Introduction to an interview with artist, Alice Bloomfield for iEL Magazine

Introduction to an interview with photographer, Maxime Bony for iEL Magazine

In a world that’s increasingly surreal and technologically saturated, Alice Bloomfield’s work resonates more than ever. Still, an irresistible comic-book quality provides just the right amount of escapism for 2020. The London-based artist combines dark, dystopian backgrounds with Schiele-esque women to make eloquent comments on luxury, materialism, and social media. Often the subject of Bloomfield’s work, it should come as no surprise that the fashion industry has taken note. You may have seen Alice’s wonderfully sinewy creations in campaigns - real and Instagrammed - for Gucci, Wandler, and emerging musician, Biig Piig. The illustrator sat down with iEL Magazine to chat about lockdown, the British government’s campaign against the arts, and the implications of animated models.

Documentary-style realism meets a painterly abstraction in the photography of Maxime Bony. The French artist is a new breed of street photographer, capturing ordinary - and sometimes exceptionally beautiful - members of the public in their natural habitat: the streets of Naples or Paris. Usually blurry, his images seem altered by physical movement and perfectly impart the commotion of the city. A sense of ambiguity also characterizes the works, inviting the viewer to look a little closer and the eye to linger longer. Bony’s thoughtful compositions make even the most mundane of scenes (a scarf lying on the ground for instance) take on a sharp intensity, even in soft focus.

Album Review of Young Thug’s Jeffery for Counterpoint Magazine

Young Thug is probably one of the most fascinating rappers around right now. His newest release, Jeffery wins me over instantly with album art featuring the rapper in an ornate dress by Alessandro Trincone. Intentional or not, this move seemed to confound the masculine ego of hardcore fans everywhere. Even a cursory look at the Instagram comments on the first picture of the album sees scores of homophobic comments left by former fans who have had their notions of maleness thrown into a state of confusion by the very vehicle that once embodied them. In youth culture today, the pinnacle of masculinity is arguably the rapper. Young Thug however, does his part to dispelling myths of masculinity and outdated social norms by wearing dresses and stating publicly that he thinks “there’s no such thing as gender”.

I’m interested to see whether Thug’s endearing ‘wokeness’ will permeate the album itself and although he seems to leave questions of gender construction out of it, the lyrics stay true to the often grotesque and sometimes nonsensical magic of Young Thug. On the album's buoyant starting point Wyclef Jean, Thug manages to end eight lines in a row with the word ‘boys’. Rhyming the same word eight times would usually incite ridicule, but like everything else on this album, it shouldn’t work but somehow does. In typically playful form, Thug is not exactly trying to rhyme as much as he’s just picking a random word and seeing how far he can go with it.

True Colours for iEL Magazine

Colour is a vehicle. It’s a vehicle of emotion, feeling, sensation, illustration. Countless artists have made their names utilizing the emotive potential of colour. Rothko created the “colour field” when he painted swaths of shades on canvases that represented and invoked the symbolic meaningfulness of color. His ‘Black in Deep Red’ was created at the end of his career when he was entering a depression, his own feelings of dread are rendered through black squares that seem to subsume the canvas. It stood in stark contrast to the energetic reds and oranges that characterised earlier works and suggested an excitable young painter on the edge of success. Munch also used color to great effect in masterpieces like ‘The Scream’. He, and other abstract expressionists, believed it spoke more deeply to our internal states than language ever could. Some argue our ability to appreciate the beauty and emotion of art is not only what makes us human, but could even be proof of the divine. 

Colour affects us so greatly, and enriches our lives so deeply. The rainbow LGBTQ+ flag, designed by Gilbert Baker, harnesses the power of color for resistance and solidarity. In many places it demonstrates to members of the community that they are safe when they see it. There are countless examples throughout history of the use of color as resistance, but can it be used against us?

Yes, colour has been used as a repellent in the past. When looking to design a box that would put people OFF buying cigarettes, Australia sought to find a colour so detestable that it might temper the growing demand. They settled on Pantone 448, which best resembles the colour of mud. Considered the world’s ugliest colour, it had come out on top of studies conducted by Australian social scientists to find out the most deterring shade. Institutions often exploit the emotional implications of colour. Baker Miller pink, for instance, was discovered by two US Naval officers Baker and Miller - the shade’s namesakes -  to have a calming effect on prisoners. The hue is a tangy yet soft pink and is known to calm anxiety and frustration while also suppressing appetite to some degree. It was used in US Naval Correctional facilities in Seattle to calm angry prisoners and later used in drunk tanks to pacify drunk and scrappy prisoners.

There are also many ways in which colour can also be used to control us in nuanced, subtle, and totally normalised ways. The forceful and long-standing association of female with pink and male with blue, for instance. From the moment our parents can even distinguish our biological sex in the womb, we have already been forced into a colour story. Gender reveal parties - that exist in different forms the world over - sometimes even use colour to inform others of the baby’s sex. Blue or pink could literally represent your entire conception. Couples will cut into a cake and inside the dense batter will be either pink or blue. Just like that, the child’s entire persona is decided for them and the only colour they will see or wear for the first few years of life is predetermined. This sets up a dichotomy between the genders. It tells us that gender is one or the other. There is no space in the ‘pink or blue’ cultural phenomenon for the fluid, nuanced complexity that gender can present as. Setting up gender as aligned with two very different colours from an early age also cements the idea of the sexes being divided. They are seen as two almost diametrically opposing forces. Again, this rigidity leaves no room for the beautiful cohesion and blending that occurs in a diverse world, one filled with countless and distinctive individual identities.

Clearly, the pink and blue relationship is not just about how parents decorate their nurseries. It has deeper implications for society as a whole, passing down notions that are seemingly learned in childhood. However, is this divide inherent to society and the colour relationships are simply a byproduct? Or do colour relationships play a part in keeping these norms and values established? In other words, which came first? Well, the history of pink and blue for babies may help us here. 

When the two colours first came on the scene as options for baby clothes in the mid nineteenth century, infant clothing was traditionally white because this was easy to bleach. Initially, pink was decided as the masculine colour as it was bolder while blue was more palatable to the eye. It was more submissive and therefore suitable for females. With the Women’s Liberation movement, women decided that they wanted to wear the dominant shade and pink became increasingly associated with femininity. This suggests that colour relationships will come to pass and fall out of favour, but the ultimate distinction between male and female will always need to be marked aesthetically. In 2021, we seem to be at the beginning of transcending the predetermining of gender from birth. Yellow - a neutral (for now!) - is being chosen more often for nurseries and baby clothes, and some parents even encourage their child to choose their own gender.

A relationship between colour and something as important as gender identity might seem a strange one. Afterall, isn’t colour completely subjective? Doesn’t colour not even exist at all? It’s true that colour is sometimes defined as a lack of that colour. The red of the tomato, for example, looks this way because that shade is the very shade that wavelengths of light cannot absorb on a tomato. We see colour on objects because of the way their properties react when light hits them, hence why we cannot see colour when in a dark or barely lit room. In fact, if there were no humans on earth, there would also be no colour. 

It goes without saying, that colour is also highly subjective. We will never truly know how another person sees a shade. Some folks are colourblind, but even among those that are not, there are regular arguments about whether a shade is blue or purple, green or blue, or orange or red. Clearly we all experience colours slightly differently, and our emotional reactions can differ too. There’s a reason that we don’t all share the same favourite colour. Some colours speak to people more than they do to others. In a sense, colour is nothing if not completely subjective. In this way then, perhaps it makes sense that colour and gender have been linked. Gender, like colour, is a completely subjective and personal entity that everyone has a completely different experience of. No one experiences exactly the same gender identity, just as no one experiences the same reactions or even perceptions of colour. Not only is gender a fluid, ever-changing spectrum, but it’s also expressed and felt in many different ways, unique to everyone. We know there would be no colours if there were no humans on the earth, but would there be objective gender roles and rules if there were no societies to suggest them? In this way, maybe it does make perfect sense.