May 24th, 2012
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The Fresh Blood Hunt art competition is going strong in its second week with entries coming in from all over England.  Open to all illustrators, designers, and artists residing in the UK,  the Fresh Blood Hunt Art Competition is a chance to flex your design skills on the Tim Burton produced Vampire thriller Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter! Not only will the winner have their work immortalized in London by talented muralist Jim Rockwell but they will also win a brand new 17″ Macbook Pro and Adobe Creative Suite 6!

With a chance to collaborate with one of the biggest film makers of all time , have your work blown up to larger than life proportions, and win thousands of dollars worth of products there’s very little downside to this competition.

Did we mention that Beautiful/Decay gets to help pick the winner as well! If that doesn’t seal the deal I don’t know what will. The competition ends May 30th so get to it Britain and lets show the world how talented the Cult Of Decay really is!

 

May 24th, 2012
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Melissa Cooke’s accomplished powdered graphite on paper works explore themes of beauty, fantasy, violence, vulnerability and identity, with the artist casting herself as subject in a myriad of thematic scenarios.

 ” I take photographs as I paint and pour liquids onto myself, using my face as a canvas.  The photo shoots reference the practice of drawing and painting; then the final graphite drawing references photography.  The boundaries between the mediums are broken down and the processes are interwoven.

The images depart from the framing of traditional portraiture.  The viewer is not given an entire bust of the subject; rather the frame zooms into up-close sections of the face.  The cropping pushes the face to the surface of the paper, making the figure more ambiguous.  Flesh becomes abstracted: obliterated by paint on the skin, distorted by the eye of the camera lens, or smeared by the glass of a Xerox machine.

Photographs are used as inspiration for drawing and mark making.  The drawings are made by dusting thin layers of graphite onto paper with a dry brush.  The softness of the graphite provides a smooth surface that can be augmented by erasing in details.  Gestural marks are apparent, while still creating dimension.  Textures are given precedence over portraying a likeness to the figure.   The act of drawing becomes the focus.”

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May 24th, 2012
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London based artist Phil Toledano’s provocative “A New Kind Of Beauty” series examines the extreme lengths people go to alter, change, and morph their appearance through plastic surgery and other cosmetic alterations. Balancing on the verge of not looking human these individuals are pushing the limits of identity politics.

“I’m interested in what we define as beauty, when we choose to create it ourselves. Beauty has always been a currency, and now that we finally have the technological means to mint our own, what choices do we make? Is beauty informed by contemporary culture? By history? Or is it defined by the surgeon’s hand? Can we identify physical trends that vary from decade to decade, or is beauty timeless? When we re-make ourselves, are we revealing our true character, or are we stripping away our very identity? Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?”

See Toledano’s work from June 2nd-July 7th at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles.

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May 24th, 2012
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Two of my favorite upcoming artists, Timothy Bergstrom & Denise Kupferschmidt recently opened up solo shows respectively @ Halsey McKay in East Hapmton. Tim brings a new suite of his gluey material paintings that visually imitate sounds, while Kupferschmidt shows a series of studies surrounding a sculptural installation, as well as a lovely mural. Good stuff, more after the jump.

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May 23rd, 2012
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Building on the metaphor of the “dome of heaven” as a visual container holding what we know, Carol Prusa  creates work consisting of acrylic hemispheres ranging from bowl-sized to six feet in diameter. Initiated in silverpoint drawing on the convex surface and completed with fiber optics, programmed LED’s and videos housed within, these domes are a visual embodiment – a download of sorts – of what it feels like to be alive while in conversation with contested cosmologies.

“My constructed domes are provocative symbols that invoke the idea of the universe and physical objects that allude to real-life structures. In my “canopies,” I explore a number of mathematical models that physicists developed to explain our universe. The mathematics of my expressed geometries offer a spiritual force that organizes structures from the microscopic to the political. Here, geometry isn’t simply abstract but creates a real world, sustained by its own logic.

To realize the startling phenomena that shape our everyday world, I incorporate digital projection and video technology. Like scientists and mathematicians who model emergent behavior, I too yearn to create a radical vision, one that takes into account the chaotic interactions that are central to formation of the universe.

As artists and scientists seek to explain our place, I join the most advanced daydreamers – those who imaginatively visualize a creative matrix and explore otherworldly possibilities – those who embrace indeterminacy and the fundamentally unstable boundaries between infinitesimal and immeasurable realms.”

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May 23rd, 2012
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London based photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten’s three part project centering around teenage girls tells the surreal story of the transition of teenage girls into womanhood. Each shot captures the lives and feelings of young girls as they change from relative innocence to a heightened awareness of their future adult life. For all of the images Batten chose to street cast girls for her models. Deliberately avoiding the use of professional models. Julia states that the slight awkwardness of her untrained models emphasizes the freshness and naturalness evident in her images.

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May 23rd, 2012

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In the current state of Reality TV and backstage blogs, we as a world have lost our sense of wonder. And it’s because of one brave artist, Jon Bernad, that we will get it back. He was part of the Venice Art Walk AUCTION, not just as himself, but as an offer for an experiential possibility that attendees could bid on for a good cause, since the money would go directly to The Venice Family Clinic. What that means was that he fearlessly walked up to strangers with a bid sheet around his neck, as opposed to on a table or wall like the other artworks in the auction, and pitched to each new person a different adventure he felt they would want to go on. Everything from skydiving to dinner came up and during his time there he was offered to join unfamiliar faces on white water rafting trips and treks in the Amazonian Rain Forest. I like to say that Jon takes people on Art Adventures, but it’s really so much more than that. He is the only artist that embodies the ultimate truth. For he is only but himself, but his self is great.

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May 23rd, 2012

Martin Eder is a German artist based in Berlin, whose nightmarish and perverse paintings abound with contradicting romantic cliches and infantile desires; his work displays lolitas in pornographic poses that are montaged with skycaps, warm bedroom interiors, and saccharine, girly kitsch that includes oversized crying kittens, giant candy, songbirds, fluffy poodles, puffy clouds, and cuddly white bunnies. Eder works exclusively from photographic references, making full use of high contrast and flat shadows and edging subjects with cyan and magenta. His paintings look imperfect and rushed in places, as if he works on his paintings only until they seem convincingly realistic enough. This slightly unpolished quality facilitates the paintings’ exploitative, creepy aesthetic and especially affects his female subjects, making them feel nondescript; the consequences of this purposeful lack of care in turn references the faceless and aggregative nature of pornography. A recurrent aura of seediness and the slightly distorted proportions of Eder’s subjects are reminiscent of the work of German Expressionist Otto Dix, although the anonymity of Eder’s subjects is a theme not reflected in those of Dix.

Edger is represented by Eigen + Art Gallery and Hauser + Wirth. In addition to being a painter, he plays in his own experimental rock band under the name Richard Ruin ed Les Demoniaques.

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