Marc Ozall makes pretty music

2009-03-26T08:31:00.001-07:00

I suggest you go and check out the music of local musician Marc Ozall – he is a rather talented rogue and has some wonderful songs. When I first met Marc, he was playing solo and stole a piece of my heart with a track called February. I went up to congratulate him on his performance and he acted like a moody, unpleasant angry musician – he muttered something about how bollocks he thought his performance had been while dragging on his cigarette before sulking off to the back of the pub. My initial reaction was 'what a wanker!'. However, as time (and the quantity of alcohol Marc consumed) progressed, Marc became the cheeky, witty, gifted character i know today. He has written some beautiful music – my personal favourite of his tracks is called 'Half Cut' and you really should do yourself a favour by giving it a listen. I've had the pleasure of joining Marc on stage a couple of times to play it with him but still haven't done the track justice. One day he will send me the words and chords to it and i will learn how it is played properly. Until then, I will listen to him and his band playing it and you should too:

http://www.myspace.com/theautumnkindmusic

I <3 The Weepies

2009-03-26T07:33:00.001-07:00

The Weepies make music I want to cuddle – I wish it was possible to cuddle songs. Enjoy this one, it is lovely:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4sa2HoXpsE

"World Spins Madly On"

Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
I thought of you and where you'd gone
and let the world spin madly on

Everything that I said I'd do
Like make the world brand new
And take the time for you
I just got lost and slept right through the dawn
And the world spins madly on

I let the day go by
I always say goodbye
I watch the stars from my window sill
The whole world is moving and I'm standing still

Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
The night is here and the day is gone
And the world spins madly on

I thought of you and where you'd gone
And the world spins madly on.

Interview with Katerina Jebb

2007-05-06T10:13:00.000-07:00

The Internet is a wonderful thing, a place where any question can be answered within a few searches of either Google or the Wikipedia – well, usually. I recently did a Wikipedia search on the artist and photographer, Katerina Jebb who was responsible for creating the cover art to my favourite book and one of my favourite records. She is best known for creating images of people using industrial-sized photocopy machines. I wiki searched her name and drew a blank – this was very unusual. I went to Google and did some more digging only to find a holding page at www.katerinajebb.com with a contact link. I thought it strange that there was so little information available about an artist that had produced such distinctive work and decided to get in contact.
Jebb called me from her studio in Paris and we discussed how she got involved in professional photography, her photocopy works and new projects that she will be showing soon.

Jebb started working in professional photography as a young twenty-something in LA. “It was a very breezy life,” she says. “It was easy to live there without any money. You could just hang out and there were parties all over the place.” Initially she worked as a stylist, doing everything from finding locations for shoots and making sets, to dressing the models. As time progressed, so did her involvement – to the point where she was directing the shoots. “People started to say to me 'you should take the photos' and that was that, I started taking pictures for myself.”

The process of Jebb becoming a photographer was very organic – she did not go to art school. “No one told me I couldn’t do things a certain way, because I was never formally instructed, for example, I didn't know that I couldn't shoot a roll of film twice, so I would take a roll out of a camera, reload it and shoot it again and again. I would experiment, make paper negatives, work by trial and error to find what I wanted to do.

Her organic attitude also comes out in the way she chooses to interact with her subjects. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she avoids using an entourage of additional people to assist in her shoots. “When I started, I didn't have anyone else,“ she says, “it was me and the subject. We’d go into a parking lot at night or on the streets or in the park or in the woods. Just me, the camera and the subject. Very personal, very intimate. To this day, it's the same - if I take pictures of people, it’s quite intimate.

Jebb spent four years in L.A., experimenting and refining her craft. She describes her need to practise her medium at that time as ‘obsessive’ and ‘like that was the only thing that mattered’. At the end of this time, it became clear that her passion for experimentation would be better served away from California.

It was then that she came to Paris where her desire to experiment was embraced with open arms. “I had these photographs that were quite surrealist, where I'd superimposed, in the camera, one image on top of another, so you'd have someone’s face in the middle of a car. A photomontage, but in camera; when I came here [Paris] my work was well received by the French.

Shortly after arriving, Jebb’s work was published in photography magazines and she was commissioned by Liberation to take portraits. She started to successfully create art work for album covers.

After a serious car accident, which left her right arm paralysed, she began to investigate new ways of expressing herself that did not require her to be physically holding a camera. She started to employ an A1 scanner used by architects to make her work.

She was approached by the Warhol founded magazine, ‘Interview’ to create the first published Human Photocopies. Jebb’s Photocopy Art captured the imagination of the industry. Both the art world and the fashion press adopted her imagery as a new contemporary language. Subsequently she went on to produce the cover art works by the Generation X icons, Douglas Coupland and Tori Amos. In the same period, the Andy Warhol Museum exhibited her first art works in a worldwide exhibition tour.
She collaborated with Comme des Garcons on various projects in museums and in advertizing.

There is something special about what Jebb has achieved with these machine images – because the subject of the photographs is lying on the device capturing the image, there is a great intimate, sometimes claustrophobic mood to the pieces. However, there is scope for things to go wrong: “They could have been done in another way,” Jebb says, “they can easily look vulgar. I always tried to avoid this. They can also be done in a beautiful, self-possessed manner where you would never know that they were machine-made.”

“Its maker is essentially three - the machine, the subject and the director. Me saying 'I want you to wear this white dress, this black dress, I want you to position yourself elevated - don't press at all, keep your body off’. I may have had two or three people holding the subjects off the machine so there would be no point of contact, or hardly any. I had my ways.”

Jebb has for many years distanced herself from this Photocopy work. “They have been in the cellar for seven years. We took them out of there recently and brought them to my studio and they are now just there. Many of them: Kate Moss, Bjork... Some have aged with time making them more beautiful because they have weathered. They've been through it. For the moment, they are just where they are.”

Unfortunately, her Photocopy work has applied a kind of type-casting. Whilst they have provided her with a unique style and a reputation,they are not wholly representative of her visual world. “I don’t deny them,” she says, “but they shouldn’t be my only validation. If you have only one good idea, it's not enough.”

Jebb’s new work is photography themed on sexual practise, a collaboration with a sexologist. Her current project is an installation concerning the practise of suspension. I asked her why she had focused on these somewhat fringe sexual activities?
“It is my interpretation of what I find strange, twisted and bizarre. It is my curiosity about these practises that are beyond my comprehension so I have to photograph them to try to understand.”

I asked Jebb about her future plans. Does she intend to go back to working on commercial projects? “Yes, however, discerningly so. I don't want to be considered as a fashion type who is producing only decorative work. It is not my intention.
I can separate from a commercial project and that’s really important because your own work belongs to you and a commercial project belongs to them - they are paying you to make a beautiful image. They are paying you to do it, you don't own it - you own a part of it. You are like a vehicle and there are constraints. For my personal work, I made a decision that it was important to express my own desires and that perhaps other people will like it.”

Jebb is developing her website to help resolve the current information vacuum on her art – the address is www.katerinajebb.com.

Stuff that isn't technical.

Marc Ozall makes pretty music

I <3 The Weepies

Interview with Katerina Jebb