art

From tearing up stages across the world to being drenched in champagne post-gig, the ebullient energy of Grammy-nominated, New York indie-dance legends LCD Soundsystem is distilled in photographer, fan and long-term friend Ruvan Wijesooriya’s intimate series. After meeting LCD frontman James Murphy in a New York bar in 2004, Wijesooriya started documenting the group’s electric stage performances, hazy drunken moments and close-knit camaraderie right through to their epic farewell performance last year at Madison Square Garden. “Ruvan has been getting in my face for years,” jokes Murphy. “In other circumstances, this is basically illegal. It’s stalking. But it’s my friend, and I’m caught.” Over 400 of Wijesooriya’s images of the party starters are collected together in a new book forthcoming from Powerhouse, simply titled LCD, and bundled with next week's DVD release of Shut Up and Play the Hits that documents the band's final performance. Combining behind the scenes portraits with on-stage revelries from Coachella, Hyde Park and Art Basel Miami, the book also features an introduction from Murphy and interview with band members Nancy Whang, Patrick Mahoney and manager Keith Wood. “We like the same music and were at the same places often enough, eventually they allowed me to take pictures wherever and whenever,” says the photographer, who shoots regularly for DFA Records, The New Yorker and British Vogue. “The intimacy in the pictures has a lot to do with trust.”

Black-and-white bodies in meditative poses are juxtaposed with geometric fluorescent forms in Thomas Dozol’s recent series of silkscreen prints. The New York-based artist began to experiment with the stencil technique about a year ago, evolving a practice that begins in the studio with traditional film, and ends with vivid pigments at the serigraph. “I was tired of the physicality of photographic prints,” explains Dozol of the shift. Working with a cast of models—friends, associates, some a mixture of both—the artist directed his subjects to gaze into the void prior to isolating the portraits from their original setting and placing them into bright, abstracted architectural contexts. “Most of our interactions are virtual and our bodies are these objects left behind,” he says. “So I asked people to be in a half-asleep zone, like sculpture, as though not completely alive.” The series will feature in Dozol’s solo exhibition Côtes d’Azurs, opening at London's French Riviera gallery this week, following a busy year for the artist that has included a solo show at the Jack Hanley Gallery in New York and a group exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. This time, the series will come to life beneath the glow of black lights: “I just want the space to mimic what the prints were trying to convey.”