Our first (and last) Advert...

This is to be our first, and last, advert for the store. We are very sad to announce that AW08/09 will be the last season in this evolution of twosee... We will be closing our doors at the end of January. We would like to thank all of you that have been involved in helping us make it a very special place indeed. We have worked with our long-time collaborator, John Lindquist on the image.

Photography: John Lindquist

Model: Jake 

Layout: Anthony Stephinson

And, as the image states, there will be a 'wake' held for the store in february...

twosee launch with 5Preview...

Special Thanks to Liz and Andrew Blyszak for all of their help...

Weird Love and Invasion for the Live music, and Pandoras Jukebox and Cathal for the Djing...

Thanks to Peroni, Vitamin Water and Jagermeister for their sponsorship...

And of course, thank you 5Preview for everything...

INTERIOR a selection of shorts

Special thanks to Alex Johns from London Kicks for making this video.

Please take a look at our youtube to see a little more of the films...

A.D.D

As fashion week blur's into fashion month, you may experience so many brand new sights, smells and sounds it could just fry your senses, but don't fret...this night might just sort you out....





find us at www.myspace.com/youandiandadd. see you soon.

Simon Bookish - EVERYTHING/EVERYTHING

I've been working over the last few months with a very close friend of mine, Leo Chadburn who performs under the moniker Simon Bookish. I have been a fan of his music since I met him, so I was honoured to be asked to art direct his new album artwork (the cover is featured here). The album is called EVERYTHING/EVERYTHING and features astonishingly complex pop songs composed for a fifteen piece band. It is being released by the german independent label Tomlab in October this year, and when he tours it you must go and take in his live show, it's spell binding.

SIMON BOOKISH website

TOMLAB website

TO SEE... SEE NEW YORK Louise Bourgeois

Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)

NY 10128 0173

June 27th - September 28th

Louise Bourgeois is a full-career retrospective of one of the most important artists of our time. This exhibition, which will fill the entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and one adjacent gallery, will be the most comprehensive examination to date of Bourgeois’s long and distinguished career.

Born almost a century ago, Louise Bourgeois has remained steadfastly at the vanguard of the development of contemporary art for more than 70 years, and continues to create new bodies of work with characteristic energy and restless innovation. Throughout a career that has intersected with many of the leading avant-garde movements of the 20th century, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Post-Minimalism, she has remained resolutely committed to a singular creative vision. Although her oeuvre includes painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Bourgeois is best known for her sculptures, which range in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and across a diverse array of mediums including wood, bronze, latex, marble, and fabric. Moving freely between abstraction and figuration, she has developed a richly symbolic visual idiom that encompasses totemic forms, ambiguously gendered anatomical fragments, and towering spiders, as well as the assemblages of found objects that are encased in her environmental-scale installations. These images powerfully articulate the psychological imperatives that drive her artistic process, based in large part on memories of a troubled childhood in France and her subsequent struggle to find personal equilibrium throughout her adult life. Louise Bourgeois presents a nuanced exploration of the artist’s distinctive iconography and major themes, in an installation that evokes both an intensely individualized process of introspection, and the universal complexities of the human experience.

This exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in association with Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Support for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presentation was provided by the Leadership Committee for Louise Bourgeois: John Cheim and Howard Read; Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr.; Karsten Greve; Xavier Hufkens
Gallery; Tina Kim and Hyun-Sook Lee; Jennifer and David Stockman; Ginny Williams; and Iwan Wirth. (TO BUY TICKETS CLICK HERE)

TO SEE... SEE PARIS Miroslav Tichy

Centre Georges Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris

June 25 2008 - September 22 2008
11h00 - 21h00

This is the first exhibition in France of the photographic work of Czech artist Miroslav Tichy, now more than 80 years old. Only recently discovered, his work reveals the distinctive talent of a marginal and somewhat monomaniacal figure who steadfastly refused the social, political and personal values of the Communist period, form its beginning in 1948 to its end in the late 1980s. Tichý took up photography in the mid-1950s, reinventing it as it were from scratch and building his own cameras and enlargers from shoe-boxes, tin cans, recycled glass and other waste materials.

His timeless and uncategorizable images, shot instinctively or carelessly on handmade cameras with makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream. Women on the TV screen : these are his single, 

obsessional subject.

Rescued from neglect by his neighbour, the film director Roman Buxbaum, in 1989, Tichý's work was first shown at the Sevilla Biennale in 2004. This exhibition at the Centre Pompidou brings together a number of cameras and some hundred photographs, mostly from the Foundation Tichý Ocean.

otnemem

It’s your birthday today, so I got you a little present. I would have just bought you a beer, but who knows where that would have ended?

So instead, I got you a bell. I think I may have had to pawn your watch to buy it, but what the hell did you need a watch for, anyway?

You’re probably asking yourself, why a bell? In fact, I’m guessing you’re going to be asking yourself that question every time you find it in your pocket. Too many of these letters now. Too many for you to dig back into every time you want to know the answer to some little question.

It’s a joke, actually. A practical joke. But think if it this way: I’m not really laughing at you so much as with you.

I’d like to think that every time you take it out of your pocket and wonder, why do I have this bell? A little part of you, a little piece of your broken brain, will remember and laugh, like I’m laughing now.

Besides, you do know the answer. It was something you learned before. So if you think abut it, you’ll know.

Back in the old days, people were obsessed with the fear of being buried alive. You remember now? Medical science not being quite what it is today, it wasn’t uncommon for people to suddenly wake up in a casket. So rich folks had their coffins outfitted with breathing tubes. Little tubes running up to the mud above so that if someone woke up when they weren’t supposed to, they wouldn’t run out of oxygen. Now, they must have tested this out and realized that you could shout yourself hoarse through the tube, but it was too narrow to carry much noise. Not enough to attract attention, at least. So a string was run up the tube to a little bell attached to the headstone. If a dead person came back to life, all he had to do was ring his little bell till someone came and dug him up again.

I’m laughing now, picturing you on a bus or maybe in a fast-food restaurant, reaching into your pocket and finding your little bell and wondering to yourself where it came from, why you have it. Maybe you’ll even ring it.

Happy birthday, buddy.


taken from Jonathan Nolans "Memento Mori"

chalk their pretty smile

TO SEE... SEE NEW YORK Teenage Jesus & The Jerks

@ The Knitting Factory

June 13th

8pm & 11pm

The legendary No Wave pioneers led by a howling Lydia Lunch will perform together for the first time in thirty years. Be sure to be on time though as they will be performing twice on the same night, and they are known for their high energy 30 minute sets loaded with one minute tracks. They will be performing at the launch of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore’s new book about the New Wave scene. It coincides with the recent release of Mark Master’s eponymously titled book on the same scene. No Wave existed for the briefest of time but its ripples are still being felt on the music and performance scenes. It represented a new kind of unlearning, and its disaffected attitude still resonates with new recording artists like Crystal Castles and Hearts Revolution. After exploding onto the scene in the late seventies and disappearing just as quickly by the beginning of the eighties, it seems to have never really gone away. If you can’t make it to the gig(s) in the Knitting Factory then take a little time out to listen to a few of these bands:

James Chance and the Contortions, Mars, DNA, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Arto Lindsay and the Modern Lovers… and, explore the scene around them yourself, you’ll almost certainly be surprised.

TO SEE... SEE LONDON Cy Twombly : Cycles and Seasons

@ Tate Modern

June 19th - September 14th

For me, the most important painter of the last fifty years: this exhibition will coincide with Cy Twombly's 80th birthday this year. When I was twelve years old I won the award for Classical Civilisation at school and chose a Cy Twombly retrospective monograph as my prize. He has stubbornly created his own pictorial language out of scratches and curves, to the point of obtrusive abstraction; often only giving away a feeling in the title of the piece. Despite being lumped in with the abstract expressionists in the fifties, he has travelled his own path. His work has always been out of context and will therefore never lose its contemporaneity. The colour looks as fresh as the day it was applied, and the scale is often dizzying, with marks ranging from tiny scratches to huge expressive curves and arcs; often punctuated by his distinctive writing style, leaving little clues. The new retrospective promises to span Twombly’s whole career, up to present day, and be the biggest exhibition of Twombly this country has seen in over thirty years. It will include paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs. The sculptures I find less important as works, but I do feel they serve to inform his shape and line, making them useful sketches.

I am full of anticipation for this show, and cannot remember the last time I was this excited about an artists retrospective, I urge you to go and see it while you can; Twombly shows are very rare things. And, I believe this will be one of the most important of his career.

twosee is now at 21 fouberts place...

Having outgrown 17 Monmouth Street, we have moved and we are now settling into our new location. The original store is closed and everything is in place at 21 fouberts place: within minutes from Oxford Circus tube, and just off Regent St, Carnaby St, and Conduit St. I think you’ll agree it would be tough to sit more centrally. As loyal customers to the store we thought it only right to give you all an insight. I have been looking at Cy Twombly in the process of designing the new store’s interior. In the last few months I have made the pilgrimage to the Tate Modern 6 or 8 times just to go into the Twombly room and gaze upon his ‘Quattro Stagioni’ (Four Seasons). It seemed fitting to work with images that were ‘seasonal’ in the creation of the interior. In particular it was his use of colour that inspired me. He has an incredible ability to juxtapose the subtlest shade of flesh or linen next to a slash of sunshine yellow, or cadmium red. This contradiction was the starting point. 

I am working on the construction with my design partner Andres Ros Soto, whom I worked with two years earlier on the Number 22 store on Carnaby Street. There have been many transitory periods; but the constant in designing the new twosee has always been Twombly and his skill as a colourist and his seemingly haphazard, but in reality, inscrutable sense of composition. It came as such a welcome surprise to have Twombly's retrospective coincide with the new store opening. Just as in a Twombly, the devil is certainlyin the details with our new space. The rails are made from Purpleheart wood, imported from Brazil, and the brass is being made bespoke in Mexico. Purpleheart is a beautiful wood, which is naturally purple when exposed to air. Over time it loses it's hue and becomes a deep reddish grey. The space is cut through with slashes of full-length mirror spliced together by porcelain floor tiles. But. for the rest, you'll have to come in and see... We are open 7 days a week, monday to saturday 11am-7pm and sunday from 1pm to 7pm.

Wolfgang Tillmans

28th May - 13th July

MAUREEN PALEY.

21 Herald Street

London E2 6JT

t. +44 (0)20 7729 4112

info@maureenpaley.com

Wolfgang Tillmans is one of those rare talents. His work has always had a raw feel to it usually associated with documentary photography. In fact, the first time I met Wolfgang he was doing just that at a friends club night: Kashpoint in Soundshaft, behind Heaven. From that point on he seemed to everywhere... A very affable man, always holding a camera. I didn't think too much of it, until I saw the photographs from that night in his studio, and then later at the Tate Britain. I knew that he was a photographic artist, but to see the images after watching him take these snapshots was beautiful. He had a fascinating ability to seemingly control light. It seems that this documentation of his friends and the people around him has always been a concern for him, often taking them out of context, and utilising the photographic process itself. 

"something appropriate about them... something recognisable from the photographs in front of me - the beautiful found within the make-piece and sustained by the most ordinary" Norbert Schoener's portrait from www.tate.org 

For this solo exhibition at Maureen Paley Gallery he will be experimenting more with abstraction. Although, I believe it will be abstraction achieved through the use of ordinary things. The work itself that will be on show will be brand new, but we are assured that it will follow the lead of the image you see here. These abstractions seem to have an ethereal quality to them, and this control of light and manipulation of medium is apparent.

Wolfgang Tillmans was the first photographer, and non-british citizen, to win the Turner Prize.

Flykkiller Live at Twisted Licks

May 2nd 8pm - 3am
229 Great Portland Street
Box Office : 0207 323 7229

Entry is six pounds.

This may be the last chance to see flyKKiller in an intimate environment before they become stellar. Their recent tour of the UK after their collaboration with the store proved to be a huge success. This gig actually came about at the event we worked on, as Mark Beaumont from the NME got them on board. The venue is relatively new, but boasts a 700 capacity, and seems to be gathering momentum...

We'll be there, but this time in a non-performing capacity.
This time it's all about the music.

To buy tickets for this event in advance CLICK HERE.

Jack The Ripper and the East End

Museum in Docklands

West India Quay

E14 4AL

Booking Line: 0844 980 2151

Ticket prices vary, to book online CLICK HERE.

15th May - 2nd November 2008

Open Daily 10am - 6pm

As it's the first newsletter and this is the first 'to see' section devoted to London being released to you on this global network, the internet, this seemed like an obvious choice. The now mythical figure of Jack the Ripper was the first time that the media and the police had worked together, and it forced both parties' techniques to be innovative. Jack the Ripper was sensationalised by a media that was beginning to realise it's importance and influence over the general public, and it was not long before the newspapers were fighting against each other to try and produce more sensational descriptions of the murders. He represented the birth of the serial killer celebrity and the creation of such a thing by the mass media.

This exhibition 'Jack the Ripper and the East End' is purportedly the first of its kind. Although we have seen countless books written on the subject claiming to be revelatory, with their evidence to support their various claims to have found Jack's identity, none have been universally accepted as the answer. This exhibition goes to great lengths to allow us the general public to see a lot of this evidence first hand. It will give a lot londoners living in the east end a chance to see how their london experience compares to the east end then. The east end traditionally has always been a tough area with a checkered history peppered with violence and crime, and only in recent times has it been experiencing a renaissance with the popularity of the area within creative fields. It is now one of the most desirable areas of london to live, with house prices at an all time high, and becoming comparable to more traditionally moneyed areas of london.

Suffice to say I don't think it's important to bore you with my opinion on the identity of Jack himself, although I am a big fan of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbells graphic novel From Hell, as we have direct contact with the source 

material for the first time.

I urge you to take a trip to the Docklands, and go and see this exhibition of artefacts and evidence, and perhaps play sleuth to come to your own conclusions. But, most of all, take it as an opportunity to see a glimpse of the east end as it was, and take comfort in the fact that the whitechapel we know now is a much safer kinder place than the whitechapel that was...

[Tickets can be purchased in advance HERE.]

OVERVIEW: twosee's collaboration with flyKKiller

FlyKKiller are long time friends of the store. Having been chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the acts set to break through in 2008, who are we to argue. As a group they represent the meeting of minds between Stephen Hilton, who works with David Holmes (most notably on the Free Association project), and Pati Yang, who has had a successful electronic music career in her native Poland since she was 18. They were given a residency at The Fly Bar in London and asked the store to collaborate with them. We promised 'happenings and disturbances' and happenings and disturbances we gave... For the most recent installment in the residency we performed live 'geometry' using compasses, rulers, set squares and all sorts of scholarly equipment. Pati wore head-to-toe Patrik Rzepksi from the store (see the picture below) and David Holmes Dj'ed.



We attached large sheets of paper to places in the venue that were unavoidably walked upon, and then took our time to approach each sheet with the equipment, and drew out complex geometrical shapes. They were shapes that architects throughout the ages have used in the construction of celebrated buildings, drawn in charcoal, so that as they were tread upon they were erased: gone but not forgotten. The audience took a great interest in the geometry and people asked questions, they wanted to give their own opinion on fibonacci, or gnostic symbolism; it felt appreciated and necessary. It seemed like they were genuinely interested in the whole: both the band and the 'happenings and disturbances'.

This was the final chapter in the collaboration, but word has reached us that it may be moved to the Water Rats in Kings Cross and our services may be called upon again!



[The top Pati is wearing is sold out, but the leg pieces and high waisted shorts are available online at our online store HERE - Please check out their debut album 'Experiments in Violent Light' which was released on FLYKKLLR RCRDS at the end of last year, click HERE to buy it from Amazon.]

Three poems for women (Susan Griffin)

1.

This is a poem for a woman doing dishes.
This is a poem for a woman doing dishes.
It must be repeated.
It must be repeated,
again and again,
again and again,
because the woman doing dishes
because the woman doing dishes
has trouble hearing
has trouble hearing.


2.

And this is another poem for a woman
cleaning the floor
who cannot hear at all.
Let us have a moment of silence
for a woman who cleans the floor.


3.
And here is one more poem
for the woman at home
with children.
You never see her at night.
Stare at an empty place and imagine her there,
the woman with children
because she cannot be here to speak
for herself,
and listen
to what you think
she might say.

*NEW twosee STORE*

This is just a taster of what is to come for the new store. We are no longer in the store on Monmouth Street, and the wheels are in motion to move to 21 Fouberts Place to see it in a map, CLICK HERE. 

I have been looking at; bees, geometry, the paintings of Cy Twombly, Mayan mosaic, Aztec mozaic, Garden furniture, Islamic Temples, the Getty Centre...

Somewhere in that soup is the answer - I'm pretty excited about it - It should look beautiful.

Otto; Or, Up With Dead people

"Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a boy of no wealth and some distaste. My name is Otto. I unlive in Berlin sometimes, sometimes farther north, depending on mood. Then again, I only have one mood: dead. Undead. I find it difficult to make an unliving because I am homeless."

Otto is the new movie by alternative film director Bruce LaBruce. At the screening I attended at the BFI he introduced the movie himself. He described it as a first in a number of ways; it was the first gay zombie movie, and it was his first myspace movie. In a sense these two things are not entirely disconnected from each other in the film as the zombie is used as a metaphor for everyman, and in particular the future everyman: as Bruce says himself "...an allegory for our troubled times".

It's only in the last few months that I have overheard couples arguing about their partner's friends on facebook; hearing the feeble excuses that they give for being friends with particular people, due to the fact that 'x' left a cursory comment on their 'wall'. I have known people that have received 'comments' on myspace the next day after a night out saying how much that 'x' liked their shoes on the previous evening. I know, creepy. Otto seems, in some ways, less socially dysfunctional than these people. Although he does have the rather antisocial habit of devouring things...

As a whole, the movie is a lot more than just a comment on this zombified post-MTV post-myspace culture. The main feeling I left with was sadness. Although in a lot of ways a comedy, underneath this humour it was a sad reflection on the state of future everyman, and it seems in Bruce's eyes, queer everyman.

Rick Owens was responsible for the costumes and the soundtrack included a friend of mine Susanne Oberbeck AKA No Bra.

Derek Jarman at The Serpentine Gallery

The Serpentine Gallery
(020) 7402 6075

23 February - 13 April 2008
ADMISSION IS FREE

I remember reading an article on Derek Jarman in which he predicted that the site on which he had his studio, Butler's Wharf, would become the focus of a new art world. Butler's Wharf is situated on the southbank where we can now find the Tate Modern, a hub of contemporary art. This ability to prophecise the future of not just one practice, but the many in which he chose to work, goes some way to explain what was and is quintessentially Derek Jarman. Rather than focus on the exhibition itself, I would like to focus on the man, with a list of words.

- saw beauty
- experimental super8
- writer
- the last of england
- tilda swinton
- personal cinema
- throbbing gristle
- artist
- the garden
- liked boys
- suitably camouflaged
- considered
- chroma

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO: REVOLUTION IN PHOTOGRAPHY

The Hayward, Southbank Centre
The exhibtion runs from 7 February to 27 April 2008

Tickets for this event are £9
Contact the ticket office (9am-8pm) on 0871 663 2500

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) is one of the great figures of early 20th-century avant-garde art, and also one of its most versatile practitioners. Half a century after his death, The Hayward presents the first major exhibition in the UK of Rodchenko’s photographs, featuring some 120 prints and photomontages, as well as poster and magazine designs. The exhibition traces the development of Rodchenko's photography over two decades from the early 1920s, a period when he revolutionised the medium by pioneering a new vocabulary of bold and unusual camera positions, severe foreshortenings of perspective, and surprising close-ups. Take a look - This could be your last chance to see it as the exhibition closes on the 27th of April...

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE HAYWARD SITE AND BUY TICKETS.

LONDON FASHION WEEK [AW 08] PICTORIAL UPDATE

Here are a few of the images of JW Anderson's menswear from the presentation at the store:

'visual happenings and disturbances'

Flykkiller

The Fly Bar

36-38 New Oxford Street

WC1A 1EP

Thursday 10th April

7.30pm - 2am

Tickets are £6 on the door

This will be the second night that we have collaborated with Flykkiller. The first one went very well; we posted 400 post-it notes around the space, and had spherical glitter heads that blinded us : then we were prompted to leave for creating too much of a 'disturbance'! Mission accomplished.

This time the great David Holmes will be DJing, so that shouldn't be missed, alongside of course, Flykkiller themselves. They were great last time and promise to be even darker this time around. To learn a little more about the band visit their website and take a look at our earlier post about them below.Of course, everyone here at the store will be visually 'happening' and 'disturbing' you, so make sure you mark it in your diary. If you would like to attend then email us at:

twosee@twoseelife.com 

Please mark the subject of your email "FLYKKILLER APRIL 10TH GUESTLIST" and we shall add you to the cheaper list at £4. Alternatively, click here to buy tickets in advance online.Here are a few pictures from the first event on the 13th March so you know what you are letting yourselves in for: 

FLYKKILLER 13th March 2008

Flykkiller are long time friends of the store. They represent the meeting of minds between Stephen Hilton, David Holmes' partner in The Free Association, and Pati Yang. They have been invited to take over The Fly Bar on New Oxford Street and in turn they invited us to join in. We shall be working as a creative collective, with all of the staff getting involved in some way to provide 'visual happenings and disturbances'. If that doesn't intrigue you enough on it's own then please check out their myspace, and you'll soon realise how great their music is... They were tipped by The Sunday Times as one of the acts to blow in 2008, and so far, they look unstoppable.

To buy advance tickets for this event, CLICK HERE.

We look forward to welcoming you a little more into our world...

It can be seen in the bodies response

It can be seen in the bodies response, but not in the way the body is presented.

It is made out of ones need to understand something greater than oneself.

LONDON FASHION WEEK [AW 2008]

This London Fashion Week, we will present the collections of Hannah Martin and JW Anderson in the store on sunday february 10th... The invite image for the event is based on the iconic image created for Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat's collaborative exhibition of paintings in 1985. The poster was shot by our own Amarpaul Kalirai and Anthony Stephinson, and Hannah and Jonathan were all to happy to recreate the famous poses... If their gaze is anything to go by, then the show will be amazing.

If you would like to attend this show, then RSVP is essential to:

twosee@twoseelife.com

Please head your email "LFW FEBRUARY 10TH RSVP"

do[ing] the ultra-violent

I arrived in Paris on thursday for menswear fashion week, and until saturday, I was completely underwhelmed. There seemed to be a pattern emerging (aside from plaid). All of the shows were slow sombre affairs. The music was barely there, with slow truncated beats, if any beats at all. The models were walking excruciatingly slow and the clothes were soft. I have nothing against soft men's clothing per se, I've even had a pre-delectation towards  silk organza, but the soft layers of drapery, the slow footsteps and the anti-beats it was all getting a little too much. I began to hope somebody would send a model down the runway with blood on his knuckles, but the most visceral effects were gaffer tape attached to the backs of shoes and inflatables. It was dull. Menswear has a tendency to be habitual, but this was a new low. I pinned very high hopes on Eric Lebon to deliver, and it didn't look good waiting for the show. There was the obligatory splash of high-camp-fur and 'Street Snappers' taking pictures of the students, and it appeared to be in a gallery. I sat and waited : It happened. The music had beats, it made you want to dance, and the clothes were progressive. Eric has begun to work with more 'lux' fabrication. The nylons from last season were replaced by silks and wools, sometimes silks overlayed on top of wools, then lined in silk. The structure was tighter, and the colour was vibrant! Autumn Winter had mustard! And red! And electric blue! And khaki! And very little black. Even the grey tended to be pale rather than charcoal. All of this without a drop of blood. I left satiated and ready for more. After all, it was only a week or so earlier that Raf Simons had sent out a single

breasted suit that looked like a skinheads dream for Jil Sander. How about some clothes for men to fight in, or more fittingly, use to avoid fights...?! It seems I was not to be disappointed. After an evening of testosterone-filled shows, I tended to my bruised bloodied knuckles with a smile on my face.