information as material's new exhibition, Do or DIY, has opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Do or DIY is the culmination of a productive 12 month long residency at the Whitechapel Gallery for the Yorkshire-based artists' publishing imprint. The Whitechapel is a world leading contemporary visual art gallery in London's East End, and has held major exhibitions of work by leading contemporary artists ever since it opened its doors in 1901. 

We've been working with information as material since we produced their last major exhibition, The Perverse Library, in 2010 and we have been proud to be able to support this latest exhibition. Back in 2010, when The Independent invited us to select ten of the top 50 UK museums and galleries, the Whitechapel was in our top three places to visit. Having 'one of our own' exhibited there is a serious cause of celebration - massive congratulations to the team at information as material.

Here's the exhibition info, as published by the Whitechapel:

Writers’ collective information as material present their two part introduction to the concealed history of do-it-yourself publishing, as undertaken by some of the most renowned writers in Western literature. Their essay Do or DIY runs around the two galleries. Part one, titled ‘History,’ is a collection of anecdotes about literary icons who published their own works. Part two, titled ‘Praxis,’ champions new approaches to writing for the digital future of publishing. A pocketbook version of the essay, published by the group, is available to read now or take away.

Also on display are self-published works by Kathy Acker, Johanna Drucker, Ezra Pound, John Ruskin, Laurence Sterne and Virginia Woolf. Shown alongside them are mass-reproduced re-publications of their work, as well as fellow DIYers including Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther and Marcel Proust. 

The exhibition runs until 15 April 2012 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. If you are passing the Whitechapel, please check the exhibition out. If you won't be but do have friends in the Big Smoke then please let them know to drop by.

If you do go, be sure to pick up a copy of the free pocketbook publication that accompanies the exhibition.

View the full collection of images from the iam Whitechapel residency in our Gallery, here.

Check out this video from a recent session between two Leeds acts, the ace Ellen and The Escapades with the equally awesome Hope & Social. 

It is always really interesting to see two bands collaborate and although we expected a lot when we heard they guys were hooking up, we were not left disappointed :) The track has already been getting airplay on BBC 6 Music and lots more in the Hebe office!

Both bands have new albums out / coming out. Hope & Social with Cotton Wool and Knotted Wood, while Ellen and The Escapades launch All The Crooked Scenes at Brudenell Social Club next month. 

Image: 2012 © Carla Borel

If Paul Fryer isn't a name that's familiar to you then it should be. For our money, Paul is one of the great success stories to come out of this city in recent times. We've been lucky enough to work with Paul on the Hebe produced Back to Basics exhibition at Leeds Gallery; his contribution is a sound sculpture, a portrait of the clubs promoter, Dave Beer, which has become the centre piece of the exhibition.

The parallels that can be drawn between Paul and the man behind the Back to Basics exhibition, Dave Beer, are uncanny. Both freely admit to a fairly misspent youth, both attended but dropped out of art schools, both played a truly seminal role in reinventing the club scene in the north of England, both have committed a significant part of their lives to music, both are spiritually enlightened individuals (that's code for "have some pretty wild beliefs") and both have sustained an artistic practice, although their approaches and interests are wildly different.  

Paul was born in Leeds and lived here until he moved to London in 1996. While here, Paul played an instrumental role in creating the influential Art-based Kit Kat Club in the late 80's, and the city's first multi-sexuality club night, Vague (about which a book is curently being written), which gave birth to what is now Speed Queen. On moving to London to peruse a career as an artist, Paul took up residence in a studio in East London, neighbouring with the artist Gary Hume, whose Flashback exhibition is currently on display at Leeds Art Gallery. This was the time before East London warehouses were transformed into luxury dwelling places, when a tight-knit, creative community had begun to form. It was through this community that Paul was introduced to the Creative Director of fashion brand Fendi, where he would go on to spend five years working as their Musical Director, responsible for curating the soundtrack for fashion shows around the world. In his first outing, naive to the logistics of coordinating models down catwalks, and sticking to his brief to create a precise 18 minutes of music, Paul was responsible for leaving Jodie Kidd naked (in audio terms) halfway down the catwalk during New York Fashion Week. Still, despite his oversight the crowed loved his work and so did Karl Lagerfeld who became a supporter of Paul's during his time at Fendi.

Following his five years at Fendi, Paul decided to return to his studio practice as an artist, leaving the world of fashion to develop his own work. It has since been shown at leading galleries around the world including Tate Britain, White Cube and The Royal Academy in London as well as public and private galleries in Paris, Berlin, Venice and Dallas, Texas. Whilst much of Paul's work is realised as sculpture, he has also published a series of books including a book of his own poetry. He has also collaborated with a number of key curators and artists, including fellow loiner Damien Hirst.

Paul's work is currently on show in Leeds, Florence and a new solo show, The Electric Sky, is due to open at Pertwee Anderson Gold in London on 23rd March 2012. As the press release for The Electric Sky explains:

"Paul Fryer is noted for working with electricity in all its forms; from lightning machines propagating millions of volts to particle accelerators generating tiny superheated plasma stars with temperatures measured in the millions of degrees. His recent sculpture, Revelation (rain), is a machine which permits the casual viewing of cosmic rays arriving on earth as flashes of lightning in a glass box and Fryer has even recreated the environment necessary to produce the subtle patterns of an earth-bound Aurora Vitralis in a bell jar."

"In his latest show The Electric Sky, Fryer investigates the connections between life on earth and astronomical phenomena through the motif of lightning, creating multiple images and representations of this dynamic electrical energy in both two and three dimensions, exploring both existing and new theories of the fabric of the universe."

It's been a pleasure to spend some time with Paul, and hear about his career in fashion and the arts. We'll be heading down to London to check out The Electric Sky but, in the meantime, for anyone who wants a taste of Paul's art, his sound sculpture will remain on display at Leeds Gallery until 17th March 2012.

We had always planned to showcase one of the winners from Leeds Fashion Show in a special photo-shoot for the Trinity Leeds Facebook Page and we thought it would be pretty cool to team up Shi-Yuen's work with established Leeds designer James Steward and see what we could create. 

We worked with our friends at Bond, photographer Warwick Stein and make-up artist Nicki Swain and their fantastic models, Paige Moore and Eliza Tate and we also worked with the ace Hasselblad and, a behind the scenes video is on the way to show how the shoot went down. 

We hope you dig the photos and we will leave you with the official line from Trinity Leeds...

"Trinity Leeds is committed to supporting emerging fashion talent in Leeds and as part of our 'Taking the T' into Leeds campaign, Trinity Leeds sponsored Leeds Fashion Show 2011. At the show we were introduced to designer Shi-Yuen Li who won the 'Emerging Designer' award. We recently invited Shi-Yuen and prominent Leeds designer James Steward to take part in a photo-shoot staged at our near neighbour The Leeds Library on Commercial Street. The shoot was styled by Shang Ting Peng and shot by Leeds photographer Warwick Stein. 

We hope our projects will provide moments of inspiration and surprise, and reflect the city's past, present and future as a destination for fashion, food, film and culture."

Stay tuned for the 'making of' video shot for Hasselblad and a guest blog post from a special Hebe work-experience guest on the shoot :)

We met ICS back in October 2010. Team Hebe attended a Harvey Nichols event and saw the boys perform for the first time alongside a catwalk. We loved their sound which was, and still is, difficult to pin down, so we introduced ourselves to the band and so began the Hebe/ICS love affair.

In May 2011 we produced Leeds In Barcelona: A Creative Encounter which took Leeds creative talent over to Barcelona for a special showcase event. This was the perfect opportunity to collaborate with ICS for the first time, which was what we had been wanting to do since we met them. It gave ICS a great opportunity to perform to a European audience of opinion-formers and we knew they were the perfect band to take as they are ‘fresh, innovative and heavily influenced by the underground of the city and the fashion scene (Lee, Hebe May 2011)’.

Josh performing in Barcelona

After the Creative Encounter

The Barcelona Creative Encounter was great for many reasons but one of the most important was the relationships that were formed on the trip. When you have fashion designers, DJs, bands and media specialists hanging together for three days you are constantly talking creative collaborations and getting to know more about what each other is about. 

On the trip we introduced ICS to our friends at Back to Basics: Dave Beer and Tristan Da Cunha. The guys got on like a house on fire and we were soon talking of what we could do when we got back to Leeds.

We all already knew in the back of our minds that we needed to work together in an official capacity, but obviously first we had to drink lots of beer, watch documentaries about The Clash and party together before any deal was agreed!

After this hard work was done, so was the deal and now ICS are officially managed by Team Hebe and Dave Beer! The boys performed at the Back to Basics 20th anniversary bash with Bez and Pritch which was fun and are scheduled to play Live at Leeds on May 5th. Keep checking the ICS website and Facebook page for updates about upcoming gigs and track releases. In the meantime check out a track from the new EP, Cassette Tapes below...

 ICS do a one-time acoustic set at Lee's birthday party

On Friday 17th February we held the launch event for the new Hebe produced, Back to Basics exhibition at Leeds Gallery. The night was so much fun, not many art exhibitions kick off with DJs, smoke machines and the sounds of Dave Beer talking about aliens, but thats how we roll :)

We will be talking in more depth later this week about working with Paul Fryer, and you can read this earlier post about the work in the exhibition and the story of how everything came together, but for now we wanted to say a big "thanks" to everyone who came and remind you that the exhibition is on until March 17th and you can buy all the work on show:

A2 Giclée Prints - £100 - Signed, Limited Edition sets of 50 (Also avaliable framed)

A1 Giclée Prints - £125 - Signed, Limited Edition sets of 25

A3 LED Lightbixes - £500  (Framed)

You can check out more pictures from the launch night here and on our our Facebook page.

After a busy week getting everything ready for the launch of our Excess All Areas exhibition at Leeds Gallery, I have finally found five minutes to write about another art exhibition that is open until tomorrow at Bar Lane Studios in York.

Kong Lear is the outcome of a collaboration between two artists, Claire Hind (pictured above) and Gary Winters. The pair held a special preview last week, and talked about the development of their work together and the multi-media exhibition that punctuates their progress to-date.

Claire and Gary came together around the writing of a solo performance project, Ghost Track (coming to York Theatre Royal in April), in which Claire explores the "complexities of the psyche, the workings of the vocal chords and the intricate and anxious lives we can lead" through successive and often comical re-tellings of act one scene one of King Lear. As Claire explained, "Kong Lear came about from a slip of the tongue, an unconscious play on words, that revealed what we both felt was a potential worth persuing." That potential is exposed in the interplay between the two charachters (King Lear and King Kong) and two locations (York and New York), and in Claire's interest in the work of Sigmund Freud. "We like the idea that Kong is inside Lear's psyche – imagine that. And we like the idea that Kong Lear is a woman. Freud would have a field day."

The exhibition, which includes prints, text and sound installations and an 8mm film, documents Gorrilla Mondays, a programme of events during which Claire led small groups on a performance through the streets on York. If you find yourself on those streets yourself this weekend, I'd highly reccommend that you head down to Bar Lane Studios to check it out - especially the film, which is beautifully made and hilariously funny. There is a special, early evening viewing between 4pm and 7pm tomorrow, after which the exhibition will close.

See Through

When I think of see through materials, the iconic trend would have to be YSL's 1969 sculpture gowns. Since 2010, this trend was popular among all styles, in 2011, Harajuku girls mainly use it with contrast materials.

Mixed Materials

Combinations of different materials have been introduced by many big brands since the Fall of 2011, and it soon became trendy for the Harajuku girls, who are really good at pulling it off. The denim and leather match was particularly popular.

Tartan

2011 Tartan was big among boys and girls in Harajuku, men wearing kilts, and the women love tartan coats, vintage style is preferable.

Colour Block

 Everybody knows this trend last year, it was very popular before the earthquake struck Japan, but then did not seem to fit with the mood of the country. But the Harajuku girls brought it back to lighten up people's mood.

Volume Coat

This look was seen in many big brands in A/W 2011, Japanese girls generally like oversize knits to contrast their tiny frames. Last year, big sleeves were particulaly popular, with beige, camel, and grey colour to soften it up.

White Tights 

White tights appeared in Harajuku from late 2010, and became more popular in 2011. It represents the lolita spirit which is always popular in Japan, it was also a big element in Bottega Veneta 2011 Fall collection.

Collar

The 'collar trend' was probably one of the most dominant trend last year. Who knew a tiny collar could make such a difference to one's style! Some say the collar trend in Japan began when Princess Diana visited Japan in 1986.

Platform

Following the boys, platforms was big for girls as well. Platforms are always trendy, but you can see a lot of Converse, Dr. Martens platforms last year.

Vintage Glasses

2011, vintage glasses were very popular. They name girls that dare to wear big old school glasses "Akiba Girl" in Harajuku. 

American Apparel Bag

Cool, simple, chic, and cheap, the American Apparel tote bag was very popular among the Harajuku girls, especially the younger crowd.

Source & images from Fashionsnap.com