The Last Shadow Puppets

Al Farrow’s gun part sculptures

Al Farrow just did a show with me at the Martin Irvine Gallery in Washington DC. He builds religious reliquaries and mosques out of gun parts: AK47s and Uzis, in particular. They’re really beautiful. It sounds gimmicky but it’s actually extraordinary. The newer stuff that he’s doing is extremely time-consuming. His work is very meticulous, and the beauty of the craft is a striking contrast to how instantly and senselessly life can be taken. Read more

The futuristic retro sounds of DJ Z-Trip

This guy is my favorite DJ. He’s the inventor of the mash-up, but his skills go way beyond that. I love to DJ, but when i do, I play a lot of classics. I don’t stick to new stuff because I’m not trying to pull out the top forty banger for the club. That’s what I like about the way Z-Trip plays. He actually inspired me to start DJ-ing in the first place. He mixes hip-hop with classic rock, eighties, and all sorts of weird stuff you wouldn’t think would go together. He’ll have people dancing to Deep Purple, for instance, who would never usually listen to a Deep Purple record. It’s a real skill to be able to entertain and educate at the same time. That’s what I try and do with my art, and that’s what I enjoy about DJ Z-Trip: that ability to slip the cool, lesser known songs in there, which works because of the inertia of the stuff people do know. He understands how to navigate that balance.

Roberto Mollá

I bought three pieces of Spanish artist Roberto Mollá’s work at the recent Art Basel show in Miami, which we both exhibited at. He works on off-white graph paper, which immediately sets up this very firm grid, and then he paints these very graphic black and white patterns into certain areas of the composition. He also does larger things, like circles and teardrops of red paint, around which he works these incredibly meticulous pencil drawings in various styles. If a graffiti artist was also an impeccable illustrator, this is what the work would look like. It’s all based on a foundation of anatomy, but it’s drawing upon the style of traditional Japanese artwork at the same time. So in one of his pieces, for instance, there is a woman riding on a Koi fish with a screen design of trees behind her. The tension between all these elements is fascinating. At a glance they are graphically powerful, but then they also have this meticulous subtlety which is just beautiful. Read more