Once Upon A Time is the latest work from Curxes unfolding fairytale, with their signature foreboding menace juxtaposing the industrial and theatrical to brilliant effect. The song’s inventive kitchen-sink beat and 80s-drenched synthetics blend a cranking, machine-like pop tune behind styled and confident vocals.

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Just finishing at Brighton with a degree in Illustration, Katie Scott is one of my favourites from this year’s graduates. Her intricate watercolors resemble medical drawings, but with a closer look, reveal beautifully surreal diagrams of hybrid creatures.

Her subtle use of colour and her immaculate eye for detail allow for her interests in early science, and the world’s uncertainty in this area, to come alive in her drawings.

Changing perception about the female body around the world through art; that’s the idea behind this amazing exhibition currently on in Brighton. British artist Jamie McCartney has created a monumental wall sculpture showing women’s most private parts. The nine metre long polyptych consists of four hundred plaster casts of vulvas, all of them unique, which has been arranged into ten large panels.

The age range of the women is from 18 to 76, including mothers and daughters, identical twins, transgendered men and women, as well as a woman pre- and post natal. Described as ‘the Vagina Monologues of sculpture’, this piece is intended to change the lives of women for good: ‘I realised that many women suffer anxiety about their genitals and I was in a unique position to do something about that’. Half a decade since its humble beginnings, the exhibtion is still a success.

Russ Mills, known in urban art circles as Byroglyphics, is turning heads with his unique juxtaposing of loose, tagger-esque lashings of paint and traditional portraiture. The Brighton-based illustrator and animator studied and Leeds Met and has since been showing at galleries including Signal Gallery and Red Propeller Gallery. Inspired by the Harajuku phenomenon in popular culture, Mills says he loves ‘the way every piece of popular culture from the recent past is smashed together in a garish soup and regurgitated into real life with absolutely no boundaries’. Glimpses of realism in his work are obscured by loose abstraction, and his application of that inspiration is coming though loud and clear.

I’ve been searching for the artist of the clever Day Of The Dead Presidents piece since it flashed past me somewhere last year. Luckily Brighton based Illustrator Matt Taylor has just contributed to Graniph, throwing his work back into the spotlight. Along with National Geographic Taylor is influenced by comic books. There’s a definite Paul Pope vibe in some of his more detailed pieces.

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We love the coolly detached electro mash-up of Brighton group, Fujiya and Miyagi. So we checked in with vocalist-guitarist David Best to find out more about their latest album, Lightbulbs [out on Pod through Inertia], and the place it all started for them — their hometown of Brighton, England: ‘Brighton was just full of wanna-be mods with cravats dancing like they were in Quadrophenia’, he says. ‘It was awful. It seemed to be very unfashionable to be an electronic group back then. Now everybody combines synths with guitars. It makes me want to start a mod group’.
What is your enduring memory of the recording process for Lightbulbs?
‘

My enduring memory is walking from where I lived in Preston Park, up and over various hills with steep gradients until I got to the studio on the other side of Brighton. I’d get a samosa and a can of coke and have a listen to what Steve had done. Then I would walk back’.

Are you still enjoying listening to the album, or have you moved on already?
‘I’ve only listened to it to check that it plays okay. You need to give it a break because the production is so intense you no longer hear the songs, only the details. It was the same with [previous album] Transparent Things. We’ve already recorded an album for joggers to run to and we are thinking about what the next one will be like’.

I’m a big fan of the vibrant, textured work of Brighton, England based illustrator Patrick Gildersleeves, who uses ‘pencil, felt tip pen and paint’ and is ‘inspired by the people of the world, patterns, paper, animals and plants’. He is a part of the Joyful Bewilderment group show at the new Rough Trade record store in London, opening October 2, 2008.

Created by Danish based research team, CITA, Slow Furl is a cybernetic environment that fills a room. CITA conceived this project as an organism with its own patterns of action and reaction. A skin envelopes the space and moves itself through arms connected to micro-controllers, and in reaction through sensory patches that feel movement. The skin unifies these two energies, producing unexpected and mysterious movement. It has just finished exhibiting at Lighthouse in Brighton and we are sorry we missed it.

If, as they say, ‘posture is everything!’, then it’s a good thing that the talented folk at Brighton-based illustration studio Shotopop believe in keeping their ‘shoulders back, legs straight, and chin up’. Oh, and their work is kinda sparkly too. [see also the illustrations of Edwin Ushiro and then check out the beatboxing skills of Brighton's own Beardyman]

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