Assemblage is art made by assembling disparate elements, often everyday objects. Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, and other ephemera are arranged and adhered to a surface. Automatism refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of […]
Jules Kang Sharpe is reading off their open tabs to me from their iphone on a sunny Friday morning in November. Lots of gluten-free recipes. Eels, which Sharpe mentions people have been really into, due to them being both “cute little grungy animals,” as well as the It Girls of the moment as they head […]
For any of my felted works, I start with rough sketches of what I want to make as it’s nice to have a plan to follow, but I keep the sketches very loose as a lot of the details and choices I make for the pieces come out naturally through the process of working with […]
“Hello? I just had a missed call from this number.” Shaena Soares calls me from her car. She just started driving for Uber. “I thought I had something to do today, let me pull over.” Soares apologizes and says her brain is scattered. “I’ve got five kids, two sets of twins and one in the […]
When I sat down with this issue’s cover artist, Michelle Perez, and asked what has been inspiring her recently, she brightened: “Girl monster movies.” Specifically, Jennifer’s Body. After moving to Providence from Jacksonville, FL (which she describes as stripmall country) to study illustration at RISD, Perez started researching the local lore and learned of the […]
“I was born and raised in Providence. I’m locally grown organic,” says cartoonist and illustrator Matthew Kramer. Kramer graduated from Brown with an MFA in Literary Arts and works as a freelance artist. They just returned from Paris where they completed a three month poetry residency. “There’s always people in the parks lounging in Luxembourg […]
Photo: Rites of Ochún, Carmen Christina Moreno. As summer tapers, the leaves will fall, annual flowers will die, apples will drop and rot into the ground. The sweet stench of plant death will be absorbed by the soil and digested, if it’s lucky, by underground structures called mycelium. Mycelium are the root-like, fungi structures that […]
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.” When there is little quiet time to […]
Is there a moment in a horse’s stride when all four hooves are off the ground? was the question Leland Stanford wanted Eadweard Muybridge to investigate. In 1878, Muybridge, a photographer roaming the western U.S. in a horse-drawn carriage/darkroom, took a series of photographs at Stanford’s Palo Alto racetrack. Muybridge photographed a horse named Sallie […]
Mad Max inspired food truck race. Illustrated by Zoë Anderson. This month, Motif was honored to welcome back Zoë Anderson of Warwick for our July Food Truck Award nominees issue. This is the sixth time her work has graced our cover. Taking inspiration from Motif’s Food Truck Awards, Anderson also drew inspiration from the Mad […]