We’re excited to announce the launch of “Transmission,” a new column on the Art21 Blog penned by former guest blogger Amelia Ishmael. During her two week guest blog stint last year, Amelia wrote about the visual culture of black metal music and its links to contemporary art. Now, she’ll focus on the broader relationship between art and rock music by highlighting projects that interweave the subcultures found in both. With a special interest in artworks that engage Rock, Punk, and Metal, “Transmission” is devoted to recording the sites where light and sound currents collide, intermix, and inform one another. Amelia tells us,
“The column’s objective is to swim in the pleasurable waves within the sea of aural and visual interactions in ways that blur traditional disciplinary boundaries. But this is not purposeless play. ‘Transmission’ also aims to intervene within art historical canons by emphasizing the threads of music throughout art (referred to by some as art’s “minor histories”) and to argue for their place in conversations of contemporary art.”
Amelia Ishmael is an artist whose practice includes critiquing, historicising, teaching, and curating other artists’ practices. Her areas of specialization are Black Metal art and the history of photography. Amelia’s current projects include curating the traveling art exhibition ”Black Thorns in the White Cube,” and serving as co-editor and curator of pages for Helvete, a journal of Black Metal theory. She has presented her gleanings on Black Metal and contemporary art at the Black Metal Theory Symposium in London, U.K. and the Home of Metal Conference in Wolverhampton, U.K. Ishmael’s writings have appeared in ArtSlant, Art in Print, Art Papers, and Review. She received a BFA in Photography and New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MA in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her personal website can be found here.
“Transmission” posts on the first Tuesday of each month.
