Cool Hunting

Olaf Breuning
In honor of Swiss artist Olaf Breuning's inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, this video visits his Manhattan studio. In the midst of working on his two-part installation for the show, Olaf takes the time to explain his inspiration and thinking behind his mini army made of readymade objects and a recreation of a 1932 photograph. There's also plenty of examples of his other playfully...

Richard Dupont
For our 99th episode, we visit the Manhattan studio of Richard Dupont who makes arresting figurative work. His sculptures initially caught our eye when they made an appearance in our very first video at Art Basel and now Dupont's busy with his large-scale installation due to open at the Lever House next month. In this video he unmolds one of his distorted replicas of his body that he made using military scans, walking us through his process and some of the ideas that inform his work.

José Parlá
Our video about Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá's work explores the thought and process behind his densely-layered graffiti paintings. Perhaps more than any other artist, José blurs the lines between word and image and graffiti and "fine art." In the video José explains his influences (including his brother Rey Parlá's abstract scratch films) and at his Fort Greene studio we get the rare privilege of...

Okamoto Studio
Takeo Okamoto, an established sushi chef in his native Japan discovered his calling for ice sculpture and moved to the iciest place he could think of, Alaska. Winner of several international awards, including a Silver Medal in the 1998 Olympics, Takeo now runs Okamoto Studio with his son Shintaro in New York City. We were introduced to them through Jeremy Mangan, an artist whose coffee paintings we admired. When we spoke with Jeremy he mentioned that he also sculpts ice—he's in fact Okamoto's principal carver—the result of Jeremy and Shintaro having met in an art class at Hunter College. We decided right away to make a video of the studio and, after some deliberation, we realized CH mascots Otis and Logan would make the perfect subjects for a video and a great feature at our 50th Episode party. Guests were treated to the breathtaking sculptures of the Sealyham Terriers themselves and to raw footage from the video of them being made.

Brian Dewan
In this, our 50th episode, we visit the Catskill, NY studio of artist Brian Dewan. His sculptures are pre-digital, unpredictable electronic musical instruments. Dewanatron, as he calls the genre, is a family of instruments which hazard unpredictable behaviors and self playing tendencies. They make all previous and future instruments obsolete. We also bring you to Pierogi Gallery where we first learned about Dewan.