6: HOTEL

The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).

- Rosalind Krauss, Grids

Pink bedspreads you say
are not pleasing to you
yet you sit very straight
till the pictures are through.
Two suitcases watch you like dogs.

- Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours

Kolya

“I am Kolya. And I have come to save the world and forgive its sins.” A trip to a hotel in Moscow to interview a man who claimed to be the son of god.

By Tom Ball

My Love Affair with The Hotel

A diary of time spent in hotels, from breakfast conveyor belts to dinner served under (specifically un-requested) silver domes.

By Octavia Sheepshanks

Get Unready With Me

The last decade has seen an unprecedented rise in what is meant to be a close, unfiltered relationship between those with a celebrity platform and the people who follow them.

By Nicholas Hayden

A Conspicuous Abyss

How the aesthetics of luxury bunkers both disguise & reveal the persistence of American myths; from the Survival Condo Project to the Madonna Inn, California.

By Katrina Russell

The Beige


Exploring the role & representation of beige, in the hotel space and beyond.

By Ophelia Cai

Good and Bad Objects in Hotel Rooms

Nothing makes a hotel room feel more transient than a clock that’s just been reset.

By Molly Bluth

Lake Sevan: Monks and Mandelstam


A ninth-century Armenian monastery and a modernist writers’ resort make a striking pair.

By Chloe Schneider

Where the gloss won’t come off

On hospitality, ‘Hostipality’, and the impossibly polished pink hotel veneer in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).

By Sophie Mak-Schram

room 505

Friday night. She goes to the city with the rest of them. This is how it goes.


By Macarena de Arrigunaga

The Wetherspoons Hotel

Every rug, every story, every Spoons, is undeniably distinct. Yet each is essentially the same.

By William Stupp

Screen Shot 2020-10-08 at 21.08.11.png

All I’ve got is K-pop and good skin, what now?

The K-pop company system is a well-oiled machine ensuring maximum exposure of the idols within the various groups while prohibiting all access to them.

By Nicholas Hayden

Tsq’alt’ubo

West of Tbilisi, towards the Black Sea, there is a region named Imereti. North of Imereti’s largest city, one reaches Tsq’alt’ubo (წყალტუბო), a town of mostly derelict Soviet sanatoria. 

By Cosima Stewart

“picturesque“


Latex painted corkboard; artwork comprised of found images tagged under #picturesque on Instagram.

Artwork & text by Julie Boldt

From a pile of stuff: Uranus in Taurus

Uranus in Taurus indicates a departure from glamour & success in the ways we’ve known it in the past.

By Molly Arnthal

FramedFred2.jpg

Framing the Image-World in 2020

In a year defined by distance and absence, we’re aware more than ever of our reliance on images as tools for making sense of the world around us.

By Fredrika Olausson

stanley_hotel-outside_stanley_in_the_snow-jpeg.jpg

Heartmake Hotel

Hotels hold prime-location status for horror stories, sites of reckoning for those upon whom isolation is inflicted. But the hotel’s detachment can also provide a place of unique connection.

By Nancy Hervey

Looking In, Looking Out

Photos taken in, and from, hotel rooms in different cities.

By Macarena de Arrigunaga

Fluffy White Bathrobes

An exploration of cultural depictions of hotels, and the workings of fantasy and seduction therein.

By Leonora Chance

IMG_7846.JPG

functional pink in Japan

“There are things you can and cannot do.”

By Katrina Russell

in+the+future.jpg

Esoteric Soap and the Commodification of Dreams™

Purification has long been culturally represented as a deified, or supernatural act. From John Wesley’s declaration that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’, to adverts promising ‘magic’ stain removal, cleaning and cleansing have long been intimate with the vocabulary of the miraculous.

By Jo Austen