The illustrations of Ville Savimaa are smooth. The soft curves and soft colors combine to produce dreamy scenes. He fuses elements of nature, animals, people, and fashion, to complete very complex compositions that are not overly busy. Savimaa begins his pieces in pencil and completes them digitally. His clean and fluid style as an illustrator has won him several high profile clients including Adidas, Disney, Nokia, and Sony.
Genevieve Blais, a photographer based in Toronto, borrows imagery from classic art history paintings to unpack sexual politics relative to today’s contemporary palate.
Of her intention, Blais states, “The aesthetic/topical dissonance aims to elicit an uneasy response in order to subvert the implicit authority and sanctity of the icon.”
The result confronts and critiques art culture by sitting in an uneasy space between not only imagery, but also mediums– cameras and brushes, forcing us to clearly see the model as the true determinant– a staged powerful variant that has been with us since Caravaggio’s rule, humanizing the myth.
Matt Leines currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He recently opened a solo exhibition entitled Hyperbolic at Beginnings NYC. From the quirky press release: “First there was Da Vinci, then Picasso and now there is Matt Leines and this show is called Hyperbolic. Ever the patient and earnest image-maker, surrealist sign-painter and erstwhile myth-shaper, Leines relocated to New York after a spell in Philadelphia during the year in which the world was scheduled to end. Settling into a fresh rhythm, he began a series of paintings that drew on those familiar rituals, traced the good ol’ sigils, but manipulated colors and shapes from the present with an attitude more formal, bright and tight. The young man in the studio considering a renaissance–small “r”. Real, live inscrutable people and chattering patterns. A happy creature drifting through the kitchen cosmos. Native American name-givers and the zig-zag of eternity. Leines’ recent output is a reminder that creative, figurative work has always been foundational to modern art.” The show is on view through May 5th 2013.
The colorful skies of Matt Molloy‘s photographs nearly seem built from dozens of chunky brush strokes. However, these photographs are actually a type of time lapse photography which Molloy calls “timestacks”. Molloy shoots several photographs of the same location or image over a specific period of time. He then takes those photographs and merges them into one image. For the timestack photographs featured here, Molloy merges huge amounts of images – up to 500 photographs for only one image! [via]
Playing with the viewer’s sense of spatial perception, artist Leah Wolff‘s works quietly pique curiosity and bend the mind. Wolff explores visual paradox through several small series of medium-specific artistic investigations. By giving her mind-bending drawings, sculptures and relief works the element of visual confusion, Wolff’s creations cause the mind to try to connect the dots over and over again—creating a mental feedback loop that’s hard to ignore. The immediate presence of the artist’s hand in these works is at times the most interesting part of the series, how she chooses expressive movement when most artists would strive for complete, flat, graphic perfection. Her use of each medium is intuitive, yet raw, leaving a curious series of entry points for the viewer to tackle each small, imaginary space.
From the artist: “Discoveries in modern science have lead the individual to a space of intellectual disconnect from their surroundings. I want my practice to resist this, as a new method of research where I find meaning through making. However, If our universe is truly infinite, then how can we possibly understand it? It is important to remember that this is a spatial concern that can be addressed and worked out intuitively through the physical act of creation. For me, this is the point and ultimate goal of my practice.”
Italian based artist team, Carnovsky, unveiled their RGB Fabulous Landscapes during Milan Design Week 2013. Their digital fresco’s were printed using an innovative technique by Italian company graphicreport. In plain light the landscapes, figures, architecture and atmospheres vibrate and the images are tangled with one another.
But when red, blue or green light is applied to the digital fresco’s a whole different series of pictures emerge. In the piece Atmospheric N. 1 the sky seems to be in a flux of sunrise, sunset and storm as the lighting changes.
In Landscape N.1 a room that seems to go back into infinity is taken over by a lush green landscape which then gives way to a centuries old battle scene.
Both the technique and the imagery are compelling and together the juxtaposition creates an ethereal and haunting effect. (via)
The work of artist Kris Kuksi has a decidedly consistent style. His amazingly intricate sculptures are often dark, reference both the classical world and the industrial landscape, and comment on religion and politics. His Churchtanks series, though, seems to especially encapsulate his philosophies. Kuksi seamlessly fuses gaudy cathedrals with modern war tanks to create one imposing structure. In a strange way, the aesthetics of each seems to compliment the other. Kuksi effectively uses the structural blending to comment on a connection between religion and violence.
Artist Josefina Concha, with the aid of a sewing machine in lieu of a brush, weaves her work into being. Full of texture and threaded messy shapes of color, her stitching fascinatingly harkens back to Mark Tobey’s thoughts on abstract expressionism: “A painting should be a textile, a texture. That’s enough! Perhaps I was influenced by my mother. She used to sew and sew. I can still see that needle going. Maybe that’s what I’d rather do than anything with the brush-like stitching over and over and over, laying it in, going over, bringing it up. Bringing it up. That’s what is difficult.”
However, of her own approach, Concha strives not just to simulate, but replace painting with crafting techniques, a medium formerly equated primarily with domestic labor. She explains, “The building of my work is articulated through the investment of a material (the thread) on a piece of cloth, and the time dedicated to sew it. This is made visible in the superimposition of weaves that in short will generate a thickness (body) and a sensation of volume, dominated by the treatment of color and optical mixtures, to which I turn to with the eagerness of creating suggestive images that appeal to the ephemeral.”
