BEYOND LOCAL: Caricature artist spreads smiles through art - ElliotLakeToday.com

The Los Angeles-based photographer, who was raised in a conservative Catholic environment, is reclaiming the divinity of queer and trans identity through religious imagery. The First Gathering (2024), with Smiles Meyer as creative director; Kaley Azambuja as stylist; Scout Nankin as intimacy coordinator/movement director; @hot_at_the_party as makeup artist; Betty Connolly as photo/lighting assistant; and models from left to right: Alena, Teague, Joey, JA, Mia, Jules, Annalise, Kat, Bamby, Mars, Chloe, Zaphir, and Lena (all images courtesy Smiles Meyer)

In Mani Haghighi’s new film, an artist’s extensive archive draws the ire of the authorities. I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies (2026) poster (all images courtesy Film at Lincoln Center)Mani Haghighi’s documentary, I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies (2026), opens with a diverse group of stone-faced archivists in a beautiful, jewel-toned room lined with books and ephemera. They suit up in masks and gloves to root through garbage bags filled with photo albums, broken pottery, and other artifacts of unknown provenance, caked in dirt and debris. However, as the Iranian director’s voice-over narration explains, “This film wasn’t meant to begin this way.” Authorities confiscated the footage Haghighi shot for the original opening, “a girl standing on a foggy mountain road, searching for a phone signal,” when they raided the film crew’s hotel room in Tabriz. Their crime was depicting a woman without a headscarf. I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies is a document of documentation — of discovery, preservation, and remembrance.

‘The first time I had the tooth in my hand,” says Linda Cardellini, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m doing.’” The star of Freaks and Geeks, ER, Dead to Me, Mad Men and DTF St Louis (for which she recently won an Emmy) is talking about her pivot towards full-blown horror. In Crystal Lake, the prequel to the Friday the 13th movies, Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, the original slasher of the 1980 film. The tooth, by the way, is human and gets embedded in Pam’s knuckle – until she yanks it out with a gruesome, revolting slurping sound. Casual filmgoers may associate Friday the 13th with Jason, the hockey-mask-wearing serial killer. But aficionados will know that Pam, Jason’s mother, is the villain of the first movie. “He didn’t even have the mask until the third movie,” says Cardellini, who has clearly done her homework. “Pam is the original killer, in vengeance of his death.” (There is some massaging of previous storylines in Crystal Lake, such as moving Jason’s drowning from the 1950s to the early 70s, but since the franchise is flexible enough to have sent Jason into space at one point, a bit of timeline tweaking feels fair game.)‘I like to change it up’ … Linda Cardellini

“The exhibition in no way presents her as an Impressionist,” exhibition cocurator Stéphanie Cantarutti told ARTnews .

Is there a better no-frills standup at work today than Kevin Bridges? You’d struggle to find a more unfussily funny demonstration of the art form’s traditional virtues than at the Glaswegian’s new touring set. It’s a consistently laugh-out-loud suite of observational material on subjects comics have addressed since time immemorial: nostalgia, marital dispute, the latest cultural trends – alongside, as Ben Elton used to have it, a little bit of politics, too. Bridges really does have the X factor, and – without him ever seeming to stretch himself – Here If You Need Me is a steamroller 75 minutes of standup. For me, it needed to be, after being hit by a £10 – 10 pounds! – cloakroom charge because my innocuous wee bag (a notebook, a novel, a pair of glasses) was apparently too incendiary to be allowed into the venue. Oh that Bridges would turn his satirical eye on that racket. But the show starts with more obvious targets: Donald Trump, whose “negotiating” techniques our host burlesques in a violent dialogue with his electrician; and Benjamin Netanyahu, pausing before another act of destruction to check out Bridges’ Instagram feed.

More than sixty artists explore migration, memory, and identity in this survey of Puerto Rican abstraction across and beyond the archipelago. Left: Raphael Collazo, “Arcana Mundi (Mysteries of the World)", 1985; Top right: Olga Albizu, “Blue Oil”, 1974; Bottom right: Raphael Montañez Ortíz, “Archaeological Find #22: The Aftermath”, 1961