Alexander Dixon’s work is capricious. It centres on the meeting place between the artificial and the natural, purposefully displacing the viewer by intersecting environmental planes to create new contextual confinements. In doing so, it allows for multiple spatial and temporal moments to converge, captured in photographs, and then conjoined beyond recognition and laid out on construction metals. According to cultural theorists Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, this merging of space and time, in relation to the conception of art, acts as a cultural carrier in creating transnational spaces that thematise, represent and become themselves ‘an object of experience.’ This multiplicity of experiential components transgresses the boundaries of rationale, and allows for the emergence of new perspectives, often using the tool of disruption.

Few artists mix the style and imagery of high fashion with the high concepts and social commentary of fine art as effectively as the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, whose work plays on the tropes of magazine photography in order to disrupt the status quo. Witness the torn-out Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar pages he paints on in his 2011 volume, Wear Me Out: he makes chaos out of art-directed beauty, and in doing so makes beauty out of chaos. Here, Wurm has created an extensive series of exclusive artworks for Modern Matter in collaboration with Olu Odukoya, using special-edition archive issues of the magazine as raw material, as part of our ongoing Overprints project. From this particular Overprint portfolio’s first conception — inspired by the sight of those fashionable painting-collages in Wear Me Out —  to its eventual execution, more than a year of work has gone into the pages reproduced here. Proof, if proof were needed, that good things come to those who wait, and to those driven to create.