BMD – The Multi-dollar Feature from Emulsion Burns on Vimeo.

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The round cheeks and lively, unaffected laughter from the five children in the yard obliterated my previous notions of what a cancer hospital would feel like. On my way to the Maharagama Children’s Cancer Ward, I had mentally prepared myself to see skeletal, weak, lifeless children sitting in wheelchairs with bags under their eyes and sharp elbows protruding through thin skin, but these five kids were as excitable as any healthy, normal child. One of the boys could even be classified as chubby. Only upon close observation did I notice the plastic IV cannulas permanently lodged into their inner elbows and the tops of their hands. To be fair, these children were probably the most healthy of the resident patients.

The Maharagama Cancer Hospital treats 120 resident children, ranging from infants to fourteen year-olds, and these five healthier children who were allowed outdoors were the exception, not the norm.  Maharagama Children’s Cancer Ward is a government-sponsored hospital located on the depressingly but straightforwardly named Cancer Hospital Road. HaRah Rahkaishi and Simon Blackfoot had planned to paint mural on a wall that directly faces the windows of the patients’ room as part of their crusade to provide visual alternatives to the endless, poisonous advertising that surrounds us daily and pilfers our rights to an neutral, serene visionscape. The theme of the mural: Circus Freakshow, which causes certain stereotypical images to arise in one’s mind: A portly, bearded, tattooed lady. An apathetic bear in pants. A potbellied ringmaster, striped red and white like a bag of popcorn, standing on a box and yelling into a black megaphone, “Come one! Come all! You don’t wanna miss the fire-blowing Siamese midgets! Today and only today! Only ten cents!”

The wall chosen was three stories tall, so we had scaffolding set up, similar to the construction site variety, for the project. It was sturdily constructed with metal bars and wooden planks, and I don’t have an irrational fear of heights, but my heart would still hiccup at the slightest of wobbles, and cold, vertigo-induced adrenaline shot up from the soles of my feet anytime I remembered that I was sitting on uppermost story (which was every five seconds). Climbing up and down the scaffolding nervously, with plastic cups of paint in one hand and paintbrushes clenched between my teeth like a soldier getting a limb amputated produced uncharacteristically sweaty currypits. It took good doses of silent pep talks each time I needed to get myself back up there.

Friends came and went, offering cheese and crackers or painterly help. We daubed and colored under the guidance of HaRah Akaishi and Simon Blackfoot. The circus freakshow divulged itself as the sun departed the narrow space between the buildings and the oven-like heat grew more tolerable.

The hospital itself was a back in time, an experience I often feel in Sri Lanka, where moss-stained colonial era buildings look as though they haven’t been refurnished for decades; trains hit cows with regularity; local businesses signs are hand painted and aloof in their comical misspellings (“microvavw”, for example); a baker still comes door-to-door each morning with lopsided, homemade loaves of brown bread; and men unselfconsciously sport the thickest caterpillar-moustaches and earnestly styled mullets of another era with complete lack of satire. The Maharagama Cancer Ward was somewhere between the 1930s and 1940s; nurses wore light blue, button-up dresses with starched collars and aprons (vintage!), complete with the white caps in the style of nurses in World War II (which I had previously only seen in movies like The Notebook, or on Halloween, minimized and sexualized to varying degrees).

As the children grew more accustomed to our frighteningly foreign presence, they came out from behind the windows through which they were peering, and a few of the more sociable ones came up to stare at us up close. A young, bald girl showed one of us her sketchbook, in which she had rendered a small-scale replica of the mural we were painting.

I made friends with a thirteen year old boy from Jaffna, a city in northern Sri Lanka where the war played out in particularly violent measures. His English was good enough for us to get basically acquainted and to find out each other’s favorite food (his: sweets, mine: avocados). He had giraffe-ishly long, fringey eyelashes. I painted an elephant and a rabbit on the tops of his hands, and he told me about parts of his childhood. His parents were both killed, so he lived in an orphanage until he got cancer. That was three years ago, when he first arrived at Maharagama. He spoke with a startling lack of apparent sadness or self-pity. When I asked where he was from, he said, “Colombo” rather than Jaffna, where he was born. I was surprised again to realize that to him, this hospital is home. I remembered how long three years can be at thirteen, and how adaptable children can be.

Before I left, he asked for my phone number. Up until then, because he looked so childlike, I’d forgotten that he was a teenager with an adolescent flurry of hormones. Despite all his misfortune, he seemed to have an innocence that an American thirteen year old would have passed by.

A few of the children impressed me with their lack of self-pity, but the parents present that day seemed to have a more outwardly visible sadness that was heavy enough to be apparent at first glance, perhaps due to having a fuller understanding of cancer and its potentially terminal consequences. A man sitting on the waiting room couch hunched over like an armadillo and put his face into his hands as if exhausted. A mother carrying her two or three year old son in the waiting room looked heartbreakingly sad and drained in a way I will not attempt to encapsulate in words, for I’m likely to underestimate her sadness in my inability to understand it.

Finishing a mural means a long, dehydrated raisin-brain workday of subsisting on crackers and adrenaline, rewarded by the instant gratification of completing a project. The last brushstrokes added to the mural were appropriately climactic: HaRah Akaishi standing on the top story, painting letters onto the banner: “INCREDIBLE YOU” with the intent to pass on some positivity and empowerment to the children of the hospital. I hope that this colorful circus mural, seen through the windows of their hospital beds, provides momentary pleasure and well-being amidst the desolation of living with cancer.

Set in a Majorcan painter’s house in New York, the model and the surroundings contrast each other to achieve a sense of darkness and loneliness. The location, with a decadent Majorcan atmosphere, is centered around the model. He is surrounded by the main concepts of the collection, disquieting, preserving and restricting.

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The Space In Between – Víctor Tur from Víctor Tur on Vimeo.

Born in Los Angeles, Dylan dove into the world of photography in 1999 when he moved to San Francisco where he spent the next 12 years perfecting his craft. Most of his time was spent in Lower Haight, a district that would ultimately shape his signature style. He began working with the newly established clothing company/gallery Upper Playground and shot the works of artists the company represented at the time. His other early works consisted mainly of hip-hop editorials and advertising in the skateboard industry. From there he moved onto street photography shooting portraits of street hustlers, gang members, and “the sexy girls next door”.

His photography has been published in both domestic and international publications including Intersection (UK), Warp (Japan), Slap, Thrasher, Juxtapoz, Mass Appeal, and Swindle. He was also one of ten photographers to be published in Juxtapoz Photo, the book.

He has been in Southeast Asia for the last year and a half. Of that time, he spent over a year in Bangkok photographing fashion, red light, and street culture. He has recently moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia where he is currently working on completing his first book.

What: Dylan Maddux | Cambodia, The New Life

When: March 24 – April 7, 2012

Where: Known Gallery, 441 North Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles

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It’s an ode to fishing and the old school Hex Wobbler lure, famous for putting Kawahai on our plates since the 70′s. Designed and printed in New Zealand. The Fishing Lure t-shirt is inspired by fishing, but also the old school fishos out there still using the “Hex Wobbler”.

326 is a collective of designers from Auckland just having fun turning their creative ideas into real products for you to enjoy.

Buy it here

Bright Sri Lankan sunlight simmered the noon time heat as Pilon and Alain set up ladders and cans of paint. After sketching a rough outline, they got to filling color into the blank wall. As the drawings in their heads emerged from the blank spaces, more and more curious folk sat themselves down in the shade of the trees across the way. The boys seemed generally oblivious to the crowd, concentrated and fueled by good tunes, gingersnaps, and guava juice.

In the ten hours it took for their mural to be completed, I had a terrific meet n’ greet with some of the people in our neighborhood

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I met a small, talkative, middle-aged Tamil woman named Nalini. She wore plastic, red hoop earrings and Jamaican colors in her outfit that reflected her passionate and politically rebellious nature. She was on her way home after attending a Thai Pongal ceremony at the local Hindu temple. She saw the mural and the gathering that surrounded it, and joined in with enthusiastic approval. She offered the boys a packet of kiribaht (milk rice), blessed by a priest no less, that she had brought back from the temple.

Nalini was quite the socialite. She knew many of the people walking by, and called them over to introduce them to me. She told me her life story, stated everything that needs to be changed with the way Colombo is run, then pointed out the local prostitute who was walking by with her bastard baby, all in one breath. She wisely said the boys should paint murals in Sri Lankan prisons “because prisoners only see ugly walls.”

“If we [Sri Lankans] ask to do something like this, they will definitely say no,” she said in her waggly-headed way. “They will think we want money. But you foreigners come and do something like this – it’s very wonderful!”

Something about the deference in this exclamation made me uncomfortable, so I said nothing.

Pilon was in the tunnel vision, concentrated mind place of painting. My advances toward his mouth with handfuls of kiribaht were distractedly accepted. I could tell I was interrupting his stream of consciousness flowing smoothly between mind and nipple and brush tip and music. The wall began showing suggestions a wolf and a tree.

A toothpick-thin man came up to us. He was wearing a plaid, blue, wraparound dhoti. He sported the powerful and omnipresent moustache. He held a walking stick that aided the shuffle of his dirty, bare feet. He asked what the boys were doing, and I explained. Then he requested, in all seriousness, that the boys advertise his prostitution business on the wall. He even advised with sweeping palm gestures where the words should go. I admired his entrepreneurial vision, that unlikely pimp.

The earth spun a few degrees, leaving the sun behind our western horizon and us in the cooler, more breathable dusk. I saw a man approach Pilon and ask to have his photo taken with the unfinished mural. Pilon, being the accommodating guy he is, stopped to snap a photo. The man went on his way, happily. Ten minutes later, he returned, and asked to see his photo. Pilon explained that he hadn’t developed it yet. This man would return a total of three times throughout the day, posing the same question and receiving the same answer.

Slowly, the leaves and feathers were filled in. Darkness arrived, and a streetlamp lit the scene. A reporter showed up with a camera; someone had given Maharaja TV a call. He took some shots of the mural, the painters, and the crowd watching, talking.

A stunning, Burgher woman came out of the crowd and dominated the screen space. She had captivating green eyes and light skin recalling Aishwarya Rai, and natural performative skills. She went into detail about the mural, making stuff up about how the boys were painting for world peace. “Here we are, Tamil, Singhalese, Burgher, New Zealander, Canadians….And we can coexist in peace!” I watched with amusement at this momentous, first hand experience of the kind of made up bullshit some news reportage can be.

In the end, the boys had their chance to explain themselves to the camera. They spoke about how they were doing it simply to beautify the neighborhood. They noted that sadly, most of the imagery one sees in public spaces are advertisements. Street art provides a more nourishing alternative from the poisons of consumerism imagery.

Hungry hours later, the mural was completed. Whenever I walk down to my favorite restaurant for my round bellyfulof rice and curry, I pass by the wolf and the man disguised as a tree, shooting for the moon under the bright sun.

We visited Buddhist Hell on a tropical, serene Sunday afternoon. Trees with long, boat-shaped leaves swished breezily. Tranquil ponds of coyfish wafted moist, algae smells. The cracked bricks under our feet were as untended as the banyans overhead. We sauntered through groups of life-sized statues, letting our eyes roam over their nudity streaked and splattered with dripping, popsicle-red blood. Green rotting stumps of limbs among white, puss-leaking nipples. Tongues exaggeratedly stretched out of mouths like melting taffy. Tortured protruding hipbones like sharp ledges, black eyeball-less sockets. Elongated fingers and ghoulish eyes showed the pain that accompanies getting your tongue ripped out with pliers. Ribs like xylophone keys. Pots simmered with soup made from the burgundy blood of sinners. An astonishingly calm man sat in a cross-legged Indian pose, feeding his own unraveled, bloody intestines to two happy crows.

Wat Saen Suk is a temple in southern Thailand that displays this grotesque zoo of wonders for the good Buddhist education of local laymen. Buddhist Hell helps one more accurately envision the punishments one can look forward to in response to specific sins committed. Each scene of life-size statues is paired with a sign that explains the backstory of the torture demonstrated.

I engrossedly read each sign, learning the punishments that befall one who skins a buffalo or kills an elephant. I earnestly agreed with some of the messages behind the displays. One example was the rape display. I delighted in the view of a turbaned, mustached, Arab man repeatedly and joyfully stabbing a rapist’s groin. Where his penis used to be was now a splashy, bloody pudding of tattered strips of skin. Another one I approved of was the sin of “killing animals with poison”. (I’m looking at you, arsenic fishermen!) Many were quite surprisingly specific: stealing aquatic animals will result in your head turning into a fish, and destroying nature forewarns a deer head in your next life.

But some of the messages made little sense in terms of global sustainability. The one that irked me the most was the one scorning the use of contraception or abortion. The offending woman was seated on a bench, and two men twisted log-thick, metal screws into her torso, from both front and back. Another woman lay nude with her legs spread as an emotionless man jabbed her blood-smeared vagina with a spear. This is dangerous moral to instill, I thought, considering our human virus now scales the seven billion mark.

While I openly commented my approval and disapproval for the morals communicated, a few of the strangest that I came across called for neither. Premarital sex was one such confusion. A thorny tree stood tall, as nude humans climbed up its trunk, mouths gaping in the pain of punctures. From underneath, maliciously barking dogs chewed their rectums that leaked loose blood. That wasn’t all – from above, crows sat on the tree branches, pecking at their eyeballs. This display was the grandest of them all, and strangely pornographic.

Some scenes didn’t have explanatory plaques, so we made up our best guesses: “If you neglect your prayers, a deer, who also specializes part-time as a monk, will scratch your body with a stick.”

One plaque sternly stated, “Those who behave themselves as the hooligans” will turn into horses. And those who “instigate theaters to have a brawl” are given duck heads. If you do drugs, your head is replaced by an appropriately psychedelic shrimp. I wondered what would happen in the hypothetical situation that I should commit more than one of these sins. Would I receive all the punishments at one go? Or would I be thrown the worst common denominator?

After an hour or so of these violent scenes, our initial surprise gave way to giggles and amusement. But the other families there seemingly did not see the comic aspect. A pair of young siblings stared, round-eyed at the hellish milieu around them. A little girl pointed at the woman of the bloody vagina and her mother what it meant. Her dad leaned against a tree, snapping photos casually, as if unaffected by the humor of it. I wondered how literally they saw it.

My friend must have been wondering similar things. He mused, “Surely this is made for kids. Anyone over forty would think …what the fuck?”

“Well, my parents believe you’ll burn in fire and brimstone if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ,” I responded. “This is not that much more absurd.”

While Buddhist Hell demonstrates forewarnings of the devastating tortures that await one who sins, it provides a way out. Scattered around the temple were blue slotted boxes, where one can donate some money to absolve oneself from punishments awaiting. Putting a coin in a box is an easy way to rid oneself of guilt in the present and punishment in the future, but can nurture an irresponsible attitude towards our affects on our surroundings now. Like schools and churches, Wat Saen Suk is another way to create maneuverable, conformed citizens for minimally disturbances in the functioning of a society. If anything I find it perfect for an amusing afternoon of stimulating photography.

“I’m creating a photo, so it’s then not just a photo; it’s a piece of art as well.”

The 26 year old Kiwi from Christchurch, New Zealand is a Barista by ‘safe’ trade and Photographer and fine artist by dream trade. But this is not so much a dream anymore; hard work and good fortune over the years has allowed her to work as an event photographer- quite successfully so far. “Pharell, (American hip-hop artists and producer) I can put Pharell on my CV. And Bear Grylls, I’m a big fan of Bear Grylls.”

Arriving in 2004 to study at Wellington’s Massey University campus, unexpectedly, it was two men in particular that put her on the path she is on now. First, her tutor who she says was amazing and managed to convince her she had a good eye for ‘stuff’ when she initially wanted to study sculpture and painting and do photography on the side. And secondly the boy she was dating in 2008 who had a few friends hosting gigs around Wellington. “I went along and took some photos and put them on Facebook. It was really low key…But then I started getting emails from promoters inviting me to come photograph their other gigs.”

Her mum had said she was always running around with a throw away camera when she was little, “So I suppose I have always been one of those, constantly taking token photos”. From token photos to a ‘new project’ screen on Photoshop, mixing fantasy and reality is one of her favourite subjects and a tactic, it seems she is becoming very good at.

Though some turn away from altering their photographs in Photoshop Melissa is embracing technological advances in her latest works. “I want people to really engage with my photos and question why I’ve shot what I have…Some people are against it [digital manipulation], and that’s cool. But I am a fan of it and I enjoy it. I look in magazines and am overwhelmed by the talent. It’s just beautiful. ”

Pat Brassington, an Australian artist who also works with digital manipulation was a major influence in Melissa at university. “She basically blurs fantasy and reality together and brings a really surreal aspect to her work. She has a beautiful colour palette…which is where I first considered digital manipulation to that extent. Her work was very quirky and bizarre and she was really testing the viewer in her work…also she was very sexual provocative with underlying messages which you found out about when you read the explanation about the piece.”

Melissa has so far found people are very encouraging of her work. “I’ve had heaps of emails where people ask: What lens were you using? Or even, what setting were you on”? She laughs, “Well I kinda change it up a bit. I don’t just shoot on one setting…” She’s just kidding, but her work doesn’t. It’s moody and serious but also quirky and cheeky. Melissa chuckles and agrees that like the work of her muse, Pat Brassington, qualities like quirky, bizarre and sexually provocative are concepts that resonate with her and translate to her art.

You may have been wondering where we’ve been for the past month. Fear not, we are still alive and have been off on adventures again. As I write this the SIDEROOM.COM team are spread across the globe causing creative mayhem in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Auckland and Chile.

We apologize to you all for the lack of updates, but be assured we are collecting amazing stories along the way and as always plotting great schemes for creative world domination. You will hear about it all very soon.

Thank you to everyone who has sent in submissions. I promise we haven’t forgotten you and they will be posted as soon as we are back in the world of reliable internet.

Much Love

The SIDEROOM.COM crew.