Evie Woltil Richner is a Florida based artist. She combines personal family photographs with feathery shroud like drawings creating a beautiful monument to memorialize family members that have passed on.
The Dreamy Sculptures of MyeongBeom Kim
The sculptures and installations of MyeongBeom Kim are very dreamlike – it makes just enough sense to prevent you questioning it. Objects transform into other objects, other inexplicably float, and yet others are designed to be entirely useless. Yet, somehow, it all seems right. Also like dreams, Kim’s work is playful but not without out a latent sense of anxiety. A noose, a crutch, an axe suggest a possible dark turn toward realized fears, a nightmare.
Intriguing Photographs Of Porn Sets Without The Porn
As part of our ongoing partnership with Feature Shoot, Beautiful/Decay is sharing the work of Elizabeth Moran.
San Francisco-based photographer Elizabeth Moran provides quite an interesting look at space and context in this ongoing series. One can’t help but enjoy the irony captured in the lack of action in these spaces that normally get so much.
The Armory documents the ever-changing sets of the pornography company Kink.com. Private spaces are constructed for a public gaze and appear both familiar and strangely foreign. Devoid of people, the spaces allude to an activity, but leave the viewer to imagine the scene.
Kink.com was founded in 1997 by Peter Acworth while he was pursuing his PhD in finance at Columbia University. Today, Kink.com’s headquarters occupy the San Francisco Armory. Built by the United States National Guard in 1912, the Armory’s Drill Court became San Francisco’s primary sports venue for prizefights from the 1920s through 1940s. After falling into disrepair, the Armory was purchased by Kink.com in 2006 and is now one of the largest adult production studios in the world.—Elizabeth Moran
Jeremy Laffon’s Chewing Gum Installations
Jeremy Laffon‘s series of installations are entirely constructed from chewing gum. He painstakingly builds each of his installations with this unusual material. The precision and care he gives to his work is contrasted by the material itself. Chewing gum isn’t particularly strong or sturdy – the lattice work structure buckling under its own weight, or tiled gum easily giving way underfoot. Chewing gum is also associated with casualness, rude to chew in formal settings, spit out when finished with: a pleasant surprise in an often stuffy art world.
Ryan Travis Christian’s Well, Here We Aren’t Again
Chicago based Ryan Travis Christian has just opened his first Museum Exhibition at CAM Raleigh entitled Well, Here We Aren’t Again. Ryan spent three weeks on site creating a large-scale wall drawing, sculptures and floor installation specifically for CAM Raleigh’s Independent Weekly Gallery. This new body of work continues his hazy vision of dank landscapes ripe with powerful patterns, cartoon personalities, and awkward situations expertly rendered with graphite and ink.
Antonia Basler’s Surreal Photoshopped Family Photos
Photographer Antonia Basler‘s series Content Aware makes use of a Photoshop tool of the same name. The content aware tool is used to erase objects from images and replace the space with content the program judges to be appropriate. Basler’s series begins with old family photos. She’s highlighted the faces of the photo’s subjects and applied the tool, then highlighted the inverse and applied the tool for a second image. The resulting images are a cyber sort of surreal, like a creepy reality glitch. [via]
Electrifying light bulb sculptures of Hitoshi Kuriyama
Hitoshi Kuriyama creates elaborate light installations using complex clusters of shattered fluorescent light bulbs. With Kuriyama, fluorescent lights and LEDs become life forces that animate the darkness of the universe with an irregular, unpredictable rhythm.
Toy Stories – Children With Their Most Prized Possessions
Photographer Gabriele Galinberti‘s series Toy Stories is a simple concept revealing a complex story. Over the course of 18 months the artist photographed children throughout the world with their most prized possessions. He would often play with the toys along with the children prior to arranging them for the photographs. It is surprising how much the toys can reveal about each child. Often children would prize toys that reflected the occupations of their parents – a large collection of cars for the son of a taxi driver or rakes and shovels for the daughter of a farmer. Also, Galinberti relates that poorer children’s play focused more on friends and activities rather than possessions. He says:
“The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them. In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”
