Artist Jeremy Geddes paints with considerable skill. His highly detailed oil paintings depict surreal, often lonely scenes. Many of his panels picture a lone astronaut in an empty urban landscape. Its unclear whether his subjects are falling or floating, in trouble or asleep. Geddes communicates the haunting silence of each scene as effectively as textures and light. He clearly has an ease of technique and personal aesthetic.
Photographer Wes Naman‘s Scotch Tape series is playful if not a bit creepy. Naman wraps clear tape around his subjects’ heads severely distorting their face. The tape tugs and squeezes lips, eyebrows, and noses making light of the idea of portraits. Slightly disturbing, the portraits resemble smiling car accident survivors or botched plastic surgery victims. Such simple but inventive ideas have made Naman a rather successful photographer winning him clients as diverse as High Times Magazine and T-Mobile. [via]
The work of Italian artist Alberto Tadiello peeks into the vagaries of technology, nature, and their relationships. For example, the first five photos of this post depict the installation EPROM (an acronym for Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory). The installation mounted on the wall consists of music boxes connected to small electric motors, which are in turn connected to transformers. While the tinny notes of the music boxes may conjure memories of childhood at first, the motors and music boxes are soon spinning faster than the mechanisms can withstand. Eventually the motors wear out reducing the ‘music’ to a hardly noticeable noise. Of this event, the gallery statement says:
“Once the pawls wear out the noise slowly becomes less noticeable and even indistinguishable. The high-speed movement is associated with a sort of cathartic event, which relieves the music box interface from bearing nostalgic feelings.” [via]
Chinese photographer Li Wei creates gravity defying work. Li Wei’s captivating photographs depict people floating and flying over cityscapes. At times mystical and other times comical, Li builds on a human fascination with flying resulting in mesmerizing images. Rather than creating his images entirely in Photoshop, Li uses complex rigging systems to suspend his subjects. The harnesses are then Photoshopped out of the images after the photographs have been taken. Li explains his insistence on not creating his images solely through a computer saying:
“There’s a visceral feeling of shooting on location that can’t be duplicated on a computer.” [via]
The work of Alejandro Almanza Pereda is colored with a dark sort of humor. While his installations are typically built of ordinary objects and materials, they are arranged with a near morbid wit. In a way, Pereda’s work gives boringly safe everyday situations a sense of impending danger. For example the last piece featured in this post is composed of what appears to be a section of the side of the ubiquitous high-rise building. They’re the heavy price tagged windows of a luxury loft sans room or even people to enjoy the view. The piece is aptly titled No Room With a View.
The team known as Lang Baumann is made up of artists Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann. Together they create large scale installations which playfully interact with the surrounding environment. Comfort, the series presented here, fills houses, barns, apartments, and more with tubes of air. The tubes twist through doors and windows completely overtaking the space they’re stuffed in. The installation and its title recall homes, living spaces, and an the perpetual search for physical comfort.
This series of images from photography duo Fesetti is aptly titled Disappear. Typically photographers succeed in capturing their subject. However, Fesetti intentionally and inventively keep their subjects visually out of reach. Hidden by everyday objects re-purposed as a witty camouflage, the models are nearly entirely concealed save for a stray hand or pair of feet. The series seems intended to be read as a how-to on disappearing or concealing oneself – a commodity itself in a hyper-connected social networking world usually fueled by photographs.
Mexican artist David Sauceda creates highly detailed illustrations. Primarily using ink and paper, he constructs his compositions from innumerable finely controlled lines. His portraits pictured here, literally depict the inside and outside of a person. The series is titled Membrane, referring to the outer body as opposed to an inner psychology. On this idea of a membrane Sauceda states:
“This project explores the concept of identity as a membrane, intangible and invisible, outside the physical body, being the filter of information between the environment and the individual’s psychological self. The membrane is in a constant state of change and adaptability, leading to the development of an identity.” [via]
