He has written for The Chris Rock Show and Conan O’Brien, among others, and may be best known as the voice of South Park's marijuana-pushing corporate mascot “Towelie.” Chatman’s repertoire has been described as eclectic, twisted (Wonder Showzen, for instance, had a sketch titled “Hitler Kid”), and — depending on who you’re asking and when — alternately hilarious and disturbing.

Though Chatman’s brain overflows with its own absurdities, the inspiration for his new film, Final Flesh, came from an unlikely source. “My friend told me that he saw there were companies that made custom-made porn, and you could make them do whatever you wanted them to do,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a nurse sitting on a yellow sheet saying the name ‘Jacob’ over and over again. I don’t know what the normal thing is. Feet? Hamsters? I don’t know.”

Speculating on what sort of oddities get other people hot is fun, but what Chatman found most intriguing about the concept was, he says, “the fact that a person would need their thing, and would only be able to find it if they could custom order it.” He had a revelation.

“If these people are already going to have sex in any way, or any style, you can get them to do anything you want and they will do it sincerely,” he says. “That’s what they do. In porn, it’s totally sincere; they just think this is a fetish. A lack of artifice, or total artifice — that makes them committed to total insanity and to give it their all.”

For Chatman, the foray into avant-garde porn was a refreshing change from his animation projects. “In animation, you have total control; you can make anything happen,” he says. “You can make the Earth blow up and bloom into a flower as easy as you can make a guy walk down the street. The other thing is that you have all this control, and it kills you. [In my animation team] we’re super meticulous. We go frame by frame and are über control freaks. This was about surrendering all control.”

He got to work writing the script, which he dubbed Final Flesh, divided it into sections, and commissioned four porn-production companies around the country to film them. “I wanted to see if I could make an inadvertent comedy on purpose,” he explains. “If you want to do something as an outsider, you can’t, because it’s catch-22. This was an attempt to do that.”
 

“If you want to do something as an outsider, you can’t, because it’s catch-22. This was an attempt to do that.”

Final Flesh, a compilation of the four short films, depicts a family unit of a father, mother, and daughter — represented by a wide cross-section of American porn actors in age, attractiveness, and acting ability — as an atom bomb drops. They are, presumably, the “final flesh” left on Earth. From there, anything that can happen does.

(Spoiler alert!) A woman gives birth to a piece of meat, which she names Mr. Peterson as she suckles “him” to her breast. A man tries, literally, to return to the womb headfirst.

“I don’t consider sex complete until birth,” Chatman says adamantly, “and this movie is proof of that.” Later on, characters receive messages from divine beings via fortune cookies, fax machines, and jars of change spilled on the floor. People grow smiley faces on their backs that “make out” with each other, or develop deformities such as being clad with never-ending layers of panties. A woman shits her brains out. People are “scared to death” and brought back to life.

Chatman remained completely hands-off in the production process. “I made the script so that as long as they stuck with the script, I would be happy no matter what they did,” he explains. To assist, he included instructions, such as guiding a male actor to play the part as if “your vagina was having a nightmare.” Other instructions include, ”Say this line in a way that would make the Earth crumple around you,” or ”After he says this line, he melts inside himself and faces the complete truth about himself for the first time.”

He explains, “I wanted to get them to do things that were bizarre and strange and things [whose meaning] they would be forced to grapple while they were doing them, but they had to do it all as they could expend with their resources. I wanted to weigh the lowbrow down with as much highbrow as possible and fold in a heaping helping of super, über lowbrow into the mix.” This led to hilarious moments including an actress fantasizing about overthrowing the capitalist regime, and another where the players argue with, and try to outsmart, God.

As far as actual sex acts are concerned, Final Flesh is decidedly soft core. “I didn’t want to have any sex in this because I think sex is a disgusting habit not to be shared with the general populace,” Chatman says. “But there had to be enough in there so they believed it was someone’s fetish. I used the word ‘sensual’ a lot in the script and ‘fantasy.’”'

But the films are anything but sexy. “I started to realize how truly uncomfortable things were and how surreal things were,” Chatman says. “If they didn’t know what to do in a scene, they would say, ‘Let’s try to make this sexy!’ and it was funny, because it shouldn’t be.” There is an inverse relationship between sex and sexiness in Final Flesh; the more explicitly the actors interpreted a scene, the creepier and more bizarre it became.

However misguided, though, Chatman has nothing but respect for all of his actors. “They can make anything porn-y,” he marvels. “That’s why they’re professionals, and that’s why we as amateurs can never compare. And that’s why I believe in God now more than ever."

“I never really let them in on the joke because I don’t really know how to explain it; I don’t think it’s a joke on them,” he continues. “I would hope that they would like it. There are varying levels of awareness. No one questioned the sincerity about it. They were aware that this was pure and sincere and not commissioned as a joke. I don’t think anyone dismissed it as a joke — hopefully not.”

Final Flesh was licensed for distribution by Drag City Records, a company known more for its association with acclaimed musicians like Will Oldham and Joanna Newsom than adult films, though Chatman contends, “If they start going down the road of distributing mostly porn and Smog albums, I’ll consider that a victory.” With the release of the film in the fall of 2009, Chatman feels that the ultimate mission has been accomplished. “It makes me laugh,” he says. “I’m not necessarily going to do this again, but there are a lot of ways to apply this concept to other things.”

Sonnenzimmer definitely is an eclectic, quaint little shop that peeks out from a quiet alley off Damen Avenue in Chicago’s Roscoe Village neighborhood. Its mishmash of secondhand, vintage lamps and portable tables made out of disassembled doors help to create the space’s inviting atmosphere, but the studio’s industrial-grade hand-press and exposure unit truly make Sonnenzimmer unique.

The studio started in 2006 when Nakanishi and her boyfriend of five years, Nick Butcher, merged their painting studios. Over the past three years, their venture has flourished into a well-respected studio that has left its mark on Chicago’s screen-printing community.

In borrowing from the hand-drawn, DIY style honed by Steve Walters of Screwball Press and combining it with the precision of a screen-printing press, they have created a unique hybrid that stands out within Chicago’s gig-poster community. “We’ve gotten into the technical aspect with this equipment,” Butcher says. “It has allowed us to do finer details, and we could start experimenting with weird textures, really precise registration, and stuff that I would just avoid before.”

When it comes to creating posters, instead of taking the traditional figurative approach that is synonymous with some of the city’s most recognizable screen-printers, they have veered into the abstract realm and in the process have created a look that is distinctly their own. “For me, what helped was diving into improvised music here,” Nakanishi says, “and being really able to go down the abstract route. [Other Chicago-based screen-printers] are very at home in the figurative lobby, and I always felt intimidated because I was like, ‘Well, I can draw, kinda’ but never remotely as good as they could.”

Over the years, the two have created posters for Chicago staples like The Sea and Cake and international bands like Tokyo Police Club. The couple has also created work for a number of local musicians such as oRSo, Tim Daisy, Vox Arcana, and Male — an experimental band that counts Butcher as a member. They have mastered the ability to create posters that aren’t necessarily visually loud but that grab attention from across the room. “Our general approach is making space for quietness so that you can come close and engage,” Nakanishi says, “so that it’s not unanimous from a visual communication point. We offer a certain smallness and a little bit of room for interpretation.”

Yet if it wasn’t for some random guy standing in the corner at a house show, Sonnenzimmer might not be what it is today. Three years ago, Butcher remembers playing a solo show at “this really tiny house show, and there was this one older guy there…”

“Alone in the corner!” Nakanishi interjects.

“He wasn’t creepy,” Butcher says. “He was just like, ‘I’m here at this show because I like weird, experimental music. All you other people obviously know each other and that’s cool.’”
 

“Our general approach is making space for quietness so that you can come close and engage.  We offer a certain smallness and a little bit of room for interpretation.”

Butcher struck up a conversation with the guy in the corner, Bruce Wood. As fate would have it, the topic of screen-printing came up, and Wood mentioned that he ran a press and was planning to sell his equipment, and that they should come check it out. They decided to take him up on his offer, and when they arrived at his warehouse, they were completely blown away. “It was industrial screen-printing stuff, and we were like, ‘Holy shit! What is this stuff?’” Butcher says. “And he said, ‘It’s like any other screen-printing stuff; you’ll figure it out.’

“Basically, when we printed,” Nakanishi adds, “we just had glass and construction lights that were hooked up to a kitchen clock, and that’s the way that a lot of gig posters were made.”

Within the DIY/punk scene, screen-printed gig posters were one of the cheapest and most accessible ways for local bands to promote their shows.

“I think that historically, it was people who were doing it themselves, and they were self-taught, doing this in their kitchen,” Butcher says. The local music scene heavily influenced the screen-printing community, which basically grew out of “nice people making posters for their friend’s bands,” says Jay Ryan, the owner of Chicago poster workshop The Bird Machine and a member of local rock trio Dianogah.

It was the DIY ethos and the sense of taking creative work seriously that led Butcher and Nakanishi to make the Windy City their new hometown. Even though they came to the city from opposite ends of Earth, their paths converged in Chicago in a way that only happens when stars align.

Butcher’s initial interest in screen-printing came from an unlikely source. “I was in a Boy Scout troop…” he starts.

“I haven’t heard this one before!” Nakanishi says as she starts laughing.

While at camp, one of the Scout leaders’ shirts caught Butcher’s eye. When Butcher asked him where he got it, the Scout leader told him it was screen-printed. “I was like, ‘Whoa, you can make your own shirts?’” Butcher says. “So I always had it in the back of my head: ‘What is this screen-printing?’”

As a graphic-design student at Middle Tennessee State University, Butcher spent most of his free time in the screen-printing department and planned to move to Chicago after graduation. Ryan was a heavy influence on his work, and it was Butcher’s dream to intern at The Bird Machine. “I got a lot of requests for people to be interns, and it just never seemed like a good idea,” Ryan says. “Then I get this e-mail from this one guy in Tennessee who I never met…but it was something about the images that he sent and his tone that seemed like a good idea.” So Butcher packed up and relocated to Chicago, and everything basically fell into place. “I interned with Jay and met a bunch of other printmakers in Chicago,” Butcher says, “and it just kind of rolled from there.”

“What about you?” he asks as he turns towards his girlfriend.

Nakanishi’s journey to Chicago spans continents. Originally from California, her family moved to Switzerland when she was a teenager. She became interested in Switzerland’s design and poster culture, which was engrained in the national consciousness. As a typography student at Berufsschule für Gestaltung Zürich, she developed a precise, modernist approach that is synonymous with Swiss design. “Poster culture is very prestigious,” Nakanishi says.

“It has to do with the cultural education. It’s political; it has really formed Swiss identity in the design world. You couldn’t just be there and be like, ‘I want to be a rock-star artist,’ because the poster world just isn’t conceived that way.”

Yet even from 4,000 miles away, she was still fluent in Chicago’s DIY/punk scene via Punk Planet magazine. In 2003, she also decided to make a go of it in Chicago and sent an e-mail to Punk Planet’s founder, Dan Sinker. “Suddenly, there is this e-mail from this woman in Switzerland,” Sinker says, “and she’s like, ‘I want to come to Chicago and do an internship with Punk Planet.’ I had to write back and be like, ‘Okay, we can’t pay you, and we can‘t put you up, but if you want to come out, we’d love to have you.” A few months later, Nakanishi was living in Chicago.

Butcher and Nakanishi initially met during their interning days because Punk Planet and The Bird Machine split an office space. Working with their mentors allowed the two to flourish and really come into their own. Butcher continued to hone the techniques that Ryan had passed on to him. “Nick has really become a master of taking screen-printing as a process, and he treats each print as though it were a painting,” Ryan says.

Nakanishi found a medium between her rigorous design education and the DIY mentality that she admired. Those around her started taking notice. “She came from the most rigorous design education that you can get,” Sinker says, “where there is literally no such thing as unintentional design or happy accidents. She would get so stressed out about designs, and we would be like, ‘That’s fantastic.’ You can clearly see that her work now is much looser than she was before and that she understands that there is a certain serendipity to this stuff…but it’s still very Swiss.”

Being in Chicago among fellow poster artists like Mat Daly, Dan Grzeca, and Diana Sudyka showed Butcher and Nakanishi how to blend the local aesthetic into their work, but being around each other showed them how to make their style all their own.

“I think that what sets them apart is their color palette, their design sense,” Daly says. “There is something very handmade about their images. It’s a very interesting combination.”

In many ways, they balance one another out. Butcher was fascinated by the clean, modernist technique synonymous with Swiss design and was influenced by Nakanishi’s minimalist approach. She, on the other hand, looked to Butcher to center her if she overthinks an image from a conceptual standpoint.

“I have felt most proud of the stuff that we did together because she has a really hardcore typography background,” Butcher says, “whereas I come from more of a printmaking background. When those two are combined, it’s just more compelling than the stuff that we were doing individually.” And their styles have become so intertwined that they have begun to forge a niche within Chicago’s printing community. “[Their styles] are deceptively similar,” says Ryan Kapp, another lauded Chicago-based artist. “But in getting to know them, I think that’s why their posters really mesh well together.”

Butcher and Nakanishi are incredibly grateful to those in Chicago’s screen-printing community who have taken them under their wing, and they want to continue to foster that sense of community. While Butcher was visiting some friends in Austin, he decided to work on a fine-art print series in their studio.

Inspired by his experiences, he wanted to try a similar concept at Sonnenzimmer. As a result, he and Nakanishi created the Art Print Series and invited their fellow artist friends to use the studio for a week to create a custom art print. “I guess the overall idea was to open up the studio and make this more than just our screen-printing studio, and make it have more of a community feel,” Butcher says. “Which I think we did because at the end of the first series, we were able to have an exhibit.” Although the series is currently on hiatus while they figure out the long-term logistics, the two plan to continue finding ways to foster a sense of camaraderie. “We want to give back like Punk Planet and Bird Machine did for us,” Nakanishi says.

“Ripo (pronounced re-po) comes from ‘repossess’ and the idea of taking something back by doing it yourself,” he says. “Also, taking back public space, which should be ours anyway.”

A native New Yorker, Ripo moved to Barcelona four years ago, hoping to find a public space more conducive to experimentation and communication.

“That was right after I was able to escape from my university with a BFA degree in hand that I haven’t seen or thought about since graduation,” he says. “Barcelona has a lot of life and art in the streets, although its laws and attitudes towards graffiti and street culture in general have changed a lot since then. I had visited [Barcelona] a few years earlier, and it felt like a really free city, unlike most places in the US.”
 

Graffiti culture in Europe has a long and politically engaged history, associated as much with strikes, protests, and revolutions as with music or fashion. Graffiti has a different meaning in these older cities than on the squeaky-clean newness of most American structures. In photographs of his street art in places like Sofia and Milan, Ripo’s newly painted signs affixed to public walls appear as only the latest in a series of historical accretions of signs, slogans, posters, and strips of paint that build like layers of fossils and sediment across piazzas and storefronts. What appears raw, shocking, and egregious in New York or Los Angeles feels somehow more organic, timeless, and at home in the Old World.

Part of this organic feeling may be a reflection of Spain’s relatively laid-back attitude towards graffiti. “Pre-2005,” Ripo says, “the city was pretty much a graffiti and street-art Mecca. Artists were traveling from all over the world to paint in the streets here since it was basically legal. Cops would drive by artists painting in the center of the city and applaud them on the work they were doing. In 2005, the civismo ordinances (similar to the Quality of Life laws passed in many cities in the US) were passed and cops immediately began giving out large fines (up to 3,000 euros), and the city began buffing years of artwork from the city’s walls. Millions of euros and four years later, the scene is still very strong — although it had a large down period — but it will never be as free as it was.”
 

"I can’t decide what’s an appropriate use of public space any more than any other one person — it should be public after all — but as an individual, I am actively going to do something about it.”

“I haven’t painted in many cities in the US, so I can’t really say,” Ripo continues. “But I’m pretty sure that there aren’t any cities anywhere in the country where it is as allowed as it was in Barcelona. [New York] is real tough, but it depends on the neighborhood. Downtown Manhattan is about as infested with undercover cops as it is with rats. They’re really angry, pathetic, abusive of power, have little regards for anyone’s rights, and profit from criminalizing people. American police absolutely work with a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ mentality, whereas in Barcelona, in the few encounters that I’ve had with the police, it’s the opposite, and I’ve managed to talk my way out of any fines or arrests.”

Ripo’s eclectic visual style is heavily indebted to calligraphy, sign painting, and typography. These textual elements capture the eye most strongly in works like “Si Ves Algo Di Algo” or “Unfamous.” Where politicians and admen have as their weapons catchy lines like “Just Do It” or “The War on Terror,” Ripo counters with quotation-ready phrases like “Come Over” or “Okupame!” (“Squat Me!” on an abandoned building), all rendered in the perfectly beautiful hand lettering of antique signs or long-forgotten love letters.

Public art pieces are known for being very bold and very big — they have to catch the eye of thousands of commuters from across an overpass or subway platform. Yet even Ripo’s large-scale works exhibit the same delicacy and detail as his pocket-sized sketches.
 

“Regardless of whether I’m doing something big or small, it’s about exploring style of the words and letters,” he says. “Usually in public, the pieces work best when they’re larger and bolder and really have an impact on their environment, and the smaller drawings or even the mirrors can have delicate details because of the time there is to work on them and the way that they’ll be viewed.”

But does work that draws heavily on textual elements require more translation now that Ripo lives and works in dozens of countries?

“Sometimes it’s important to adapt a message to the local language so it can speak to the people there,” he says. “Sometimes by not putting it in a local language, it can actually make people more curious and also stand out more. It depends on what I want to say. I once wrote ‘fuck’ in English in a nice decorative style on a roll-down shutter in Valparaiso, Chile. I would laugh my ass off if I ran into that on a street somewhere. Most people there didn’t understand it, so for them, the way the letters and the word look are what was more important, not the meaning of the word. It’s fun to play with the aesthetics of words versus their meanings.”
 

Ripo also experiments with a variety of media in his work, from the spray paint associated with graffiti to photography, found objects, and lately, the mirrors that he references above.

“I started using mirrors in 2006 during a tour around Europe,” he says. “Because of how they constantly change with their environment — busy city streets work best — it was a way to make static paintings more dynamic and add more meaning to them. Everyone literally puts themselves into the mirrors and reflects on the message or image that’s there when they’re confronted with it. I also love photographing them, and the way that the image changes and moves with every photo is beautiful.”
 

In Istanbul, Barcelona, Bucharest, and Mexico City, Ripo has been confronting passersby with mirrors bearing slogans like “It’s Not Love; I’m Just Drunk” and “You Did It; It’s Okay.” The response, predictably, has been mixed. On his website, Ripo has photographs of people responding with real delight to these meaningful fragments encountered in a cluttered cityscape. But on his blog, he also amusingly recounts the reaction to one of his colorful posters in Zagreb:

“Some color to brighten up a grey day… The guy on the corner didn’t seem so happy when I first put this piece up, and he began yelling at me in Croatian. I had to tell him it was an advertisement before he let me go on my way. I wonder what he would have done had I explained that it was just a gift.”

Ripo’s blog is a key part of his work; it is there that he assimilates and comments on his work, records reactions, and showcases his fine talent for photography, including dozens of city scenes that have a wonderful sense of rhythm and playfulness.

Yet with the exuberance of Ripo’s public and private pieces come questions about the place (both literal and figurative) of public art. In his work, Ripo considers the role of public versus private space, and of what is and is not an appropriate use of the shared visual landscape. Is it true that graffiti and other “broken windows” encourage crime and despair? Or do they rather communicate joy and possibility to members of a community?
 

“It depends on the neighborhood,” Ripo says. “Some areas are vastly improved with graffiti; in others, it looks kind of dumb. I think that the best reaction to graffiti or any work in the streets is getting someone to break out of their daily daze and take more notice of what’s around them. That reaction could be anger, amusement, amazement, embarrassment, curiosity, gratitude — it all depends on what’s there and who the person seeing it is. I can’t decide what’s an appropriate use of public space any more than any other one person — it should be public after all — but as an individual, I am actively going to do something about it.”

But Ripo also has moved more of his work indoors. In March, he held his first solo show, …is what I meant to say, in Brussels, and in May, he took part in a Sao Paulo exhibition appropriately titled Caligrafia. Just as Ripo’s work takes on a different color when viewed by English speakers and non-English speakers, seeking out his interior work is a different experience from happening upon his exterior work on the public street.

“When you’re going about your daily life in the streets, a work has to impact you enough to break you out of your normal pace and make you stop and notice it,” he says. “In a gallery, you know what you’re going for more or less, and you are already looking to be affected by what’s inside.
 

“I couldn’t just do the same thing that I do outside and put it on canvas or paper inside, but at the same time, it was important to show what I’ve done outdoors and how the work indoors fits in with all that. That way, everyone who visits the show, whether or not they know my work, can see all of the different ways that I’m working and how it all ties together.”

Unlike his posters and photos, the exacting wall art that Ripo installs outdoors is usually fated to be tagged, painted over, or taken down, but he remains optimistic even when he watches his work be destroyed only a few days after he finishes it.

“That’s the beauty of working in the streets,” Ripo says. “The work ages, changes, gets covered up, gets torn down. It’s part of the city and changes with the city rather than being an untouchable and preserved object. It hurts the first few times that you see something that you’ve put work into get destroyed or covered up, but it means that you’re also always motivated to do the next thing. I think that’s another reason that a lot of the artists who work in the streets are so prolific. You can’t be stagnant and keep your work and your name up in the streets.”

When speaking about these pieces, though, he doesn’t even bother to describe what they look like — what matters is the idea itself. And with this gesture, Cruickshank turns Marshal McLuhan’s phrase “the medium is the message” on its head. “I’m not driven in the first instance by the way things look but rather what they’re about,” he explains. For this artist’s artist, the message is the medium.

Though he was born in Australia in 1970, Cruickshank spent most of his teenage years living in places as disparate as Malaysia and Port Moresby, New Guinea, while his father was in the Air Force. He says that living in these sorts of places required a closeted type of lifestyle, where freedom of expression was not necessarily encouraged, and the family really had to rely on itself. (Funnily enough, The Economist rated Port Moresby one of the least livable cities in the world in 2005; in the same study, Melbourne was rated as one of the most livable cities.)
 

When Cruickshank’s dad left the services, though, the family was so accustomed to a nomadic lifestyle that they continued to travel the globe.

From a very early age, Cruickshank knew he would grow up to pursue a career in art. “I never really had those phases of wanting to be an astronaut or wanting to be anything other than an artist because I was told that’s what I was, and it’s what I’ve always thought I was,” he divulges. Cruickshank later attended Queensland College of Art in Brisbane, where he began to experiment with vastly different materials and hone his ideas on viewership in public space.

He has since spent time as a sculptor, graphic designer, video artist, assemblagist, illustrator, and designer — laying out pages for a number of magazines, creating shirts for brands including 55DSL and Boxfresh, and designing characters for a Nike street campaign (“No, I don’t love to draw little monsters for Nike, to be honest, but it’s certainly better than my current day job,” he admits. “I’ll take it; it’s a lesser evil.”).
 

"Wouldn’t it be nice if you could sum all this stuff up? More weird and commercial and for the kids? Big business co-opts so much underground culture, why don’t they just do the big thinkers of our time?”

In the early 2000s, Cruickshank began dabbling in the world of street art, erecting wheatpastes on the walls of Amsterdam, London, Sydney, and other major metropolitan areas. Such a transitory childhood existence gave him a varied and nuanced perspective on public-versus-private space; he had inhabited vastly different cities and towns of all sizes and levels of wealth and development.

He wanted to explore these issues by putting up work outdoors but did not want to get casually lumped in with the street-art movement. He clarifies that any work he’s put up is done so because of the idea germinating behind it. “Whether it’s in a gallery or it’s in public space, or if it’s a drawing or if it’s a sculpture, the idea always drives it into that place rather than, ‘Oh, I wanna do work on the street,’” he says.

Due to this, in conjunction with the recent stigma of trendiness attached to street art, he’s shied away from it as of late. However, he was inspired in 2008 to put up a series of screen prints reading “Populism” in heavily illustrated lettering on the streets of Berlin, where he was stoked to see the city’s tolerance of — and even appreciation for — the form. “You would see people very deliberately checking it out,” he says. “It was almost a nice thing to find on your building rather than a bad thing.”

In early 2009, Cruickshank was able to leverage his concerns about showing work outdoors with the limitations that indoor galleries offer by putting up a poster series, "Philosopher Kings," at a window-display-cum-gallery space on the façade of the Majorca Building in downtown Melbourne. These images cheekily pair popular hip-hop lyrics from the likes of Run DMC and Wu-Tang Clan with well-known but often little-understood concepts advanced by Western philosophers including Isaac Newton and Jacques Derrida.
 

Though Cruickshank listens to a lot of hip hop, the idea was generated while reading a philosophy book. “I was thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if you could sum all this stuff up? More weird and commercial and for the kids? Big business co-opts so much underground culture, why don’t they just do the big thinkers of our time?’” he says. While putting back a few pints at the pub with friends, they began pairing wordsmiths, driving at simple comparisons that would resonate with anyone: “We were like, ‘How about Simone de Beauvoir and…Peaches!’ It’s a pretty fun game,” he says, chuckling.

For another recent project, Cruickshank took on his complex feelings towards the world of marketing with a combination of sculpture and assemblage he’s dubbed the “Enhanced Awareness Campaign.” These brightly colored, gaudy plastic concoctions are meant to ridicule — or perhaps praise — successful folks in consumer branding and advertising.

When asked if they represent a definitive statement against consumerism, he replies, “There are certain elements of irony and sarcasm in those trophies — that’s undeniable. You could easily read it as criticism, but conversely you could read it as some kind of weird, psychedelic joy of the same stuff.”

To assemble the trophies, he salvaged plastic bits and baubles from outside a closed bowling alley. Riding past the forgotten structure on his bike one day, he spotted the remains peeking out of a dumpster, and they reminded him of his youth in Malaysia. “My parents and I were real kingpin bowlers,” he says.

“I had all these tiny little bowling trophies as a kid, but I hadn’t played for ages. So then seeing [these] huge, half a ton of trophies in this bin outside the ex-bowling center, I just couldn’t contain myself. I had to have them all.” He immediately realized that they could function as a material for art making.

But then, in Cruickshank’s world, so can anything.

“I remember writing about it in my diary, which is how I remember, and saying how I was excited that people liked my clone images,” Dybisz says. “I never expected to get a big response from putting pictures online.”

Her photos haven’t only awed fellow Flickrers; she was gaining such a response that her work was being featured on Wired.com before she had even finished a degree from the University of Sussex in England.

When Dybisz created her Flickr account in April 2006, she came up with Miss Aniela as a playful twist on her middle name, and as she started gaining recognition, “it just felt natural to carry the name on to everything else, a little like an artist name,” she says. When she started uploading her digital creations, she was especially drawn to focusing the self as subject in order to hone her burgeoning photography skills and to develop her personal style.

“At first it was [a] kind of convenience, and as I went on, I developed a passion for it,” she says. “I think also it is the ultimate way of expressing yourself, and you literally have control over everything, and that’s definitely an appeal for me. You can just go straight into doing it, and the final product is completely yours, which is empowering as well.”

Her haunting, sophisticated images, which often feature multiple self-portraits combined into one photo, are reminiscent of movie stills. “I am definitely inspired by the way in which everything is thought out and much more embellished in film,” Dybisz says. “Although I never thought that I could create something that looks like what has been made in film, because that takes a lot of equipment.”
 

“To win a competition would be amazing, but to be the actual judge is, for me, even better because I am really young and have been doing this for like, what, two minutes?”

Even though her photos look incredibly complex, she keeps her initial setup for each photo surprisingly simple. She uses props found around her home, and her lighting sources often consist of natural light or household lamps. Only recently has she started utilizing studio-lighting equipment — courtesy of a birthday present.

“I feel like I’m still very much an embryo, but it’s still very important for me to have a simple approach,” she says. “Start very simple, think about the idea more than anything, and bring the equipment in as you need it rather than having all the gear.”

But the real spectacle, so to speak, takes place when Dybisz seamlessly combines multiple self-montages into one cohesive image in Photoshop and then posts the final product online. “The process of sharing my work online was part of the process all along,” she says. “People associate me with Flickr and photo sharing, and I think it is kind of interesting that the Internet has gotten me into photography so much.”

Her recognition on Flickr has opened some unbelievable opportunities, such as being a featured guest at Microsoft events. Last year, the company handpicked Dybisz to fly to Seattle to host a few digital-photography presentations for it. “That was really amazing because literally someone from Flickr recommended me to Microsoft,” she says. “That was probably the biggest thing that’s happened so far.”

This past October, Dybisz also was a judge for the Photographer of the Year competition that was hosted by the UK’s Digital Camera magazine. “To win a competition would be amazing," she says, "but to be the actual judge is, for me, even better because I am really young and have been doing this for like, what, two minutes?”

In addition to her appearances, her work has been included in exhibits throughout England and has also been featured in magazines throughout the world including American Photo, Vanity Fair (Italy), Playboy (Spain), and TECHMAG (China).

Dybisz is starting to branch out into other art mediums as well. She recently teamed up with a sculptor to create a 3-D sculpture, and she is interested in embarking on film projects. If her undeniable photographic talent and previous achievements are any indication of her future potential, there’s pretty much no limit to what Dybisz can accomplish creatively.

“I think it’s very important to keep your mind open as an artist,” Dybisz says. “I’m very modest about what I have done so far, and I feel that I have just touched the surface of what I would like to do.”

But artist and activist Gord Hill was convinced that he could turn the material into something widely accessible, a galvanizing account that would serve to rouse a generation to action. The result is the comic book 500 Years of, a bold, graphic, and gripping Indigenous Resistance account of indigenous struggles, past and present.

Hill is a member of the Coast Salish peoples—an anglicized term, Hill explains, for an indigenous tribal group whose territory includes Canada’s Lower Mainland and South Vancouver Island.

Hill grew up on North Vancouver Island, spending some time on reservations, before he and his mother settled in South Surrey when Hill entered high school. There he took the art classes that formed his only formal art education before he became an apprentice to Native carvers in Alert Bay, a village on Cormorant Island in British Columbia with a large indigenous population.
 

“The aim is to provide a history of resistance for Native peoples, to show that their ancestors resisted colonization, had many victories, and that this resistance continues to this day."

“On the coast, there is a strong tradition of carving—mostly red cedar but also yellow cedar, alder, [and] yew,” says Hill, who uses carving knives that are adopted from traditional tools. Though he has made masks, rattles, and plaques, Hill primarily carves cedar boxes with images of thunderbirds, ravens, wolves, sea serpents, bears, and heron. Hill values the boxes as aesthetic objects while also recognizing the income that they bring as essential to his larger political goals.

“I’ve had many jobs,” Hill explains, “as a janitor, dishwasher, and store clerk—but my main occupation is resistance.”

In 1992, Hill first wrote the original text for The, a sprawling account of 500 Years of Resistance organized indigenous efforts against colonization in North America, from the Incas in 16th Century Mexico to the Secwepemc in present-day Canada.

This comprehensive textual history was followed by the illustrated version that Hill is now distributing through progressive publisher Arsenal Pulp Press.

“The comic version I did so as to make this history more accessible to Native youth and people in general, who may have a hard time sitting down with a long article,” Hill says. (The original book also recently was reprinted by California’s PM Press.)

“[The book] starts with the arrival of Columbus in 1492 and progresses through the centuries up until the present day,” Hill says. “The format is mostly two- to three-page stories about a number of different tribes’ resistance against European colonization, including the Inca, Mapuche, Seminole, Lakota, Apache, [and] the Northwest Coast.”

Though the book begins with the earliest European colonists and includes legendary indigenous figures of the 19th Century like Geronimo and Crazy Horse, Hill is quick to emphasize that the indigenous resistance movement is a living one, and 500 Years illustrates a number of key events of the recent past, including the beginnings of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s, the Wounded Knee Incident in South Dakota in 1973, the Oka Crisis in Québec in 1990, and the Ipperwash Crisis and Gustafsen Lake Stand-Off in Canada in 1995.

All of these incidents are told in Hill’s signature style: hard, angular lines; bright, bold colors; and collage effects created with the use of other print media like contemporary newspapers.

“The aim is to provide a history of resistance for Native peoples, to show that their ancestors resisted colonization, had many victories, and that this resistance continues to this day. I hope to accomplish their mental liberation from the colonial coma many are presently in.”

To that end, the book concludes on a note of victory, with the Six Nations land reclamation in Ontario. Members of the Six Nations made public claim to a tract of land in Caledonia, Ontario, an area that was to be developed into a subdivision, and assumed control of the area in 2006. The dispute is unresolved to this day, but all development has ceased, and it appears likely that the Six Nations will eventually be granted legal dominion over the land.

“My main concern is distributing [the book] into Native communities,” Hill says, “which will necessitate foot work on my part, and in this way, it will be a useful organizing tool.

“There is no distribution network that reaches into many Native communities,” he continues. “Plus there are over 600 separate bands spread across the country as well as within urban areas. Virtually all national and regional newspapers are owned by the Aboriginal business elite, and all governance as well as social spaces are controlled by the government. This makes distribution and communications difficult.”

Effective communication is a hallmark of Hill’s activism, whether through print media or YouTube. For the past three years, Hill was involved in the movement to prevent the 2010 Winter Olympics from being held on seized Native land in Vancouver, and as a result, he created the documentary video Resist 2010: 8, posting Reasons to Oppose the 2010 Winter Olympics to the video-sharing site as well as to No2010.com, a website that Hill maintains.

“The Olympics was…a tremendous waste of money that benefited the business and corporate class while the people are stuck with the bill,” Hill says.

Despite Hill’s organization, the Olympics went on as scheduled in February of this year, but Hill feels that the anti-Olympics protest movement was productive nonetheless.

“We organized a successful resistance campaign that focused attention on some of the worst aspects of the industry overall,” he says, “and [we] helped to limit the most negative impacts, such as homelessness and the 2010 police state.

The documentary video was useful in mobilizing resistance and communicating the basic message of our movement.” And that message now extends far beyond Vancouver; No2010.com continues its work, now focused on displacements accompanying the 2012 Olympics in London. Hill’s anti-Olympics campaign, however, sat at odds with the Native band councils, many of which supported the Olympics bid.

“The band councils were established by the federal government under the 1876 Indian Act,” Hill says, “which imposed government control over all Natives in Canada and covered primarily the establishment of reserves, band councils, and membership. It also comprises a separate set of laws for indigenous peoples as in apartheid. Some of these provisions, for example, were used to ban traditional governance and ceremonies.

Today the band councils are the primary forms of state control at the reserve level, and they are replicated in urban areas by state-funded political organizations and service providers, which include housing, employment, and childcare, as well as community centers. The bands upon whose territory Vancouver is now located are highly urbanized, and it was their band councils who collaborated with the government and corporations for the 2010 Olympics.”

By taking on these seemingly insurmountable challenges, Hill is heir to a long tradition of uncompromising indigenous political artists/activists, including, most famously, Leonard Peltier. Hill cites Peltier as an influence and also looks up to Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall, a Mohawk artist and writer who designed the warrior flag.

“His basic concept,” Hill says of Hall, “was to educate the people, inspire them with empowering imagery and writing, and raise their fighting spirit. He helped renew the ‘warrior movement’ among the Mohawks in the early 1970s.”

Hill also admires the work of kindred creators such as Art Wilson, Clifford Harper, Seth Tobbacman, and John Yates, but other influences are closer to home, including Hill’s cousin David Neel, who creates traditional masks that represent contemporary social situations like political injustice and environmental pollution.

“I don’t frequently do art for art’s sake,” Hill says. “I usually have a purpose—it’s for a poster/magazine/event/T-shirt, or it’s something that someone is going to pay me for, so it’s work.”

The practical limitations of effective and efficient activism drive the technical construction of his pieces, and Hill usually works in one color so that mass production is less expensive. He finds that a bolder, simpler black-and-white style is better for propaganda work, but this doesn’t prevent him from recognizing the importance of art in political struggle.

“Art is used to record the people’s history, the story of their ancestors, [and] family lineage,” he says. “It manifests in the daily physical world the supernatural powers that are largely intangible.”

Since 2003, the DC-based artist has altered urban spaces throughout the world by constructing off-kilter creations with little more than packing tape and plastic wrap. In addition to showing his work in galleries like Stricola Contemporary Art in New York and the SESC in Sao Paulo, Jenkins also likes to bring site-specific pieces to the streets so that the average pedestrian can interact with his art as well.

“I figure that if you do something in a public space, you might as well do something where there are people walking around,” Jenkins says.

Seven years ago, Jenkins was hiking through the Andes with a former girlfriend. The couple planned to relocate to Brazil to teach English, but she ended up moving back to the USA, and he fell in with a group of street-installation artists. Their influence motivated Jenkins to hone his tape-casting skills.

“When I was in Brazil, I would put plastic wrap down first and then tape over it, and you can capture a lot more detail,” he says. “So I think, with this technique, it was what really enabled me to get in there and really get every detail, whether it was horses or human forms or just any object that you’re casting.”

Though his incredibly life-like installations look as though they took hours to painstakingly craft, Jenkins can usually set up his pieces in high-traffic areas in less than five minutes. He feels that a quick “drop” allows people to have a more natural reaction to his work because the viewer can perceive his installations in a completely different context without his presence.

“I don’t want it to be a project that is tethered to me. I want people to have the experience of art without the artist being around.”

Although Jenkins often tries to disassociate himself from his work as quickly as possible once he’s gone public with it, he usually sticks around for a few minutes to take a couple of pictures from across the street. However, he doesn’t stay long. “I don’t usually like to be there watching for some reason,” he says.

“It doesn’t feel right to be sitting there gawking when people are looking at the art, because I want their experience to be genuine. And if I’m standing across the street, it just doesn’t feel right to me.”

Regardless, he’s witnessed some tense reactions to his work over the years. Back in 2006, Jenkins set up an installation that resembled a panhandler sitting on the ground, wearing jeans and a hoodie with the hood lowered over his head. Jenkins snapped a quick photo of a little girl sneaking up to the installation to check if it was real while her father abruptly stepped in to usher her away.

But that was nothing compared to what happened next: “One guy came up and looked at it, and he kicked him to see if he was real instead of reaching down to touch him,” Jenkins says. “It’s kind of weird because everyone else walking around didn’t realize that it’s not real; [they] just [saw] some guy kicking a beggar.”

And then there was the situation in Malmö, Sweden. In April of 2008, Jenkins traveled to Sweden and decided to place a replica of a fully clothed body floating under a bridge with multicolored balloons attached to the torso. A passerby thought that it was a real body and called the police. Just as Jenkins and his friend were leaving the area, they saw a squad of emergency vehicles descending on the scene. “While we were driving away, three fire trucks and all of these ambulances were coming,” Jenkins says.

“The people on the street kind of become part of what is happening, the art just turns into a catalyst for what is happening, and people just become actors, basically.”

The police are another reason that Jenkins tries to be as covert as possible with his work. “When you’re doing a street job, you don’t want a cop or some of these people in the city,” he says. “In DC, they have a couple of companies that are contracted by the government to watch out for what’s going on in the street. You don’t want to get out there and have that call made and have your project stopped because you are dilly dallying around talking to some guy on the street.” Although he hasn’t had too many run-ins with the law in the USA, the same can’t be said for when he’s gone abroad.

While in Palestine, he was working on a project that was facilitated by famed British street artist Banksy. Jenkins created a piece with a pair of legs haphazardly sticking out of a huge black garbage bag. As he took a photo of it, a Palestinian student mistook him for being a member of the Israeli media, and within a couple of minutes, others took notice of the situation and got the local police involved.

“I had a small mob screaming at me, and they were kind of backing me into a corner, so I was pretty happy to have the cops show up,” Jenkins says. “The cops took us into the station and made us erase our pictures. But in the end, we had coffee with them, and they let us take pictures with them and all of the sculptures. It’s intense when the authorities get called, but at the end of the day, if anyone gets riled up, they simmer down pretty quick.”

Jenkins doesn’t plan to let these setbacks keep him from traveling abroad. In fact, he spent a good portion of the fall of 2009 in Russia at the invitation of an artist-residency group called CCP. “A lot of art teachers have started contacting me and asking [me] to teach students how to do this,” he says. “So this is one of those ones where they will have between 30 and 50 students all being part of this project.”

Invitations like this have become so commonplace that Jenkins actually left his nine-to-five job in order to bring his art to the masses on a full-time basis. “With the human sculptures, it’s about creating a stage,” he says. “The people on the street kind of become part of what is happening, the art just turns into a catalyst for what is happening, and people just become actors, basically.”

This is one of more than 200 recordings on OpenSoundNewOrleans.com, the website founded by media producers Heather Booth and Jacob Brancasi in March of 2008. With the intent of making the authentic, unedited sounds and voices of New Orleans more accessible, the mission is also to show the Big Easy in a more positive light.

“New Orleans and her people have been impacted by a long history of problematic and often damaging media portrayals,” Booth says. Demonized as “cockroaches” by the media during and after Hurricane Katrina, and blamed for crime in a number of American cities, New Orleans residents get back the respect that they deserve with Open Sound.

The beauty of Open Sound is in its accessibility. Anyone can suggest a recording for the site, and recording equipment is provided on loan where needed. The site reveals a unique soundscape of New Orleans while documenting a city that still is picking up the pieces and holding on tight.

Aware that journalists were working within the confines of traditional media, Booth and Brancasi created Open Sound to show that every story in the city is multidimensional and complex. “We knew that locals would recognize these sounds and voices as distinct to particular places around New Orleans, where every conversation has a part in constructing the city, both imagined and real,” Brancasi says.

“Most importantly, we have implemented a new model for collaboration with our community.”

“It makes me feel like I live in a small place,” says Zork, a Dallas native who moved to New Orleans in 2004. Despite Katrina, Zork stayed to pursue her nursing degree. Before she had even heard about Open Sound, she carried a recording device around to capture “spontaneous storytelling.”

Zork was one of the first to upload her recording on the site, and “The Street of My Life” spoke to the spirit of the project. Booth notes that Zork’s recording achieved one of the best outcomes of cooperative technology in converting present knowledge into deep memory. “It was the first of many exhilarating moments for us,” Brancasi recalls. Dozens of contributed sounds followed, and some contributors adapted sounds in music and art pieces.

After a year of pro-bono work, Booth and Brancasi sought funding in an effort to make the site more fulfilling. To date, Open Sound has received grants of support from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Maker’s Quest 2.0. Now redesigned with an interactive sound map that geo-locates each sound posted, the site offers greater accessibility and ease of use.

“Most importantly,” Booth says, “we have implemented a new model for collaboration with our community.”

Recorded sounds range from the everyday to the politically charged. One can listen to Darlene Wolnik’s recording of rain falling through the gutter at Tulane University Square or Rick Tippie’s recording of the brassy jams of Baby Boy’z performing outside Café Du Monde.

Meanwhile, local pride and research are uncovered by Hilairie Schackai’s recording of a couple’s “priceless stories” about pursuing the American dream on the “other” side of the line in the suburb of Pontchartrain Park. Through her interview, Schackai discovers that water is not intuitive in New Orleans; it flows to areas where one wouldn’t expect. “The recordings have a spontaneous nature,” Schackai notes, “but they also document all these details that make up the fabric of New Orleans.”

Open Sound showcases the vibrant sounds of a city still rich in character after the storm. It’s homey, a bit melancholy, and resonating with life force — in all senses, New Orleans. And it’s a way to keep pushing forward.

“We’re definitely still recovering, and I feel like Katrina keeps taking,” Schackai says. “There’s still a lot of healing to be done.”

Enter Super/Prime, an innovative quartet of kids in their early 20s who began mounting art shows in alternative spaces in September of 2009. Harry Gassel, Zach Steinman, Brittany Taylor, and Corwin Lamm met at Oberlin College in Ohio, where they all studied art, writing, or film before flocking east to seek out the collaborative, creative community that is Brooklyn.

Harry Gassel's "Six Loaves and Two Point Four Fishes" (Marble Rye Series). 2009. 8x10 (717 Prospect Place)

These core members, along with a gaggle of friends, recognized a unique opportunity to showcase their work and challenge the public’s idea of what exactly makes a proper art exhibition.

“I don’t think it’s all that political, and I think we’ve all agreed it’s not our place to make that kind of statement directly,” explains Gassel, one of Super/Prime’s organizers. “The motivation is to be able to find whatever opportunities are viable and interesting and maybe have a dialogue with the work, maybe just present really good space, and to bring work together and put on shows.”

So far, the group has held an inaugural show in a Crown Heights condo, participated in the Fountain Art Fair in Miami, curated work in a three-floor residential space in conjunction with a nearby warehouse exhibition in LA, plotted a takeover of a Madison Avenue retail space, and, with any luck, will hold a one-night-only show in a psychic’s storefront.

"A lot of what really good graphic design does is take similar forces and make artwork within confines."

Currently, its biggest challenge as a collective of young artists is figuring out the level of importance to place on finances — to be or not to be a 501(c)(3)?

“We are casually commercial,” Steinman says. “We’re not a non-profit, but we’re not making a lot of money, so we’re not profitable yet. That’s something we’re still figuring out. Right now it’s just a project that we’re doing.”

Super/Prime’s first show, held at 717 Prospect Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, came about when Taylor called a meeting of her artistic friends and co-conspirators. At the time, she was working for Art Observed, a blog with close ties to real-estate firm Tungsten Properties. She revealed that the firm would let the group mount a show in one of its unused condos to generate positive press, and the crew jumped at the chance.

“It seemed great because of the free space, and also the opportunity to at least interact with this thing that was going on in New York — these weird, empty condos, this real-estate boom and bust,” Gassel ruminates. “It felt really present to us. It was nice to not have to make a critique specifically but to be present in that kind of zeitgeist.”

Zach Steinman's "ODB Clapper Memorial"

Wanting to avoid a hierarchical structure, all four members cheekily took the title of vice president, and they decided to curate the first exhibition as a group.

“It was a tough meeting,” Gassel says. “Things got heated. The fat was cut by everyone’s strong opinions, and what remained was really strong.” They came up with a final lineup of work by 10 artists, including themselves, acquaintances, and total strangers, entered via a submission process.

One of the pieces in that show was Gassel’s “Six Loaves and Two Point Four Fishes” from his Marble Rye Series, for which he made silkscreen prints of the middle pieces from loaves of the bread in order to highlight the artisan-ship and patterns in a product that can seem so monotonous, especially when compared to white bread.

“I was talking to my grandmother, who completely doesn’t understand my attitude toward abstraction,” Gassel says. “She’s in love with the ’50s and hasn’t really left it, loves the Abstract Expressionists and mid-century furniture and jazz, and just doesn’t look past. I brought her down this imaginary conversation: ‘Picture yourself in the bread aisle of the supermarket, and take away all the plastic from the bread and think about these as sculptures.’ They may not be expressionistic art choices, but at the same time, they do express this really delicate study of form.”

Gassel, who originally hails from New York, is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Yale University to study graphic design. Most of his work is primarily concerned with its own materials — prints about the act of printmaking, designs about design theory.

His commercial endeavors are done under the pig-Latin moniker Eeshirtay (a key indicator of his love for language play). Gassel is quick to point out that his for-profit designs should not be so easily separated from his artistic practice.

“If you look at the fine-art-gallery system and see how people make work specifically for shows, you’re starting to introduce elements of the client or some kind of external force that would drive the work,” he says. “I think fine artwork has always had some of that. A lot of what really good graphic design does is take similar forces and make artwork within confines.”

Some of his bread prints were also shown at the Fountain Art Fair in Miami, Art Basel’s DIY-punk little sister based in hip, downtown Wynwood. The group raised money for a booth there by throwing fundraisers with bands including Silk Flowers and Teengirl Fantasy, and soon enough the four were headed south for one of the country’s biggest clusters of art happenings. For four days, they held court in a warehouse among mostly New York-based galleries like Glowlab, Milk Studios, and Grace Exhibition Space. As Steinman explains, they found it rewarding to show alongside these well-established institutions.

“We’re coming in, basically an unheard-of group of people, and getting a response and developing an identity, which was really interesting as a group,” he says. “It gave us a lot of good momentum, which was probably the most valuable part of going down there.”

In the corner of Super/Prime’s booth stood an unassuming lamp that connected to a stereo. It played “Got Your Money,” the rap anthem by deceased Wu-Tang Clan member Ol’ Dirty Bastard, on loop. Whenever the song’s iconic clap clap rolled around, the lamp would turn on or off, comprising Steinman’s piece, “ODB Clapper Memorial.” With the help of a whiz-kid friend, he hacked into that bizarre piece of Americana, The Clapper, causing it to respond to the song in just the way he wanted.

Roland Tianco's "Life:size study, Rauschenberg–Retroactive 1, 1964" (717 Prospect Place)

“What I like about the clapper is I can set it up in 20 different ways, and it runs itself,” he says. “I definitely have a very minimalist approach to using space. Everything has to be really loaded and well chosen. I generally like to keep it as reductive and un-haphazard as possible while still seeming like it could have just fallen there.”

Steinman grew up in San Francisco before heading to Ohio for school and then settling in Brooklyn. Currently, he works as an assistant to artist Wade Guyton, and he has worked at different times for Carroll Dunham, Piotr Uklanksi, and Jean Shin. His artistic practice is centered on balancing the hyper-referential and the extremely ambiguous.

Another of his self-operating “machines” is a 2007 performance piece entitled “Phantasmagoria.” Steinman commissioned 14 of his friends, some of them professional dancers, to stand underneath long, white circular swaths of fabric and do the “Macarena” while wearing black and white outfits with no musical accompaniment until they couldn’t do it any longer.

“I thought of it as the Abu Ghraib of the ‘Macarena’ or something,” he chuckles. Recalling Yoko Ono’s instruction paintings, his creation set strict guidelines and left little room for the performers to improvise. “It’s the ‘Macarena,’ which is the least creative dance you could think of,” he says. “Anyone can do this. I like that it’s the everyman dance and that it was a real fad.”

Now Steinman is creating a large marble engraving with the Washington Redskins logo on it, and he also is making a series of epoxy-resin paintings that are part of an ongoing project using glitter. In addition, he plays synthesizers and a drum machine in a band with friend Sam Haar (called Blondes), and he occasionally DJs under the same name.

Gassel is continuing to study printing methods and creating work around it; similarly, he is hoping to begin making work that involves documenting Super/Prime’s efforts. “There are really interesting ways to string these things together that I’d like to try and make happen,” he says. “Even something as simple as having a tripod in the same place and taking before and after photos — it’s so simple, to see what it looks like and learn from that process.”

For Super/Prime’s next trick, the group is planning to create more focused, site-specific projects that will allow its stable artists the freedom to play with unconventional spaces. What’s most important right now is staying diplomatic and trying to show work by a wide range of artists.

“I think we’re all looking around a lot and trying to ask people to be involved,” Steinman says. But real estate is a fickle industry, and because of its nature, the group is not specifically committed to condos. “It’s a little tricky dealing with these real-estate people because you can never really believe a word they say,” Gassel laments.

“But it’s exciting to have the opportunity to put something on Madison Avenue or in a warehouse in Long Island City and keep reinventing how people are going to look at the work we curate, or art in general, and keep making these surprising things happen, which I think will give the artists and the artwork a great opportunity to surprise itself, the viewers, and the community.”

Despite studying audio/visual communication in college, Jorge managed to find his way to the design world after graduation. The Madrid native worked with a number of design and advertising firms throughout the city, but he eventually became burned out by the daily routine once the lines between creating art and creating profit margins started to blur.

“I think that graphic design is work where you have to communicate, not work where you have to sell,” Chamorro says. “[In advertising], it’s all about selling without any kind of love or worth; that’s why I hate it so much. I like to be happy with my work and not only earn money.”

This realization is what fueled Jorge’s decision to leave the advertising industry behind and chart his own career path about four years ago. It was around this time that he started to delve deeper into his own artistic projects — focused on his interest in collages — which allowed Chamorro to step away from digitally produced images and explore a more DIY approach.

“You don’t always have to be political, but I think that if you can express yourself in freedom, it is good for you and good for everything.”

“I work with a computer all the time, but I don’t like them,” he says. “So when I do handmade collages, I enjoy the paper and the scissors in my hands, and I like it very much…they are like my sons.”

Initially, Chamorro intended for his collages to simply be a personal project and didn’t plan on doing anything serious with them. He also prefers to keep his designs simple and unfussy. “I admire designers that do very complicated things, but to look at it for five seconds, I say, ‘I couldn’t do that in all my life,’” he says. “The kind of design that I like is very much just black and white. I was reading a book [by Eduardo Chillida], and he finds that black and white is the highest way to communicate. I like things simple; I think that your life and your work have to go in the same way.

Chamorro took a surrealistic approach with his "Women" series by incorporating images of women’s body parts juxtaposed with landscape scenes and geometric elements. Though the images draw similarities to Salvador Dalí’s intricate and whimsical paintings, Chamorro mentions that he was not directly influenced by Dalí’s work and that he simply wanted to create pieces and leave their meaning open ended.

“With many of them, I really have no idea where any of them come from,” he says. “With 'Women,' I really didn’t think anything, just ‘make, make, make,’ and that was it. When I try to do something, I really don’t wish anything. I just try to have a good time and learn from myself.”

His work took a political turn with his recent “VIVA ESPA__A” series. Chamorro also does work for a Spanish graphic-design magazine and was inspired to create a project that focuses on an iconic bull image, which has become a popular symbol of patriotism. “In the last few years, [the bull image] has become important to the people of Spain, and they put it on their cars for example,” he says. “To me, it sucks. I hate it, but so many people love it because it is so Spanish.”

As a result, his project focuses on playing with variations of this iconic image in a way that is meant to provoke viewers to question the symbol’s original intent. “I don’t like how the world goes and how Spain goes, and I think that art is a good way to fight and express yourself,” Chamorro says. “You don’t always have to be political, but I think that if you can express yourself in freedom, it is good for you and good for everything.”

Chamorro also brings this philosophy to the next generation of artists. When he’s not creating his own collages, he facilitates creativity workshops for students in Madrid’s schools. “I think that my work is very lonely work, and to be with 15 children can be a good mix,” he says. “When you see a collage made in five minutes by a 10-year-old, it can be shocking, but I also learn a lot from them.”

When it comes to the kids, he not only wants to impart an eye for design but also hopes that they will learn how to push society’s buttons as well. “I don’t like the education [system] in Spain,” he says. “I think that education should be more about teaching how to think. The world likes people who don’t think too much — ‘just make money and shut up.’ I like to teach the children critical thinking, and that’s my objective. I would like to see a more critical population.”