and a conservative dresser, Mr. Wilson looked more like an accountant than an avant-gardist with a long résumé of provocative productions. But there was nothing conventional about his sense of the stage. He often said that he was less interested in dialogue and a narrative arc than in the interaction of light, space and movement, and that even when he watched television, he turned the sound off. Early in his career, Mr. Wilson established a working method in which new pieces would begin not with lines of text but with richly detailed visual images, which he would either draw or describe in detail in a 9-by-12 ledger he carried with him. 'I've had the idea for a long time of a room with lots of books, all placed neatly on shelves, and something slicing through the shelves,' was how he described his startling vision for his 1977 theater piece 'I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating.' In an interview with The New York Times shortly before its premiere, he went on: 'There is a telephone, and a telephone wire. There is a scrim or gauze over the front of the stage, and images are sometimes projected on it.' (In its subsequent review, The Times took note of the work's 'monstrous title.') Dialogue would find its way into the ledger later in the process. It might be fragmentary and repetitious — or there might be none at all. The seven-hour 'Deafman Glance (Le Regard du Sourd),' from 1971, and the 12-hour 'Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,' from 1973, were entirely silent. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
CBC
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How a dream inspired this Montrealer to start selling homemade slushies — on a bike
Montreal based tattoo and visual artist Maya Cardin, aka Madame Slush is serving up fruity, ice-cold treats from her one-of-a-kind slushy cart.
Mail & Guardian
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Mail & Guardian
Siyazila: Siyababa Atelier and the sacred syntax of style
'So if you can overcome the personal fear for death, which is a highly irrational thing, then you're on your way.' — Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (1978) About 10 months ago, I authored a Surreally, this trajectory now yields Visual artist On the phone one time, Mtshali generously opened up about the collection's connection to the death of his dear sister, Nontobeko Mtshali. One night, out at the practically deceased At this moment, I even asked, intentionally, about Mtshali's own fabulous fit. The designer's retort was elusive, which I appreciated. I too was mantled in mountains of masking. In these fleeting moments, grief becomes the ground upon which our sartorial expressions emerge. Pain shifts from shadow to style, sorrow to pattern, loss to luminous becoming. These sartorial synchronies invite a rethinking of ukuzila — not just mourning, but an ethical condition, a disciplined abstention from the familiar. Expressed through clothing, ukuzila can materialise on the body as a negotiation between the visible and the invisible, the living and the ancestral. The mourning garment can become an archive — inscribed with love and relational obligation. Ukuzila fashion then renders grief as necessarily performative — its fluid silhouettes, textures and colours do more than signal mourning; they activate a living circuit between the bereaved, the community and the ancestors. The black of mourning, for instance, is not an absence but a saturated presence, thick with ancestral charge. In disrupting Western binaries of black and white, life and death, body and spirit, ukuzila reframes mourning as a stylised practice — one that honours the departed while sustaining the vitality of living through ritual and aesthetic pride. Within African relational ontologies, where personhood is communal, processual and extends across temporal and spiritual registers, grief can never be solely personal. Mourning becomes a public and ritualised dialogue — an embodied choreography that facilitates a shared aesthetic and somatic practice. With the weight of this wisdom in mind, the collaborative nature of this project is not incidental but fundamental, echoing the si in Siyazila — a plural pronoun that affirms grief as a communal condition and an ontological assertion of togetherness. Yet this togetherness doesn't extend only to the living, but to the deceased, as well as inanimate objects — including clothing. Mourning is not merely a response to loss but a stylistic reverence toward the stunning and indiscriminate inevitability of death. While the pain of loss is heightened during this period, so too is the fashionable exaltation of death as an unfathomable, yet fertile, passage. This layered immersion in mourning challenges reductive views of death as mere cessation, revealing instead its infinite potential as a source of beauty and becoming. What Siyababa achieves with this project is a new step in an age-old process. Mtshali's exercise in materialising his sister's death demonstrates a command of the productive faculty of ukuzila. When I asked if there was a particular piece that epitomises the project, he was definite — the brown sculpted mini dress, with its angular neckline and body-armour silhouette. The use of embossed leather and reptilian texture signals a hardened exterior, while the brass grommets punctuating the surface suggest openings — eyes for tears or mouths for wailing. The carefully curated, yet somehow chaotic, cargo rope hangs with spectral weight off the dark model's body — a relic of racial violence, yet a conduit for subversive, politicised play. Entangled in the afterlives of colonial spectacle, the minstrel line, the lynching noose and the pirate's defiance, it signals both domination and defiance. It stages not only redemption, but a sequence of survival — where beauty emerges from ruin and freedom is wrested. In this delectable dance of death, the future is neither pure nor promised, but fiercely, nihilistically alive. This piece and its presentation reminds me of the The ensemble, while undeniably seductive, resists mainstream polish in favour of a more haunted aesthetic — one that acknowledges the relentless suffering entangled with black existence and how that very suffering paradoxically enables the experience of elite, even decadent and unknown, pleasures. Siyazila by It carves out a liminal space in which memory, movement and material sustain ancestral presence and affirm blackness. As the studio navigates this period of mourning, it summons not only mortality but metamorphosis — a new aesthetic dawn shaped by pain, animated by continuity and grounded in the African principle of the oneness of all things. Siyazila is on at the National Arts Festival until 6 July 2025.
