Latest news with #Arles
Wales Online
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Wales Online
Weird Fish shoppers 'feel amazing' in 'great price' dress that 'looks so expensive'
Weird Fish shoppers 'feel amazing' in 'great price' dress that 'looks so expensive' Weird Fish have reduced the Arles Embroidered Cotton Dress by £14 and shoppers are snapping it up to wear this summer The Arles dress is a beautiful option in blue for summer (Image: Weird Fish ) Dressing for the warm weather is all about finding outfits that keep the wearer cool and comfortable, without looking frumpy. Sometimes an easy-throw-on-and-go dress is the best option and fashion retailer Weird Fish have just the ticket in a gorgeous shade of cobalt blue. Reminiscent of sparkling oceans and balmy Greek holidays, the Arles Organic Cotton Embroidered Double Cloth Dress is as summery as they come, featuring a swishy full skirt, tassels and gentle pleating. Stocked in sizes 8 to 22, the dress would typically set shoppers back £70, but a limited time sale brings the price down to £56. The statement dress could easily be worn as a wedding guest dress, paired with metallic accessories and jewellery, or popped on over the top of swimwear at the beach or pool on holiday. Made with organic cotton, the dress was inspired by Greece and Morocco, using a breathable fabric. READ MORE: Fashion writer's 'top picks from Ann Summers' festival collection ahead of Glastonbury READ MORE: New Balance shoe hailed 'comfiest to exist' and is 50% off Better yet, the maxi dress boats deep hand-slip pockets - a winning feature many shoppers applaud. White embroidery around the neckline and down the three quarter length sleeves add a touch of elegance and really elevate the outfit to stylish heights. One shopper took to the reviews section of the Weird Fish website to say: "Perfect for holiday. Fit is gorgeous, I feel amazing in it and such a good price for something that looks so expensive." And now reduced to £56, it's even better value for money. Arles Organic Cotton Embroidered Double Cloth Dress £70 £56 Weird Fish Shop Deal Product Description Shoppers are getting prepped for the warm weather in the Weird Fish sale. Boden have also got a number of beautiful blue summer dresses on their website, including the Isabel Broderie Mix Maxi Dress. It's £130, but shoppers can shave 15% off the price tag bringing it down to £110.50 with the code JM7D. Shoppers are calling the dress a 'win win' as it is 'very comfortable and breezy', however, someone did find the colour to be a little too 'intense' for their liking. Opting for a summer dress with a pattern helps to break the colour up and make it a less of a statement. This Light Blue Tile Print Shirred Waist Maxi Dress for £48 at Roman does exactly this. It would look lovely with wedges and shoppers say they have 'had lots of compliments' since wearing it. The floaty tiered skirt is a flattering feature (Image: Weird Fish ) Fashion fans also say that the Weird Fish maxi dress has lots going for it, with one person writing: "Lovely fabric, colour, embroidery, sleeves. Like it." Those that have a shorter frame may wish to know that some customers found the design a little too long. Article continues below A four star review reads: "A nice quality garment. The embroidery is lovely but the dress drowned me I need to be taller. Having bought online I returned it in store very easily. There were some nice items in there and I will shop there in future." But, shoppers with their eye on the Arles Organic Cotton Embroidered Double Cloth Dress can pick it up for £56 on the Weird Fish website.
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When van Gogh Fled South, This Family Gave Him Purpose
February 1888, and it's freezing in the South of France. Vincent van Gogh had left Paris after two years of art-world hustle, deepening depressions and a worn welcome from his brother Theo, who had housed the difficult painter. He packed for the small river town of Arles, hoping, he wrote, for 'even more color and even more sun.' Instead he found a snowstorm. He painted orchards and landscapes in the cold, well into spring, staking his easel to the ground to beat the wind. But by July, 'I haven't made a centimeter's progress into people's hearts,' he complained to Theo. To get models an artist needs either money or social grace. Vincent lacked both. 'His disappointments often embittered him,' his sister Willemien wrote, 'and made him not a normal person.' That changed when at the bar he met Joseph Roulin, a postman 'with a head like that of Socrates,' he marveled in July, 'a more interesting man than many people' and a 'raging republican' who had 'almost no nose, a high forehead, bald pate, small gray eyes, high-colored full cheeks, a big beard, pepper and salt, big ears.' Roulin became a confidant, diplomat and crucial sitter. Over the next half year, van Gogh painted 26 portraits of Roulin, his wife, Augustine, and their three children. (Theo he painted only once.) You feel that outpouring at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has reunited 14 of these likenesses in the impressive and record-correcting exhibition 'Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits.' Augmented with 30 other works by van Gogh and his influences, plus archival material, the show examines the sitter relationship that most reliably allowed van Gogh to test the spiritual qualities of color and paint handling. It is the largest exhibition (outdoing a 2001 show on Joseph in New York) on an iconic but little-known family in art history. It is also a powerful redraft to the myth of van Gogh's constant solitude. He was in fact a social creature. More than any show I have seen, this one revives the centrifugal pull of people you detect in his letters. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Kitchen gods and Chinese opera: views from the diaspora
The British Journal of Photography, in partnership with WePresent and Galerie Huit Arles, has announced the winners of OpenWalls Spotlight 2025. The international photography award champions both emerging and established photographers by exhibiting their work in the historic setting of Galerie Huit Arles alongside the prestigious Les Rencontres d'Arles photography festival. Work can be seen at Galerie Huit Arles from 7 July 2025 This year's theme, Traditions in Transition, invited photographers to consider how cultural rituals, identities and heritage evolve across time, place and generations. Judges picked a series winner and four single image winners The 2025 series winner is Anh Nguyen, for Kitchen God – a vivid, staged exploration of Vietnamese identity in diaspora. Drawing from the belief in omniscient kitchen gods who observe and report on domestic life, Nguyen reimagines these figures within the homes of Vietnamese youth living in New York City. Through stylised imagery and symbolic use of food, space and ritual, the series invites viewers to reflect on what it means to maintain – or reinvent – tradition in new cultural environments Nguyen: 'In Vietnamese popular mythology, every family is said to have three kitchen gods in their house. Their altars are placed by the stove to watch over the family, ensuring they treat each other well and that all matters of the home are in order' 'Growing up in Vietnam but having lived away from home and family for a decade, I began unpacking traditions and rituals I grew up with as performance to find ways to interpret them in my own life' 'Fifty years after the beginning of large-scale migration from Vietnam to the US, the immigrant experience of Vietnamese people of my generation is reshaping the narrative around our identity in America. By deciding what aspects of our culture to preserve and make our own, we serve as a living connection between cultures' 'The Kitchen God series uses the imaginative landscape of Vietnamese myths to explore the meaning of home-making to young Vietnamese people in New York City. What would a kitchen god see if they could look into our lives?' Dalia Al-Dujaili, British Journal of Photography's online editor and OpenWalls Spotlight 2025 judge: 'All the winning works are a testament to how migration and the diaspora shape emerging culture and subculture. Though we might lose old traditions when we move or evolve, we also gain something in return – we create new identities, we forge the unseen' Pandey: 'Bonita's story is a powerful and multi-layered one, deeply intertwined with personal, familial, and societal dynamics. Growing up in a village like Pali in Rajasthan, where rigid class, caste and veil systems prevail, her journey of gender transition becomes not just about individual identity but also about challenging foundations of deeply patriarchal societies, longstanding traditions and cultural norms' An image that documents New York City Chinese opera troupes in Manhattan's Chinatown. This project follows middle-aged and elderly performers – some professional from China and others amateur – who preserve this art form's tradition in the US as a centrepiece of their own identity Benson: 'This is a reflection of my father's arrival in the UK in 1990. He proudly wore my grandfather's suit, a privilege granted to the first generation of our family to leave Africa. Thirty-four years on, he wears the tie, days after making the decision to return back to a happier life at home. Homing in on my father's experience as a first-generation immigrant in the UK, the project is an ongoing documentation of his present life, a witness between two homes – Kenya and the UK' Kurunis: 'Greek Orthodox Easter Friday in the remote village of Olympos, Karpathos. Women of all ages adorn an epitaph with fresh flowers, in an ode to those from the community who have passed away that year. This is one of many cherished unique customs of the village, which persist even despite a gradual decline in the local population'
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Deutsche Börse prize review – Black cowboys, bonkers rock-huggers and a story of shocking loss
The Deutsche Börse photography foundation prize is back, with four shortlisted artists, each nominated for a solo exhibition or book presented or published in the last year. It's a quiet, solemn and laconic show ranging from lyrical, captivating portraits of Versace-clad Black cowboys in the American south to a woman hugging rocks. The show begins with the least interesting work. Cristina de Middel, a former photojournalist and now president of Magnum, is nominated for the second time. Here, a slice of her vast exhibition Journey to the Center, staged in a spectacular 15th-century church during the Arles festival last year, is re-created. The installation tries to be dynamic – a bright orange wooden framework cuts through the middle of the space; photographs are placed next to blown-up versions of Mexican Lotería cards – but it can't cover up the blandness of De Middel's work. Journey to the Center (the title cribbed from Jules Verne's adventure novel) attempts to reframe journeys of migrants from Mexico to California as a heroic quest. Yet this is done through mostly unremarkable landscape images, sutured together in a narrative that's unconvincing. De Middel experienced real danger while making the images along these routes – perils all migrants face – but that is edited out. Does heroism exclude hardship? In one image, a portrait of a young, unnamed migrant woman stands on the border on the beach in Tijuana, wearing a jumper with Donald Trump's giant pouting face on it, preparing to enter a country with a 'Remain in Mexico' policy. It reads too much like a joke at the migrant's expense. In another conceit, De Middel depicts high-jump athletes training next to the Tortilla Wall, a particularly perilous crossing point from Baja California into San Diego. De Middel sets out to reinvent the story of Mexican migration into the US for western viewers in this series, but the stifling symbolism is too glib and glossy to achieve that. It does get better. Waiting in the next room are knockout works by American photographer Rahim Fortune, a selection from his nominated Hardtack book, reproduced as sumptuous black-and-white silver gelatin prints for the wall. Hardtack refers to the unleavened bread used as a survival food by buffalo soldiers and later adapted by Black cowboys and ranchers. Fortune's glorious documentary images take us between the topographies and people of rural communities in the southern states, where he grew up and where metaphors of survival and persistence abound. Whether depicting settler-era wooden homes, whose history speaks through their hurried architecture, or a new father tenderly holding his infant, Fortune's photographs shimmer and scintillate. There is grace and humility in a portrait of three praise dancers in Edna, Texas, heads bowed and arms thrust out in spiritual abandon; and a pearlescent pageant queen who is all gossamer glow. In this tender portrait of Black life in the American south, the tattered facade of Sam's BBQ, in Austin, confronts what lingers ominously in the American landscape, with its hand-painted sign reading: 'We may have come on different ships but we're in the same boat now.' The Peruvian-American artist Tarrah Krajnak is the wild card this year, but brings the laughs. In one series, Krajnak playfully re-enacts images from Edward Weston's 1977 book of nudes. There's a restaging of a 1942 image of model Charis Wilson reclining on a sofa, wearing a gas mask she'd been issued as a volunteer for the Aircraft Warning Service. Krajnak replicates the image, including the fern frond Weston used, but switches up the composition, creating a diptych so that her body is cut in two. It is a pithy deconstruction that shows up the coldness of Weston's gaze on women's bodies in his sculptural, fragmented figures. I wonder if Krajnak was also inspired by Weston's challenge to 'photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock' in her series Automatic Rocks/Excavation in which she digs up stones from her garden, names them, cradles them for a time, then takes pictures of them. It's bonkers, but irrepressibly fun. Lindokuhle Sobekwa, the final artist in the show, would be a worthy winner for the £30,000 prize (which is announced in May). Sobekwa's gripping project, I Carry Her Photo With Me, is reimagined in a slideshow, with a gorgeous musical score by Nduduzo Makhathini, and a constellation of images scattered in fragments across the walls, in keeping with the rawness of the original spiral-bound scrapbook. It is a journey of shocking loss. When Sobekwa was seven, his sister Ziyanda (then 13) was chasing him when he was hit by a car and badly injured. Ziyanda then ran away and didn't return home for nearly a decade. She was eventually found living in a hostel, but died soon after, aged 22. She would not allow Sobekwa to take her photograph, an absence that looms large. In lo-fi images, he combs the misty, dilapidated, disenfranchised landscapes of the South African township complex where he grew up, once the site of a bloody taxi war. He sees glimpses of his late sister's face in other young women he meets at the hostel. Slowly the sense of the family's loss merges with the masses who have disappeared into the void of violence during (and since) apartheid. Diary entries are scribbled and urgent, the pencil pressed hard to the paper. The pain of Sobekwa's grief is penetrating; in one image, he catches his shadow cast over her grave. His photographs are often hazy, evanescent light fading like memories, the camera trying to clutch and fix the image before it is gone for ever. The Deutsche Börse photography foundation prize 2025 is at the Photographers' Gallery, London, until 15 June
