Dispatches | September 01, 2010

We don’t usually say much about our covers, which needs to change because we’ve been using the work of some exciting contemporary artists. The cover of our current issue, Crash, is a photograph by Kerry Skarbakka. For the sake of the camera, he jumps off bridges, freefalls from skyscrapers, tumbles from stepladders, trips down stairs face first or simply slips in the tub. He has been compiling a portfolio of falling pictures since 2002. We had a difficult time selecting from this collection because all of the photographs had cover potential. You can visit his gallery at www.skarbakka.com

Our up-coming cover for the fall Shadow’s issue is by English filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist Sam Taylor-Wood from her Bram Stoker’s Chair series. This summer I took in one of her video installations at Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a playful piece of Robert Downey Jr. lip-syncing badly to an Elton John ballad as he walks languidly through an empty mansion. Her first feature film Nowhere Boy about John Lennon’s childhood in Liverpool opens in October before the seventieth anniversary of his birth. It stars Aaron Johnson as Lennon and Kristin Scott Thomas as his buttoned-up Aunt Mimi. You can view Sam Taylor-Wood’s work at www.whitecube.com

Kris Somerville is the marketing director of The Missouri Review.