Celebrations of the Strange, the Pathetic and the Morbid | Glamourie | Project Space Leeds

Text by Elizabeth Holdsworth

An immobile red hatchback, front smashed against a skewed road sign, blares out hypnotic and maniacal club anthems from its boasting stereo system. Beyond, bagpipes coalesce with distant explosions, and someone, somewhere, is cranking a hurdy-gurdy.

This is the distinctive sound of Glamourie, the current exhibition at Project Space Leeds so named after Celtic lore, a magic transformation from "the normal aspect of an object or area... [into its] resplendent... semblance." Upon this fluid basis, the exhibition voyages upon exploring the idea of a glamourie and itself becoming one. Project Space Leeds' expanse of divisible spaces becomes the ground for the figuration of a holistic approach to curating, where artworks are both nestled and spliced together in the pursuit of an altered and distinct whole.

Once through the project space's glass exterior, the visitor is greeted with a relentless cacophony and visual conundrum. Like opening a loaded and secret drawer, the show tumbles and spills unrestrained into the spaces like an overflowing toy box. Artworks overlap and buttress each other unashamedly and without classification. Each contained area of the space is categorized by a symbol on the wall, so that, if examining the accompanying leaflet closely and deciphering the materials of the works, visitors can just about decipher which work is by which artist. A deliberate move towards shaping Glamourie as a whole and single entity, artist-curator David Steans makes no apologies for this esoteric gesture: "there is no interpretation, you have to take everything in at once", he explains during a gallery walk-round.

Above the gallery reception desk the exhibition's title is rendered in funereal floral lettering in pink, yellow and maroon. The floral letters, titled Service for a Vacant Coffin, form both branding of the show and an artwork by Steans, setting the climate and distinguishing Glamourie as not something dead, but something uncanny revelling in the ghoulish, lurid and uncouth. Although Steans claims the exhibition to not be an artwork itself, the curating of it was undoubtedly approached as an artistic endeavour and it becomes tempting to make that conceptual step.

Leading us into the largest area of the gallery space, a long, low banqueting table in MDF stretches through the space, places set with a single Bristol blue glass bowl, one for each artist in the exhibition. In contrast, aside the table is a demarcated cell, closed off from the rest of the space by a newly installed partition wall. To enter this area the visitor must climb through a hole in the shape of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, into a white box with black geometric shapes painted on all sides of the walls and floor, like entering a surreal electronic hallucination. This space exclusively contains the work of Ant Macari, a contrasting arrangement to the rest of Glamourie: an amazing space, yet incongruous to the the rest of the exhibition. Like a self-contained solo show within Glamourie, Macari's work shrugs off interaction with the group and refuses to join the feasting.

In gestures which deface and dress the PSL galleries, works by Joseph Buckley and Harry Meadley both point to the limitations of the neutrality of the space. Buckley's giant gaffer tape crosses fill every pane of glass on the front of PSL, so that the gallery may well appear abandoned to a passerby or commuter on the adjacent Leeds to London railway line. As light pours through the windows the X's strike through everything, effacing all in its path. Shadows with no shadow (that thin black line)(2012), Harry Meadley's black electrical tape, creates a fake shadow line along the base of the galleries' walls, an aggrandising or perhaps gentle mocking of the roughness of a project space. Near the entrance, forming an area easily mistaken for the gallery's cafe seating, Oakwood Gallery 3 by Matthew Crawley is a replica of the front of a Spanish Tapas restaurant: a large backlit sign mounted on the wall flanked by hanging baskets of plastic flowers, hovering over lightweight metal tables and chairs. Eclipsing the entry spaces of PSL, Crawley implants a playful new façade which serves us the rest of the show: all art as tapas.

Glamourie is an exhibition curated by an artist, of his fellow artists, predominantly for other artists. The blue bowl banqueting table, Iona Smith's Super Supra – Glamour toasting rite feat. David Steans (Tameda) illustrates this sense of camaraderie to great effect, as it becomes apparent that the table top is resting on and supported by the benches along each side, so in order to function the table would need to rest on the laps of each of the artists in the exhibition. Indicating the possible endangerment of its kind, this network of artists arises out of connections forged amid a UK art school system currently being dismantled. Visitors attending Glamourie hooked in by themes of ritual and ceremony and expecting immediate recompense will most likely be at a loss, as this clandestine company of artists, with a loud, ugly collection of intriguing works, is not one to be easily untangled or resolved.

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Glamourie, 14/01/2012 - 31/03/2012, Whitehall Waterfront, 2 Riverside Way, Leeds, LS1 4EH. www.projectspaceleeds.org.uk www.glamourie.co.uk

Caption:
1. David Steans Service for a Vacant Coffin
2. Iona Smith, Leon Sadler and Ant Macari
3. Sophie Carapetian, Joseph Buckley and L Foundation
4. David Steans, Kitty Clark, Harry Meadley, Chris Evans, Paul Mc Devitt and Rory Macbeth
All images courtesy of Project Space Leeds
Photography: Ben Statham

A Pilgrimage of Self-Discovery | Idris Khan: The Devil's Wall | Whitworth Art Gallery | Manchester

Text by Carol Huston

Born into a Muslim family in Birmingham in 1978, London-based artist Idris Khan decided to stop practising Islam when he was fourteen years old. Despite this, he is now reknowned for producing Islamic-themed works which garner public acclaim. In a recent interview, Khan likened the practice of reading the pages of the Qur’an to his artistic process, which he described as a continual return to the same place. For Khan, this place appears to be found in the methodic repetition of found texts, written or photographic. For his current exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, Khan’s recent works overlap written texts, obscuring the traditional understanding of how we read and communicate.

Khan’s work challenges notions of original authorship, recalling Roland Barthes’s seminal 1967 essay The Death of the Author. No stranger to the writing of Barthes, Khan used the pages of Camera Lucida (1980) as subject matter in 2006. Like the masters of appropriation who preceded Khan, such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Andy Warhol, Khan reinterprets found texts and reworks them to suit the interests of his current practice. In line with Barthes’ essay on dubious authorship, Khan acknowledges that he is not the sole author of his works by allowing room for multiple readings interpretations according to the viewer’s perspective. For the seven drawings from the series of twenty-one prints, 21 Stones (2011), Khan combines verses from the Qur’an with melancholic personal notes; "My mother died on the 23rd January 2010." "God is great." "We lost our baby" "Why did this happen?" For the prints, the artist combines Arabic, the language of the Qur’an, with English phrases, nodding to his Muslim heritage. Departing from his artistic roots in the manipulation of photography, Khan hand-printed the drawings using bespoke stamps. The repetition of stamps in a block-printing fashion creates a rythmic, circular pattern on each print, akin to concrete poetry in which the visual image is paramount to the text.

As a collaboration with the British Museum’s current exhibition Hajj: Journey to the heart of Islam, in which Khan’s work is included, the Whitworth presents the series of works as an opportunity to educate the British public about a religion still veiled in controversy and misconception in popular culture. Dark and dramatic, the gallery space is barely lit with spotlights illuminating the works into view. The centrepiece of the exhibition is three ominous, black cylindrical sculptures punctured with funneled vortexes. Verses from the Qur’an are embossed across the top of the each sculpture in both Arabic and English. Together, the trio The Devil’s Wall (2011) represents an aspect of the fifth and final pillar of Islam, the performance of Hajj in Mecca. For believers, Hajj ought to be practiced once in a lifetime. As part of Islamic ritual, believers throw seven rocks at each of the three Devil’s Walls, or jamarat in Arabic, in remembrance of Ibrahim’s sacrifice. Rather than depicting the jamarat themselves, Khan’s work portrays a stylised represenation of the dishes used to catch the fallen stones after they have been tossed against the jamarat. Serving as a reminder of his shared Islamic background, Khan’s interpretation of the Qur’an is both an homage and a declaration of personal reclamation of the verses which he uses.

Coinciding with the chants evoked by the sculptures are four photographic compositions based again on found texts - musical scores written by minimalist classical composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Typical of Khan’s ouvre, he interjected text over the composite arrangement of musical notes. For each of his prints, Khan uses twenty to thirty photographs in which he layers over each other, rendering the musical notes often indecipherable. The process requires several months for Khan to complete a single work. In Different Trains (2011), for example, Khan leaves legible only the secondarily-sourced phrase "from New York to Los Angeles", referencing Reich’s frequent trips between New York and Los Angeles as a child during World War II. Voices (2011), Contrary Motion (2011) and Three Songs (2011) are composed of photographs taken of scores by Philip Glass, another minimalist composer. Along with Different Trains, these works play with the falsification of three-dimensional texture on a two-dimensional surface. Like the rest of the works in the exhibition, the composite designs of musical scores recall the ways in which manipulated photography can appear to be painting-like, as seen in the work of Lahore-based artist Rashid Rana.

Idris Khan: The Devil's Wall, 23/02/2012 - 13/05/2012, Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road Manchester, M15 6ER. www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk

Artist's Talk: Idris Khan
Tuesday, 3 April, 6-7pm, (reception at 5.30pm) Free
Idris Khan will be at the Whitworth Art Gallery to talk about his work, and The Devil's Wall.
Please note a reception will be held from 5.30pm and the Artist's Talk will begin at 6pm.

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Caption:
Idris Khan, The Devil's Wall (2011)
Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York

Mark Storor: a tender subject | An Artangel Commission | Secret Location | London

Text by Emily Sack

“Do you hear me?” echoes a haunted voice in a vacuous subterranean space while a man crouches in a cell unable to escape the persistence of the creeping and persistent speaker. This is just one of many vignettes encountered in Mark Storor’s most recent collaborative performance acknowledging the experience of homosexuals in the prison system, both as prisoners and guards.

Meeting at a gallery in Central London, visitors are then transported in vans winding through the streets to arrive at a secret location. The disorientation is highlighted by the darkness and a permeating sense of uneasiness. Having surrendered all mobile phones at the meeting point thereby losing connectivity with the outside world, audience members are isolated and stripped of a network beyond the strangers attending the same performance. Once arriving at the secret performance venue, a heavy industrial door is opened and visitors are herded down the stairs to a fluorescently-lit waiting room. After an uncomfortable silence a stern prison guard orders the audience to form a single-file queue and leads the way to a series of performance spaces on either side of a long corridor.

Each of the mini-performances, like single-act plays, feature different actors and inspire disparate emotions. The initial space features a film of a man attempting to escape a crate by prising planks loose with his bare hands. Another holds two men and a house made of loaves of bread. A most peculiar scene has two men stepping on tiles covered in soap while being persistently splashed with buckets of water. Despite the strangeness of the vignettes presented, two were exquisitely beautiful: a floor covered in soil with flowers attempting to grow, and a heart-wrenching scene of a man embracing a deceased man sprawled in a massive pool of blood.

The audience experiences a tumult of emotions feeling empathy for the actors though bewildered by the circumstances. There is a strange sense of uncertainty that arises from the juxtaposition of freedom and restriction. In the corridor the audience is ordered to remain in a queue and follow the guards; however, once enclosed in each individual performance space, the audience is free to move about the space and examine each situation from all angles, creating a sort of theatre in the round. Once visitors become immersed in a scene another guard enters and orders the journey to continue and lingering is discouraged.

Mark Storor spent three years investigating the experience of homosexuals in the London prison system conducting interviews with prisons and guards alike. There seems to be a dystopian stripping of identity, a loss of individuality among both parties. Or, perhaps worse, the defining of a multi-faceted individual by a single characteristic. The aptly titled performance plays with the meanings of the words ‘tender’ and ‘subject’: implying both the sentimentality and emotion felt by the prisoners and the tenderness of a bruise, while subject can refer to a specific individual or the topic as a whole.

Overall the performance was a bit heavy-handed and perhaps a bit too abstract, though certain scenes certainly evoked beauty and sadness and strength. Returning to street level, somewhere near Farringdon Station, it becomes apparent that the performance occurred in a disused meat-packing facility. The outside reality feels like an extension of the underground world, and regardless of how each visitor personally relates to the scenes below, all are left with Storor’s research question: “in a hostile environment, where everyone has a role to play, how do you maintain a sense of yourself?”

Mark Storor: a tender subject, An Artangel Commission, 16/03/2012 - 31/03/2012, Secret Location, London. www.artangel.org.uk

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Photography: Stephen King

Birdhead: Welcome to Birdhead Again | Paradise Row Gallery | London

Text by Daniel Potts

Birdhead's concern is the flow of power from West to East, as gauged by that thriving metropolis of ever increasing scale, life and culture: Shanghai. Captured in black and white, the city in all its enormity - skyscapers, towerblocks, flyovers – is seen in its potent vastness to host the human activity. We are encouraged, therefore, to view the snapshots – for a snapshot aesthetic is employed - of culture with an eye to the effects increasing power can have. Groups of images are numbered in the exhibition; 1 is an introductory piece, 2 to 14 consist of two large images each, 15 and 16 consist of a high volume of images and 17 is best viewed as the finale, therefore it is best to view the whole exhibition in number order, according to the guide.

Ji Weiyu (1980) and Song Tao (1979) form Birdhead. They both appear in the photographed images capturing contemporary daily life in Shanghai. Here, in China's greatest city, we find the pair socialising with friends: eating out, talking, laughing, partying. We also find them sleeping it off. In the lower of the two images forming exhibit no.6, Untitled (Large 9 & 10), 2011, a man wearing only a shirt and underclothes sings or shouts with apparent abandon into a microphone. His enthused gaze is directed towards the camera, and we are reminded of the bacchanalia of a karaoke excursion. Exhibit 7, Untitled (Large 11 & 12), 2011, captures, in the upper image, a young man slumped in a bean bag, smoking. Continuing the theme of nocturnal hedonism, the lower image captures a woman dressed in an elaborate, white-feathered dress with a matching hat that obscures her face. The corresponding, post-night-out morass is to be found in the lower image of 8, Untitled (Large 13 & 14), 2011, as a young man sleeps, which in the spatial and thematic context suggests a hangover. Apparently in response to the after effects of indulgence, a man drinks coffee in the upper image. In exhibits 12 to 14, along with striking images of a polished, mounted mineral fragment and an agitated portion of water suggestive of the sea, we find further images in which youth culture is captured. The energy of the dancers at a live gig is the subject . Similar youthful activity is to be found in the mutiplicity of smaller snapshot images in exhibits 15 and 16.

Shanghia's urban landscape, evocative in the inclusion of the skyscrapers and high-rise towers of advanced capitalism and affluence, forms the backdrop to these joyful and carefree cultural phenomena. Evidence of consumerism and the possession of leisure is rife. Exhibits 9 to 11 capture young people and children enjoying leisuretime in manicured parkland. The use of these images seems to compound the impression that the culture of youthful leisure has an established position in the city. Thus far, the visitor may reflect that Western experience teaches that with increasing affluence came the emergence of the teenager. And we are aware that youth culture, and youth sub-cultures, accompanied this change. Perhaps we may also reflect from our own current, cultural experience that with increasing affluence comes the increasing extension of the adolescence. In this exhibition these complimentary trends seem to have been captured and interpolated as an expression of the ongoing flow of power from West to East. This in itself is a great achievement, attained with considerable grace in in the immediacy of the execution. The use of the snapshot aesthetic conveys and compounds the sense of youthful leisure with overtones of tourism. Coupled with the solemnity of black and white, we are encouraged to engage with the images seriously. However, Birdhead go further.

Exhibit no.17, Song Dynasty Poem, 2011, provides a broader point relating to the folly of youth, which seems to surround the piece in the accompanying photographic exhibition. The poem expressed using the original characters is written on a double track of, what looks like, slate squares, encased in the uppermost surface a very long wooden box. The box gently rises from one end to the other, such that from the side it may be viewed diagonally. Though modest it is charismatic, and it can be seen as the centrepiece of the exhibition. An English translation of the poem, titled Youth Does Not Know How Sorrow Tastes by Xin Qiji, can be viewed at the lower end of the work. The poem reflects on experience in life, how naïve youth which often focuses on melancholy does not know true sorrow, and how that sorrow is the price paid for wisdom. There is little point in describing a poem further, which may be viewed to great effect as the finale to an experience which is at once familiar, yet somehow other.

Birdhead: Welcome to Birdhead Again, 09/03/2012 - 07/04/2012, Paradise Row Gallery, 74a Newman Street, London, W1T 3DB. www.paradiserow.com

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Caption:
Birdhead Untitled (2011)
Cellulose Black and White Print
100 x 121 cm
Copyright Birdhead and courtesy of Paradise Row

Born out of Necessity | Architecture and Design Galleries | The Museum of Modern Art | New York

Among the most common and enduring definitions of design is "problem solving." A problem arises, the designer analyses it and distils it into goals, and then she creates a roadmap to a solution, working with the means at her disposal. These include the budget, the materials and techniques she can afford and master (for an object like a chair, a lamp, or a bicycle, for instance), or the code and software she favours (for a digital product, such as an interface or an interactive map). She must also consider the requirements of distribution and marketing, if the product is meant for wide dissemination. If she is good, this process, simple and linear, will result in an elegant, functional, economical, and meaningful solution, the splendid outcome of an inspired syllogism. Design is often not linear, however, and sometimes, rather than focusing on solving existing or forthcoming problems, designers - informed by current technological and social developments - imagine possible future scenarios and infer from them urgent issues that may eventually need to be tackled; in other words, they design problems for which we all one day might need solutions.

Born out of Necessity features objects of design from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art that are solutions to problems, some of them real, concrete, and urgent, and others speculative, tied to possible future scenarios, their urgency removed but no less intense in the designers’ minds. Some highlight emergencies at home or at sea; others are made to be used efficiently in medical crises or to be deployed in response to natural disasters. While some are staples of everyday life in the present moment, such as Band-Aids, earplugs, and coffee cup lids, others address possible problems of the future: a planet-wide food shortage caused by overpopulation, for instance, which leads to an inventive redesign of the human gastrointestinal system; the ethics of lab-grown meat; or the psychological effects of organ transplantation from animals.

In some cases, challenges specific to people with disabilities (the problems of a few) have led to products that improve everybody’s life (solutions for all); in others, solutions to pressing needs in developing countries are extrapolated successfully to the environments of cities in wealthier nations. Design that is first problem making and then problem solving often veers dramatically from the visual and functional catalogue of the modern tradition. Its predictive and narrative power comes alive in objects that address present and future cultural developments - such as the integration of environmental responsibility into everyday behaviours or the marriage of ancient religious beliefs with up-to-date media and habits - and that aim to anticipate and prevent future technological and ecological quagmires. Goals and means come together in the design process, a remarkable synthesis whose ambition is to distil an object that is much more - in significance, functionality, innovation, and elegance -than the sum of its parts.

Born out of Necessity, 02/03/2012 - 28,01/2013, Architecture and Design Galleries, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019. www.moma.org

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Captions:
1. Andreas Vogler and Arturo Vittori of Architecture and Vision.
Desert Seal (2004)Polyurethane-coated polyester fiber and silver-coated Mylar.
Prototype by Aero Sekur, Italy.
Gift of Architecture and Vision, 2006.
Image by Architecture and Vision.
2. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby of Dunne & Raby.
Grass Processor, Tree Processor/Digester, and Augmented Digestive System from Designs for an Overpopulated Planet: Foragers. (2009) Fiberglass.
Gift of The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, 2010.
Image by Jason Evans and courtesy of Dunne & Raby.
3. Andrew Burroughs, Dickon Isaacs, Stacy Benjamin, Dick Grant, John Grimley, Jerry O’Leary, Anton Schubert, Amy Schwartz, Paul South, and Eric Sugalski of IDEO and David Kravitz, Douglas Schein, and John Brassil of Organ Recovery Systems. LifePort Kidney Transporter. 1998.
Polyurethane, polystyrene, polycarbonate, and polyester. Manufactured by Organ Recovery Systems, USA.
Gift of the manufacturer, 2006.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
4. Zach Lieberman, James Powderly, Evan Roth, Chris Sugrue, TEMPT1, and Theo Watson.
EyeWriter (2009) openFrameworks and custom software, eyeglasses, PlayStation Eye camera, IR pass filter, IR LEDs, battery clip, resistor, zip ties, and metal wire.
Image by the EyeWriter Team.
Architecture & Design Purchase Fund, 2011.

Selfridges Film Project | London | Film 1: Alexander McQueen

To celebrate the unveiling of the Womens Designer Galleries in its London store, Selfridges has commissioned The Film Project - a bespoke short film collection. Intended as an experience rather than a conventional exhibition, the free screenings continue until 26 March at the Old Selfridges in London. For those who can't make it to London, the short films from available online and we will be screening a selection on the Aesthetica Blog every day this week.

The Film Project showcases films from some exciting names: A.F. Vandevorst, Alexander McQueen, Ann Demeulemeester, Comme des Garçons, Dries Van Noten, Gareth Pugh and Rick Owens.

Selfridges has appointed curator Emma Reeves to work closely with the designers who have been invited to take part in the project. These designers have created short films which interpret the essence of today’s modern woman: sophisticated, intelligent, confident, stylish, strong and feminine. The designers have chosen to collaborate with a range of international filmmakers from exciting young talent to more established names.

Alexander McQueen film Obscure Desires is directed by the acclaimed cinematographer and art director Dustin Lynn. Watch it for yourself above.