Coco Star Sims Has Been Extremely Busy

Over the past year, she has been extremely busy working on a variety of different projects across the world. She designed three collections, with LQQK Studio, Big Love Records and Perks and Mini. She released a zine with Commune Press with fellow tattoo artists Keegan Dakkar and Jackson Epstein from New York as a prequel to the group show ‘Songwheel’ they did together in January at Commune’s Gallery in Tokyo. This year is planned to be just as full on for her. As a fan of Coco and her work, I wanted to sit down with her and talk about her work and her projects before she moves to Tokyo next month.

I wanted to start by asking about tattooing which seems to be your main practice as of late. How did you get into tattooing and was it a natural transition going from drawing?

Drawing has always been my happy place and I think tattoos are just an extension of that. I got my first tattoo when I was fifteen. I wore an outfit that I thought looked really grown up and hoped they wouldn’t ask any questions, thankfully they didn’t. I really enjoyed the experience of getting a tattoo. I started doing terrible stick and pokes with my friends when I was in high school, we would get sewing needles and tape them to pencils and use pen ink. Then it grew and at parties’ people would ask me to do it. It got to the point when friends and friends of friends started asking if they could come over for me to give them a tattoo after school. When I was at art school people started asking me to do drawings for them to get tattooed. I was spending a lot of my time doing stick and pokes and doing drawings for others. I wasn’t thinking of it as a career, I just enjoyed doing it. People offered to pay but I thought that was ridiculous and refused for a long time. Then there was this one time when my friend who was visiting asked if I could give him and his friends these matching tattoos to commemorate their friendship, they’d buy me a six-pack of ciders and we'd light off fireworks [laughs]. That night I realised just how much I enjoyed tattooing. After that, that’s when I decided to commit to it. I bought a machine, made Flash, got a mentor, started practising on lemons and my friends, quit my job and that was it.

When did you quit your job and start tattooing full-time?

I think I was 20 or 21, so it’s been sixish years now. In 2020 and 2021 Melbourne was in lockdown for basically the whole time so I couldn’t really tattoo for most of those two years. Then I’ve also done some travelling before and after, so I haven’t been consistently tattooing the whole time. In the scheme of things, it hasn’t been very long.

Wow, I didn’t realise it’s been so long. When did you develop the style of tattoos that you are doing now?

I have always just made tattoos in the style that I would want to get myself and things from my other drawings that people asked for. When I started, they were more scribbly and doodly because I wanted ones like that and also because I wasn’t very good [laughs]. I would say during lockdown when I had a lot of time to sit, and draw my style shifted more to what it is now.

Your style is so unique. Where did the influence for it come from?

I have always been really interested in creatures, world-building and storytelling. I read a lot of sci-fi, I watch a lot of movies with special effects, I love trail running and get a lot of inspiration from nature especially Australian flora and fauna, space, my friends, and I really love puppets and animatronics. Those are all such big influences on my work.

Can we talk about your love of puppets?

Yeah, I used to spend a lot of time at this puppet shop/theatre called Hocus Pocus when I was a kid. I would have every birthday there. It got to the point where the owners would put out birthday signs on the month of my birthday because I spent so much time and all of my pocket money there [laughs]. It felt so big at the time, like I was stepping into another world. I have gone to visit where the shop once was since, in reality it’s just a small place, the store has changed into many other things over the years, but it still feels nice to go in.

A lot of your recent drawings have been centred around the theme of perception and shrimp vision, where did the influence for that come from?

I love theories of perception. I really like looking at how other creatures see things and make sense of them compared to humans. My favourite creature is the mantis shrimp, the mantis shrimp has the best vision of any creature in the entire world. Humans view the world through three channels of light and the mantis shrimp views through twelve and they can see UV. They see a whole spectrum of colour and light that is so beyond what we can even imagine. A big focus in my work is imagining how the mantis shrimp would experience the world. That is what the big focus of my recent show with Commune Gallery was, trying to play with colour that created a spectrum in the way I imagine they are morphing colours in a way we can’t perceive.

Do you think that’s where your use of coloured pencil comes from?

Yeah, definitely.

While you are out in nature are you taking photos of things that you’d take influence from?

Yes, or I take them home [laughs]. A lot of feathers, rocks, lost buttons and things. As I’ve been moving I’ve been getting rid of a lot of it, but I bring a lot of things home. A lot of what’s in my drawings is from something I’ve found or has some kind of story behind it.

Do you have an example of a bit of your work that has a story in it?

This little creature with robo-tentacles in this one part of this drawing. An old friend of mine is working on a project making birdhouses to help keep swift parrots safe from sugar gliders. I was thinking about how sugar gliders are so cute and it’s funny to think they are the villains in this situation. I saved some photos of sugar gliders when I was reading about the project. That same day I took a photo of a Spider-Man balloon to send to a friend of mine that loves Spider-Man. The two photos were next to each other in my camera roll. So, I drew a sugar glider with these big Dr Octagon arms to represent their villain-hood in this story.

That is so cool, it’s something that the viewer would never understand, but it means something to you. Is it something you think about when you’re drawing and putting in these little personal easter eggs?

I’m not trying to make it something people won’t understand on purpose. People can take what they want from it. I want looking at my drawings to be like cloud watching, where the viewer can get lost in it and constantly find new elements or make sense of different parts in different ways.

Where do your characters come from?

All of the things that I have been talking about. I also get a lot of inspiration from seeing images in things like droplets of water or in the pattern on a machine. I see a lot of things in droplets of water when I’m in the shower.

Your latest zine, ‘Sixteen Rollercoasters’ that you made with Stacks Bookstore in Tokyo focuses on some of those characters. Can we talk about the zine?

The infinity symbol looks like an eight, two eighths make sixteen, which in my mind is double infinity. As infinity is infinite, in theory it can’t be multiplied so I like the idea of multiplying the un-multipliable [laughs]. It is also a reference to a song by Rammellzee called ‘Seventeen Roller Coasters’. I like the idea that by “doubling infinity” it is still one behind Rammellzee. I made this zine to zoom in on specific characters within my larger drawings that are particularly special to me. It’s printed on this pearlescent paper that sparkles in the light.

You are doing so much at the moment and it goes across a wide variety of mediums, whether that be clothing, drawing, tattooing, food and design. How does it feel having that much creative freedom to be able to not be limited by the medium?

I have never actually thought of it like that. I like trying new things and making things with my friends and have always been excited by collaborating with others to make something neither of us could do alone. That is one of the big things with tattooing for me too. I see the characters as little friends of mine and when I tattoo them on someone, they become that person's own little friend.

Working with different mediums you can stretch your ideas so much further. Do you ever feel limited by drawing and tattooing?

I haven’t ever felt particularly limited by these things. I see drawing and tattooing as just part of what I do in the bigger scheme of things.

Are there any other mediums you could see yourself working in?

I would love to make more sculptural pieces and furniture at some point.

You’re also designing a donut, right?

Yeah, I’m designing a donut for Juanita Peaches which is a café owned by my friends. They are doing a series of different donuts throughout the year, and they reached out to me to design a donut.

How does designing the donut work?

So, I come to them with my flavour ideas and what I want to do with the design. Then I work with the pastry chef, and she takes the ideas I have and works out what is realistic and what can work.

What drives you to create?

I’m not sure, really. I think storytelling and connecting. It’s important to me to work with friends and people whose values align with mine. All the projects I’m working on at the moment are with people I feel very lucky to have in my life. That definitely helps drive me.

What’s next for you from here?

I am moving to Tokyo next month, so I am currently packing up my apartment. I am working on a new collection with Perks and Mini that will come out at the start of next year. I worked with them on designing some pieces and I have really enjoyed the process. I am also working on a three-way collaboration with Geek Out Store and Commune Gallery. I have some other projects that I am working on now that I am really excited about.

Art

Barbara Nitke's 'American Ecstasy'

Throughout the show’s three month run, Nitke, who now teaches at SVA and works as a mainstream film photographer, has hosted several talks. On March 30, she and porn expert Casey Scott played clips from hardcore films that appear in American Ecstasy like Sexcapades (1983) and Viva Vanessa (1984), all by legend Henri Pachard. Nitke was his go-to photographer.

She entered the industry in 1982 through her husband, a financier who helped make The Devil In Miss Jones (1973). In 1982, Nitke started off as an on-set photographer working on Part Two. “I realized early on that I had access to this world, and I could do a documentary,” Nitke told me. “I saw it as an art project.” She struck a deal that she could pull slides, and did interviews on set.

“I did have a theory back then, that if you were going to do sex work, especially in front of a camera, you probably had a trauma in your life,” Nitke said, “which I totally disproved to myself.”

Every photo in American Ecstasy tells many tales, beginning in the stars they depict. One of the most striking shots in the show centers on Stacey Donovan, still fresh from Seventeen, riding her seated co-star reverse — her body poised mid-air precariously over his visibly glistening head. Donovan’s dirty blonde fringe obscures her downcast eyes, and the hands on her hips read defiant. “What I found interesting about her is she did not like sex,” Nitke remarked.

In White Women (1986), though — as we saw the night Nitke and Scott offered everyone an authentic porn dinner of soggy baked ziti — Donovan uses poppers to seduce a lovesick rockstar into fucking. She fakes an orgasm as he finishes, and when he promptly leaves, she desperately gets herself off. Nitke considers it a classic Pachard touch. She calls him “a sensitive guy who was also a shithead,” as well as a director who sought to portray female desire and experience.

Although porn migrated to meet LA’s pretty young starlets in the mid-80s, Pachard preferred seasoned performers like Sharon Mitchell and Vanessa Del Rio, both in American Ecstasy. One photo from Nasty Girls (1983) captures Mitchell before a moment of immense professionalism, where she improvisationally licked fluids from her necklace because her co-star accidentally busted outside of her mouth. Del Rio, seen flexing on stage, knew and demanded her worth.

These were hour-long films that fans had to leave home to buy. Although the plots that connected their sex scenes were flimsy, Nitke believes that if porn had been allowed to grow, it may have become an artform, like horror did. Instead, she witnessed prosecution from numerous angles — feminists like Andrea Dworkin, who saw porn as objectification and violence, alongside Jerry Falwell’s moral majority, who pushed the Reagan administration to pursue aggressive new venue shopping tactics while sticking obscenity suits on porn producers.

But, try as Mike Johnson’s “Covenant Eyes” might, vices prevail. For most who aren’t asexual or otherwise celibate, arousal is on the hierarchy of needs. And, like the rest of culture, the internet tessellated porn into infinite online niches. Some are exploratory and healthy, yet the wider machine says porn is giving teens hardcore tastes and dysmorphia. No wonder they’re not having sex. In a final blow of poetic justice, abstinence-only education IRL just makes porn more powerful.

Not that adults who had first kisses before Pornhub are much better off. I suffered when my middle school boyfriend called Megan Fox hot growing up, so the lover I brought to Nitke’s talk felt my hands sweat in his. Another colleague I ran into there walked out before it was over. We crossed paths again at a birthday party that night and discussed our various discomforts. In a world saturated with viscerally violent imagery, it’s fascinating that porn can still make people squirm. Nitke herself went through four literary agents and the illustrious editor Judith Reagan before self-publishing American Ecstasy in 2012 to avoid censoring its central hardcore stars.

As an exhibition, American Ecstasy encapsulates the fuzzy glamor of porn’s halcyon days. It can even get guests to check their baggage at the door by arresting them with the alluring abandon of a fledgling genre playing with the archetypal elements of sex, beauty and power, uninhibited.

Art

Unrequited at 59 Wooster Street

May 15, 2024

I walk past the posing mannequins dressed up in sequins and micro shorts at the Gucci flagship and dial all the buttons available. Not sure which floor to press, all I know is that I’m at 59 Wooster Street, birthplace to decades of extraordinary prints. It’s the address where art dealers Brooke and Carolyn Alexander established their gallery, bringing the peak of post-war print revolution and altering the evolving practice of art.

The door opens and I step inside, probably the very same worn-out bunker that once propelled the likes of Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, and Richard Tuttle to elevate their legacies. I'm greeted by Pietro Alexander, nephew of Brooke Alexander and founder of SPY Projects, claiming this as its temporary New York space and Sara Apple, curator of its first exhibition, a show that puts its own noble spin on the heritage of the house by disregarding just that.

Words by Vilda Krog

The Alexander Gallery is haunted by phantoms of the past. I imagine curating a show in a space like this is equivalent to checking in at the Chelsea Hotel, hosting a party at CBGD (impossible, thank you wholesale), or ordering the bacon burger at JG Melon. It’s a New York time capsule, nostalgically self-indulgent, and rightly so.

When you inherit a legacy like this, it's easy to fall into the trap of repetition. At times, this repetition is driven by pressure, a sense or honor, or frankly, fear. There's an anxiety about living up to whatever was achieved before you arrived — the feeling of stepping into shoes that are too big to fill but wearing them anyway. They might guide you down the same path, but that's precisely the issue. It takes more than just a hint of confidence (or naivete) to break free from this cycle.

Chris Lloyd, I Shall Cut Off My Eyelids To See Better, 2024.

Cristine Brache, Blue Mood, 2024.

“You’ve got to have a serious ego problem to own a gallery,” quips Alexander, presenting me with an unfiltered glimpse into his self-perception as a tastemaker. This prompts the question: do all artists share this trait? Beneath the imposter syndrome prevalent in many creatives lies a fundamental desire to be recognized, seen. Is this egoism, or perhaps a survival instinct?

The outcome of ego isn't what justifies Spy Projects’ arrival in New York. While it may be tempting to attribute it solely to Brooke Alexander being Pietro Alexander’s uncle, the truth is more nuanced. The exhibition stands independently, free from the weight of legacy or family ties. With almost effortless grace, the space's rich history now showcases both established and emerging artists, creatives united by a shared urge — a 'need,' as Apple describes it — to harness the remnants of New York’s post-industrial landscape, not just in their art, but in their very way of life.

Raymond Pettibon, Untitled (Hitchcock’s “the birds”…), 2024. Untitled (Shall I consider…), 2024.

Katherine Auchterlonie, Feuillet-Beauchamp Notation of a Good Make-Out Session, 2023.

Kay Kasparhauser, Blood, 2024.

It feels like a family affair. The curation doesn't try to impose a grand narrative by forcing artworks under an artificial title, a futile attempt to unify disparate artists. Unrequited is as enigmatic as it is purposeful — a title as blank as the gallery's walls, allowing for continual exploration. Each work stands distinct yet interconnected, except for instances where an artist submitted duplicates, strategically placed apart to evoke a thought-provoking contrast.

Textile collages by Alison Peery converse with Peter Alexander’s transition to velvet in 1984; Montana Simone’s pieces assert dominance not only in size but also through their assertive use of steel. Kay Kasparhauser’s medium evokes elements of hair, moss, and what the artist calls “Kay’s blood.” Malik Al Maliki’s outlandish treatment of woodblocks tempers the intensity within Raymond Pettibon’s expressive acrylics, while within Sasha Filimonov’s panel — reminiscent of Eastern European propaganda — the artist has incorporated a portable gun, which, when activated, is almost as arresting as the female figures concealed behind thick layers of wax in Cristine Brache’s works, blurring the line between dehumanization and a dream state.

Cristine Brache, Purple Bunnies, 2024.

Montana Simone, Choke Collar, 2024.

Sasha Filimonov, nightlight, 2024.

Unrequited is akin to being at a library but only reading a single page in each book, or scrolling through Netflix but only watching trailers. It's like waking up hungover at a brunch-buffet on a Sunday morning, finding yourself faced with croissants, bacon, ham, sausages, eggs, pancakes, bagels, cream cheese, avocados, bananas, blueberries, yogurt, etc, etc. But does it satisfy or does it leave you feeling overwhelmed and nauseous? A group show always presents a delicate balance.

Spy Project’s New York debut is not an imitation like the posturing mannequins at the adjacent flagship store, nor is it an attempt to mimic the legacy in which it finds itself ensconced. Rather, it offers a genuine experience devoid of pretense. Unrequited sits you down for family dinner, where conversations traverse generations, opinions vary, and no one hesitates to voice their views.

Before I left the gallery on Wednesday afternoon, Apple opened the window to invite neighbors smoking on the fire escape across the street to the opening the following evening. Despite seeming to have absolutely nothing in common, there they were, finding a connection.

Photography by Daniel Arnold

Spy Projects, a contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles founded by Pietro Alexander in 2021, is temporarily visiting New York. The exhibition, Unrequited, will be on view until May 31st, 2024, at 59 Wooster Street.

Art

Wishing Well

Gal Schindler, Wishing Well, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Raised on the work of de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Milton Avery, Schindler’s work exudes a sense of fluidity and ambiguity. Further citing influences ranging from old-style Disney characters and antique botanical wallpaper, the artist combines a charming illustrative style with gestural strokes and a unique scratching technique to depict figures reclining languidly leaning in and against their pastel backdrops, merging into one indecipherable composition.

Gal Schindler, Fire Fountain, In the Meantime, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

At the heart of Schindler's practice lies an exploration of the human form. Her nudes serve as conduits for a multitude of emotions, embodying the fragility and mutability of the human, and particularly female, experience. Further drawing on influences from her childhood, the artist references intricately depicted anatomical drawings, her loose figures and strokes blurring the boundaries between flesh and canvas.

Undoubtedly spring-like in their palette, Schindler’s works are both optimistic and uplifting, with the artist referencing themes of renewal, regeneration and growth in her playful alternatives to traditional nudes depicted under a male gaze. There’s a sense of performativity, appealing to both a female and a younger gaze by creating fluid figures that defy categorization. Schindler’s paintings are sweet without being saccharine and sensual without being overtly sexual, instead, they occupy a liminal space between categories, appealing to anyone who may be a little ground down by moody palettes and sterile compositions. The transitory nature of Schindler’s composition speaks to the flux of the human form and an inability to contain and categorize the human form.

Gal Schindler, Live the Questions Now, Paint the Rain, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Gal Schindler, Crystal Clear, A Promise, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Wishing Well is a playful collection of fairy-tale figures that lean between sensual characters and traditional forms, with the transitory nature of the compositions creating a sense of impermanence that comes from the artist's unique technique of scratching into wet paint to create transitory forms. Schindler's works occupy a realm between landscape and figuration, where bodies float in a nebulous non-space. Beginning with instinctual colour planes, the artist overlays rapid structural lines, leaving behind traces of gesture and memory. The resulting figures blend seamlessly with their visual surroundings, their forms emerging from the depths of the canvas like reflections on still water, calling to mind the “Wishing Well’ in question. Life ripples on still water, Schindler’s figures remain distorted and alluring, half-emerging and half-hidden, they occupy somewhere between imagination and reality.

Wishing Well is on view at Ginny on Frederick, 99 Charterhouse St, Barbican, London EC1M 6HR, United Kingdom until May 24th, 2024.

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