John Chae’s Fantastic Digital Worlds

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John Chae’s digital illustrations are suffused with bright colors, provocative images, and pop culture references. These digital worlds are odd and labyrinthine and reflect a pastiche of influences. While strangely captivating, his use of patterns and repetition is quite hypnotic. His work feels like a hybrid of Charles Burns’ and early mimetic internet styles. From his website:

안녕하세요! My name is John (희택) Chae and I was born in the year of the dragon (1988), but I’m technically a rabbit. My birthday jam is Tiffany’s Could’ve Been and my blood type is B, but I’m not sure whether I am B+ or B-… I was born in Boulder, Colorado but I grew up in Seoul, Korea. I graduated with a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. I currently reside in Jacksonville, FL.

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Darren Pearson’s Skeletal Light Paintings

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Light painting or light illustration has been a trending technique of late.  Darren Pearson‘s skeletal pieces, though, are much more complex than most of the work we often seem to come across.  While the camera shutter is open Pearson moves a light much like a brush which leaves its trail on the resulting photograph.  The image appears to take up physical space and leave a haunting glow on its surroundings.  Each piece also interacts with the surrounding scene, the California landscape which figures largely in much of Pearson’s work.   [via]

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A Gigantic Outdoor Disco Ball By Michel De Broin

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This is a huge disco ball.  The hugest, actually.  Michel De Broin‘s newest site specific installation One Thousand Speculations was created for Toronoto’s Luminato Festival.  The piece consists of disco ball over 25 feet in diameter hoisted 80 feet into the air, spun and spotlit each night of the festival.  The ‘thousand’ of the piece’s title likely refers to the ball’s mirrors – a thousand of which reflect on David Pecaut Square below.  Each of the individual mirrors reflect a large swath of light that travels over the yards and buildings each evening.  The surrounds, perhaps unavoidably, seem to feel just a little more lighthearted.

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The Otherworldly and Complex Paintings of Mario Martinez

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Mario Martinez painting6Mario Martinez painting1Mario Martinez painting3The visions of Mario Martinez (also aptly known as MARS-1) seem to either be extraterrestrial or drug induced.  His large scale paintings hold to very realistic perspective.   However, there the realism breaks down.  Geometric shapes, organic like growths, and strange lighting effects intertwine to form one complex mass on his canvas.  Martinez’ work seems to depict something between living and synthetic, not quite landscapes or creatures.  Check out his website to seem some similarly styled sculptural work.

 

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Lonesome Neon Typography Searches For New Context

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Aleksi Hautamaki - Photography

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From Futura Standard to Helvetica Neue, designer Aleksi Hautamaki refits vintage neon letters, previously destined for the bin, with a touch of LED lighting to resuscitate their glow for another 10 years.

Character, his company, sells each piece to the public, intending to cultivate a “second life cycle” capable of creating “new value for everybody involved.”

Likewise, portrayed here in a series of artful photographs, each previously abandoned bit of font now haunts the city, with a fresh sense of freedom, searching for a new artful context, home, or environment outside its previous life in advertising.

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Made With Color Presents: Scott Anderson’s Paintings Walk The Fine Line Between Abstraction And Representation

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Scott Anderson Painting
Once again we’ve teamed up with premiere website building platform Made With Color to bring you exclusive artist features. Each week we join forces to bring you some of the most exciting artists and designers who use Made With Color to create their beautifully designed and user friendly websites. Made With Color doesn’t just help artists create gorgeous websites but allows them to do so in a few minutes without having to touch a line of code. This week we are excited to bring you the work of midwest painter Scott Anderson whose work balances on the fine line between representation and abstraction.
The source material for Scott Anderson’s paintings are preexisting images – found photographs, his own snap shots, drawings or collages – that fall within broad archetypal categories such as portraiture, landscape, iconography, and still life.  The common denominator of these source images is distance, either due to authorship, such as in the found photographs, or time, as in the source imagery of Anderson’s own making.  The act of making new paintings from these images allows Anderson to understand them in new ways and to develop a idiosyncratic visual vocabulary.  In this sense, Scott Anderson is a translator.  What is foregrounded in his work is the way he perceives, organizes, scrambles, and prioritizes the images he makes the paintings from.  The delivery of the message IS the message.  Scott Anderson’s paintings establish an alternate reality in which they are safe to exist as ordinary illuminations of their surroundings.

Although relatively abstract, Anderson’s paintings have their origins in representational imagery.  This dependence on the objective along with his overall motivations put him in dialogue with early Modern art movements, particularly Dada, Surrealism, and Cubism.  Scott Anderson is interested in the continuation of this art historical conversation as a means to change the rules of the game as it were.  Where Modernists of all stripes were largely interested in winning the game by ending it (to paraphrase the critic, Jan Verwoert), Anderson sees this mode of objective / non-objective hybridity as one way among many in which to view the world.

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Sculptures On Colonialism And Globalization By Yinka Shonibare, MBE

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The work of Yinka Shonibare, MBE is filled with the complexity and ambiguity that make art endlessly exciting.  Born in London, Shonibare moved to Nigeria when he was three years old and later returned to London to attend college.  In a way, his work reflects this personal dynamic between Europe and Africa.  However, Shonibare’s work makes it clear that his scope is much larger than that.  He skillfully blends traditional textiles, costume, and symbolism from various European and African cultures and times.  Through his distinctive work, Shonibare has a way of exploring issues of colonialism in an increasingly shrinking world without taking away any of its complexity.  Thus, his work doesn’t inspire political reactionism, but rather sincere thought and deep consideration.

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Daniel Canogar’s Mesmerizing Projections

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“My most recent sculptural installations are constructed with discarded electronic materials: computer, telephone and electric cables, thousands of burnt-out bulbs, meters of videotape, old slot machines, celluloid, DVDs, etc. The installations explore the short life expectancy of the technologies we cast off and their relationship to organic mortality.

These installations also seek to reanimate the lifeless. Light animations projected onto the installations appear to free the energy stored in the electronic waste, awakening in it memories of its past.

Through my work I try to bring dead materials back to life, reveal their secrets, revive the collective memory they contain to construct an accurate portrait of a society and an age.” – Daniel Canogar.

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