rl_rail has added a photo to the pool:

Kobe, Japan

Greater Manchester mayor would need to win byelection to launch leadership challenge against Starmer

• UK politics live – latest updates

Andy Burnham now has a route back to parliament after a Greater Manchester MP announced he would stand down, triggering a byelection, and putting Burnham in contention to become the next Labour leader.

The Greater Manchester mayor has been seeking to return to parliament for months, but was blocked by Keir Starmer from running in the Gorton and Denton byelection at the start this year, to the anger of his supporters inside the party.

The Hacks star spoke at Cannes about fallout from pro-Palestine comments and joining a tradition of Jewish allies

The actor Hannah Einbinder has said the cost of not speaking up about Palestine is greater than losing her Hollywood career.

The Emmy-winning star of Hacks, who leads the new queer slasher drama Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, told an audience at Cannes film festival she would not be deterred from standing up for causes she cared about.

“I believe in myself. That’s why I commit.” A young skater doesn’t give up trying to land a three-stair kickflip.

Joy Machine is pleased to present Feel Free, a group exhibition featuring new works by Rachel Hayden, Paulina Ho, Hanna Lee Joshi, and Jeremy Miranda. The opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. on May 15, 2026.

Attempting to create order and find clarity amid chaos is human instinct. Since time immemorial, we’ve endeavored to make sense of a world in which reason and certainty are never assured. Change, as the saying goes, is the only constant, which means notions of autonomy or control are a subjective fantasy rather than a concrete reality. In Feel Free, we witness four artists grappling with this enduring paradox. Each surrenders to the inevitability of change and focuses on the small instances of understanding that, for a brief moment, allow us to believe we’re closer to figuring it out.

Hayden is known for her uncanny compositions that infuse flowers, plants, and insects with human emotion, often those that are unsightly or difficult to voice. She’s described her work as a way “to take control” amid situations that are so often out of our hands. For this exhibition, Hayden subsumes fruit and figures with the checkerboard pattern of a picnic blanket, utilizing color to make one indistinguishable from the other. As ants crawl along a character’s face in the shape of perfectly arched brows, the artist gestures toward the brief intervals when disparate components align, creating an uncanny harmony.

Blending gouache and colored pencil into textured gradients, Joshi similarly reflects inarticulable experiences through her signature nude figures. In the bold “Held like a flower,” the artist presents an anonymous woman with a mass of black hair as she peers down at a single flower. The thin vines mimic the gestural qualities of her fingers, suggesting an affinity between the two.

Typically working in controlled acrylic on canvas, Ho shifts to textiles sourced from a thrift shop, rendering soft landscapes with Japanese indigo. This new direction emerged from an artist residency in Joseph, Oregon, following a trip to Andalusia, where she found inspiration in the cream-and-blue Moorish architecture. Frayed edges and bold gradients capture both movement and evolution, invoking a sense of the undone and the cyclical processes that often pattern our lives.

Miranda, too, captures singular moments of impermanence. There’s a stock pot atop a roaring flame, a bundle of plump white asparagus bound by bands, and an antique ceramic sink unadorned by backsplash or countertop. To create his painterly compositions, Miranda incorporates a wet-sanding process that reveals how “the painting has lived.” Acknowledging that his own desires are not the sole factors in an artwork’s creation, he surrenders to the slippery qualities of memory and paint itself. 

Feel Free is on view from May 15 to June 27, 2026. RSVP.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article At Joy Machine, ‘Feel Free’ Plumbs the Tension Between Chaos and Control appeared first on Colossal.

MHKBB posted a photo:

Architecture: UN Studio
Camera: Leica M3
Lens: Leica Summicron-M 2/50
Film: Kentmere Pan 200

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m giving a virtual talk on “The Security of Trust in the Age of AI,” hosted by the Financial Women’s Association of New York, at 6:00 PM ET on May 21, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany. The event runs June 24–25, 2026, and my talk will be the evening of June 24.
• I’m speaking at the Digital Humanism Conference in Vienna, Austria, on Tuesday, June 26, 2026.
• I’m speaking at the Nuremberg Digital Festival in Nuremburg, Germany, on Wednesday, July 1, 2026.

The list is maintained on this page.