Lodown Magazine Issue 128 - Crush

Highlights of our Crush issue include… Karabo Mookie… The brilliant thing about authenticity is that you are either authentic or not. There’s no way to try it, no way to buy it. And that’s why, in the current climate of everybody wanting to be everything at any given time in praise of rising follower numbers, the work of Johannesburg-based photographer and filmmaker Karabo Mooki - and the way he explores local subcultures - cannot be appreciated highly enough.

Alison Blickle… Myths are deeply embedded in basically every culture on our planet. They were necessities to explain our surroundings and the world itself, long before any kind of elaborate academic vocabulary offered a different view on things. And, in actuality, people still love to create them in order to make sense of a world that’s changing at warp speed. Los Angeles-based artist Alison Blickle now combines the ancient with the contemporary to form urgent and highly topical narratives in her amazing paintings.

DRE Dogue… If you understand life as a state less shaped by borders and rules but by connectivity and options, then it makes perfect sense to be constantly in motion instead of showboating your permanent residence. And celebrated photographer Dre Dogue does exactly that. From Manila to Tokyo, from Bangkok to Hong Kong. And then some more. Living the life of a full-time urban nomad for many years already, he travels Asia’s primate cities and beyond with his trusted analog cameras - and luckily, he isn’t getting tired of it at this point.

JAY Wilkinson … Your sense of self is much more defined by what your mind tells you about yourself than by the actual truths your very own storyline is offering. It’s way more fiction less facts. It’s basically a composition of disjointed half-truths placed on a rather porous timeline that keeps you going. Texas-based painter Jay Wilkinson is very much aware of this fact, and his latest series “free Dirt“ is his take on how memories are built by the permanent absorbance of information.

- plus more elaborate features and visual awesomeness from the likes of: John Brosio, Sunandbass, Mark Gonzales, LA Pools, and many others.