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Shije Interviews Multi-Media Artist Alexis Karl

[ I met Alexis Karl at a gallery where she was performing fragrance design and came to find this was but one facet of her talent.] – Shije

Shije:  Alexis! I love your Gothic music Ondyne’s Demise. How did you get started in the world of fragrance creation?

AK:  Well, it started out with me being a multi media artist…that led to perfume.

Alexis

S:  Multi-media – but I think of specific scents from the gallery, when I met you. Earthy, rich fragrance —

AK:  Ah, I remember that. My exhibitions and performances often have elements of fragrance. I believe fragrance as an ambient element can break boundaries of architecture and alter a visitor’s perception, much in the way music can make a room seem large or small…

Scent is so similar. I can make a gallery become a forest with the scent of dirt, oak moss and flowers, or an ancient edifice with notes of stone and fossilized resins. Fragrance has that power. It is really quite an amazing artistic medium.

S:  How did it turn into a business for you?

AK:  It was not my initial intention to become part of the fragrance world, but rather, to create olfactory art works…sellable, small, fragrant art pieces that harkened back to an age before large fragrance companies. I have always strived for a very personal approach to fragrance creation, in in that vein, bespoke, or custom created fragrance are still my favorite to create!

S:  What is a ‘bespoke fragrance’?

AK:  Bespoke is a term for a custom created scent..usually for an individual, and it denotes something very special. Bespoke perfumes are pricy as they are created for one person, like a couture gown. It’s a word definitely used in the fragrance world.

S:  Here’s a link to your store so that everyone can go to House of Cherry Bomb and order the fragrance you got mentioned at the awards ceremony! I loved your celebrity-on-the-red-carpet photos of that, in sunny California! What are those awards called?

AK:  You mean The Art and Olfaction Awards! One of our scents, Tobacco Cognac, was a finalist, which was such an honor!

hocb_TCbottle2

S:  Congratulations on your success! What’s a time you’d point to as a turning point in your career? Right place at the right time, people or situations that serendipitously shaped you? That helped you to gain more success specifically in the fragrance biz?

AK:  How I got into Fragrance: as a multi media artist, and was working with the Fragrance house, Firmenich, years ago doing installations and artistic work for their creative team, when I was first introduced to their perfumers. I was immediately fascinated and inspired. The place was flooded with scent! There was this incredible juggling of fragrance notes going on all around me by master perfumes, and here I was creating large- scale paintings and installations to present their works. I thought, I would like to do this!

S:  So….the science, the alchemy if you will, of making a fragrance from scratch, it inspired you to get into that.

AK:  Yes! But… in another way. A way that incorporates my art, a way where colors synthesize with fragrance notes, where each fragrance I make will be a work of art- from concept, to scent, to packaging to presentation. So I started researching. I delved into the study of historical fragrances, from Ancient Egyptian to 18th Century French perfumes. I looked at how the fragrances were inexorably linked to culture.

S:  What do you mean inexorably linked to culture?  What does your research entail?

AK:  My research entails reading old texts on perfumery, from 15th Century Islamic texts on fragrant gardens to translations made from the walls of ancient Egyptian Tombs to reading biographies on Marie Antoinette’s perfumer. I lecture of the Art of Perfume at the Metropolitan Museum regularly now, so I research quite a bit before each lecture. All of this information on historical perfumes is very inspirational, yet I try to incorporate it into a modern perfumery practice. My scents for Scent By Alexis and the scents I create with Maria at House of Cherry Bomb are always modern. We respect the tradition of perfume, but want our perfumes to be relevant now, in this age, influenced by our urban culture.

S:  So, Alexis, with your flair for the historical, mythological and natural —

AK:  Yes! Those three! From this research I created my first line of fragrances: oil-based perfumes held in hand-gilded 18th Century inspired flacon. The research landed me lecturing work at the Metropolitan Museum and a launch at Henri Bendel. My work has changed so much over the last ten years. The scents have become more complex, and have a literary tilt.

S:  Literary how?

AK:  Bottles are no longer hand-gilded, but now hand-etched …the fragrance names are snippets of poetry or lines from favorite writers.  My “Utopian Body” series is inspired by Michel Foucault’s The Utopian Body essay. The first two fragrances in the line create a scented poem: “Body made luminous. Secret, Sacred Cyphered.” In fact, I’ll tell you a secret nobody else knows yet: the next fragrance will be entitled “The Harmony of Being” and serve as the next line in the olfactory poem.

S: An ‘olfactory poem!’ I love that! I love secrets! And ciphers! What do you mean 18th Century scents! How old and precious are these materials you and Maria use?

AK:  From http://www.scentbyalexisperfumes.com are three descriptions: Body Made Luminous is an all natural scent composed of chocolate absolute, which is this deep rich bitter chocolate, fossilized amber, which comes from 35 million year old resin, and lush Moroccan flowers. The scent is deep and rich with a fiery, glowing heat. It is extremely sensual… daringly edible and is meant to enhance the skin’s own warmth.

Secret, Sacred, Cyphered is a heady fragrance of Moroccan flowers and tuberose blended with hints of leather, ginger and fig, all tied together by natural vanilla. It is elegant while still very sensual, and it’s base is a skin accord I actually developed for a lecture I did at the Guggenheim Museum. It is refined yet complex, and beautifully heavy.

The Harmony of Being, which will be released this spring is quite elegant. It is strives to create balance of dark and light- and so black agar wood, coffee flower and beeswax absolute play with hints of ambergris, woods and a melange of flowers like neroli, lily of the valley and mimosa. The perfume volleys back and forth with green notes and lush flowers and always a trace of delicate smoke and again, skin.

All three fragrances find a common note of skin, for the wearers body is the true base. They were created with skin in mind. They are full of rare and natural oils, and I think they are very sensual and alluring…very special.

S: Are musks always expensive, wild animal products?

AK:  Well, musks are no longer animal products, but now are synthetically created! Maria and I have some vintage musks that are about 50 years old from Morocco. The ouds are natural… and we often use vintage ouds as well…so, they are indeed hard to come by. We have found ourselves rooting in the dusty, never-opened cabinets of oil purveyors to search for forgotten Arabian ouds, the longer they sit, the more viscous and heavy the scent!

S:  Cool! Vegan musk! That is just so Brooklyn!

AK:  Ha! I guess it really is. Also, I have two fragrance lines, Scent by Alexis and House of Cherry Bomb, which I co-founded with perfumer Maria McElroy of Aroma M.  House of Cherry Bomb is all about NYC. We pair Classic NYC chic with edgy modern. We use rare, beautiful oils sourced from all over the world. Flowers from Morocco and Spain, more from France, citrus notes wild-crafted in California… vintage, hard to come by musks and ouds. I adore working with Maria who is like my sister, and who, with music blaring out of our speakers at the Aroma A Atelier, we pass oils back and forth, back and forth, talking excitedly about ideas and composing fragrances all the while.

S:  Sounds fun! Thanks for joining us.

AK:  Thanks for having me.

S:  My band says hi to your band.

AK:  Ha!

S:  Tell me their names again?

AlexisKarl1

AK:  Ondyne’s Demise are: Alexis Karl, Fara Badrieva and Paul Ashton. Now we’re joined by our incandescent fire dancer, Erin the Red! A press release from our archives:

A huge array of amazing performances happened at http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/les.htm! My solo show MYTHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION challenges theories of creation, suggesting human-animal hybrids as our true evolutionary ancestors while promising the existence of these creatures still. The installation, composed of large scale paintings, crystal and obsidian encrusted sculptures, film, fragrance, dark ambient music and live performance spanned a 2,500 sq. foot Warehouse in Brooklyn, NY.

Sneak peek into our set: https://soundcloud.com/ondynesdemise/neon-jesus

Ondyne's-Demise-Live

See you soon.

S:  Yes, for sure at Fashion Week in New York. Everybody, get these free albums as a gift from Alexis Karl. Lost Cities is the newest one, here:

http://onyudo.com/#!/albums/lost-cities

AK:  Yes, and the other one online is also free, and here’s the press about it. “Mythological Evolution is a dark ambient soundtrack created for singer Alexis Karl’s multi-media one person exhibition, MYTHOLOGICAL EVOLUTIONA RE-CREATION CREATION MYTH, which explores the theory of human-hybrid evolution and the reality of mythology.  Created as part of a soundtrack for Mythological Evolution for The Hall of Celestial Transformation. Album available as a free download. Free MYTHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION SOUNDTRACK:

http://onyudo.com/album/mythological-evolution

Mythological Evolution by Ondyne’s Demise (in collaboration with Anima Animus Animal) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.”

LINKS!

http://www.scentbyalexisperfumes.com

https://www.etsy.com/shop/houseofcherrybomb

http://houseofcherrybomb.com

http://bodymadeluminous.tumblr.com

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SCENTBYALEXIS

http://onyudo.com/#!/albums/lost-cities

Photo Credits:

All black and white photos and the photo of the Tobacco Cognac bottle are credited to Jorge Colombo

The photo of the live performance with the fire dancer is credited to Eden Brower 

 

Shije Meets Mark Kostabi

Shije Meets Mark Kostabi

Shije:  A giant ‘Kostabified’ guitar greets people at the entrance to The Cutting Room. What a beauty. I think I stared at it for half an hour. How did it come about?

KostabiMark_05011303_edited-1

Mark Kostabi:  Adam Sands, a concert booker and party/event promoter in New York asked me to do it. I agreed and along with showing many paintings within the Cutting Room, I feel like I’ve become part of the family there.

S:  Lots of musical instruments in your paintings! Which came first for you art or the music?

Free Listening Station – Mark Kostabi

MK:  I started as a visual artist at age 6. I started as a pianist at age 12. My mother was a piano teacher.

S:  Should we hear your paintings, are we supposed to imagine sounds? In music there is such an interplay, the language of music, spoken between the musicians on stage… in your visual artform do you ever riff back and forth with other artists, and if so, how long does it take to get a ping back?

MK:  I do feel art and music are very related. Both have colors and harmony. I’ve done many collaborations with other visual artists and we riffed back and forth: Enrico Baj, Tadanoori Yokoo, Howard Finster, Arman, Paul Kostabi and Tony Esposito. Sometimes the ping happens immediately. Other times it takes a while.

S:  At your exhibit at the Dillon Gallery in Chelsea, bass player Paul Nowinski told me you are from Estonia! That’s fascinating. Is there a link online where I can learn more about your family during this exciting time in history? Do you speak Estonian?

MK:  I was born in Los Angeles to Estonian immigrants. I understand a lot of Estonian but speak only a little. People have said that my visual art relates to some historical Estonian artists. The Estonian art critic, Heie Treier, could elaborate better on this. I feel very connected to the Estonian music scene.

S:  So Mark, I wrote to Heie and here’s that:

Hello Heie,

I’m interviewing Mark Kostabi, especially exploring his roots. May I please include a statement from you about his visual art? If you name other Estonian artists, I can link their wikipedia pages, so the readers will know what you mean and can explore the other artists in more depth.

Best,
Shije

Dear Shije,

I wrote about the Estonian connection in the catalogue of Mark Kostabi’s exhibition in Tallinn in 1998. The catalogue is printed, the text is not available in the internet. I have thought about the topic a lot.
Perhaps similar kind of metaphysical painting is strongly present in the Estonian painting of the cold war period (Soviet period), in the 1970s-80s. Kind of mystical, resembling de Chirico – Wikipedia. For example Mari Kurismaa, Andres Tolts; architect Vilen Künnapu promoted this kind of art in his texts. It also occured in graphic art.  See Ando Keskküla – Animation on YouTube!
It’s a long story.
Best,
Heie

S:  Is there a real life muse behind the faceless female?

spiritual_seduction_orkos201359-2

MK:  Basically I just like seeing girls with ponytails. Especially high ponytails. I think it’s so cute and sexy. The great painter and influential art critic, Walter Robinson, said all the girls with ponytails in my paintings are Heidi Follin, who is the long time girlfriend of my brother Indrek Paul Kostabi. But now my girlfriend, who is Estonian: Greesi Desiree Langovits, often wears ponytails that look exactly like the Kostabi painting ponytails. She even creates the round ponytail “tie” with her hair. It’s so cute. We call them Kostabi Tails.

S:  If there were a rosetta stone, you know, a legend to the map, a decoder ring for your symbols, which of your artworks would it be?

IMG_1075

MK: You’ve just given me an idea for a new book. Thanks. It doesn’t exist yet but a painting that may come close is The Rhythm of Inspiration, a very large and detailed painting that was in my 1998 Tallinn retrospective (which was curated by Heie Treier) and for many years was displayed within the Estonia Concert Hall in Tallinn.

I’ve done over 30 books so I don’t know which is the most likely to contain a decoder ring, but Conversations With Kostabi comes to mind as a strong possibility.

S:  Mark, I like your painting Climate Control, the world out of control, but soothed by the familiar shape and shading of the ponytail lady and familiar symbols.  Tell me a secret about the symbols that nobody else knows! Example, what’s with the witchy hat?

MK:  The relevance of the pointed hat depends on the context of the rest of the painting. It could be for witches, parties, dunces or an antenna for wisdom.

S:  Is Misguided Perfection set in Italy? I like the depth of the shadows in it, and that it looks like three women holding up the sun! Strong women! Can you tell me more secrets about all the significant symbols in the painting?

MK:  If you asked a prolific film maker, like Woody Allen for example, about things within any of his movies and you cited the title of the film, I imagine he would know which film you were talking about. But I have made over 20,000 paintings and I don’t remember all the titles. I must say however, I like the title: Misguided Perfection. One word of that title could describe my brain.

S:  Until the event at Martin Lawrence Gallery, I thought of you as a painter. I think because of CD covers you’ve made for The Ramones, and Guns N’ Roses. So to find out you sculpt — the two sculptures were a beautiful surprise.

mark-kostabi-cover-adios-amigos-ramones-photo-by-george-duboseuse-your-illusion-1

MK:  Thanks. I pointed at you like a rockstar.

S:  You’re the rockstar! Such a fun evening. More than once I was asked if I modeled for any of these.

ShijePonytailModel

MK: What did you say?

S:  I lied, “Only the ponytail ones.”  *both laugh*

Cutting Room Photo ©2015 Derek Storm
Artwork Photos Courtesy of Mark Kostabi and Martin Lawrence Gallery
Additional Photos ©2015 Kenmarespoppin.com and Shije.com

For this full interview in Spanish, click here.

#WorldCup2014 A Poem

“Long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” — Juneval A.D. 100

These are the days of wine and roses
of elegant lies
of media poses

and if the poor
can’t give more than they take
let them die in the streets, let them all eat cake

for today is the day
of the game of kings
of which Cláudia and fat Pitbull sing

so let them hide in the favelas
fearing for their lives, or
so live-streams tell us
hide in plain sight, un-show the world
poor Brazil’s plight

because the party must go on
to sell those commercials
for Chevy and Ford, & to pay JLo’s rehearsals

Nero
and his bread and circus
can’t touch Brazil’s teargas and all that hurts us,
this is on a grander scale
deaths that are not reported
and reporters beaten in jail

but let’s film from the beach and show TV a smile
the game is on
it only la$t$ for awhile

“… iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.”

(Juvenal, Sátiras X, 77–81)

Piece of the Blue Sky


Fly

You can
cry with the saints or
laugh with the fools,
be your own personal Judas
and break the golden rule

It doesn’t matter anyway,
I know you’re gonna fly away

You can soar with the wings of eagles,
ride with the doves
reaching into the heavens
calling out for love

You can fly high
into your piece
into your piece
into your piece of the blue sky

You can
live your life in detention or
just be on time to school,
worry about memory retention and
obey all the rules
You can
question all the answers or
be a “good girl”
stick with “the winners” or
be your own personal world

It doesn’t matter anyway,
I know you’re gonna fly away

You can soar with the wings of eagles,
ride with the doves
reaching into the heavens
crying out for love

You can fly high
into your piece
into your piece
into your piece of the blue sky

You can soar with the wings of eagles,
ride with the doves
reaching into the heavens
calling out for love

You can fly high, fly
into your piece of the blue sky

It doesn’t matter anyway,
I know you’re gonna fly away

You can soar with the wings of eagles,
ride with the doves
reaching out into the heavens
calling out for love

You can fly high, fly
into your piece of the blue sky

Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
I’m begging of you please don’t take my man
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don’t take him just because you can
Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green

Your smile is like a breath of spring
Your voice is soft like summer rain
And I just cannot compete with you, Jolene

He talks about you in his sleep
There’s nothing I can do to keep
From crying when he calls your name, Jolene

And I can easily understand
How you could easily take my man
But you don’t know what he means to me, Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don’t take my man
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don’t take him just because you can

You could have your choice of men
But I will never love again
He’s the only one for me, Jolene

I had to have this talk with you
My happiness depends on you
Whatever you decide to do, Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
I’m begging you please don’t take my man
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don’t take him just because you can

Hiaku “Spring”

Spring in the sunshine
The trees have gone to popcorn
An airplane flies by

Sol primavera
Palomitas de árbol
Un avión vuela