Photographer Minh Tran captures the raw, gritty nightlife of Portland in his series Nights, Camera, Action! The images simultaneously surprise with their intimacy and reflect what one might expect in a Portland night out complete with some PBR cradling. It’s a fun, seemingly endless scroll of people who just look like a real good time. When you make it over there, make sure to keep an eye out for a Stevie Wonder cameo.
Robert Josiah Bingaman is the master of beautiful dark landscapes. Bingaman states about his work: “My studio practice is an idiosyncratic teeter-totter; a shifting set of consistent obsessions. The first, to be “out there”, in the distant places, and the second, an anxious need to permanently mark the rare, fleeting moments that originate from those places. The scenes I paint are the result of an indulgent desire to regain the innocence and satisfaction I once associated with the subjects depicted. Yet, in the offing, these paintings reveal my struggle to name what I haven’t found.”
The work of Korean artist Cha Jong-Rye looks like anything but wood. Her large pieces hang on the wall as if they were draped cloth, strange liquids, and geological formations. Her peculiar choice of medium undoubtedly references these and other ideas of nature and the home. She painstakingly carves her work from wood, often from hundreds of small pieces. She seems to crumple, pinch, and pull a material that’s especially rigid, typically found as a tree or house. They’re temptingly tactile – if no one in the gallery noticed I’d nearly be enticed to drag my fingers across their surface. [via]
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The shapes of Rorschach tests are intentionally flawed and ambiguous — allowing us to draw conclusions about a person’s psyche based on what organic matter they claim to see growing in the inkblots. In her series, Mirrors, photographer Traci Griffin flips that concept. By applying symmetry to natural subjects, they are rendered unnatural and too perfect for this world.
Ana Bidart‘s sculptures resemble small geological models. She wears away layers and layers of paper to create each piece. Reminiscent of rolls of receipt paper or even toilet paper, her medium in this series usually has a particularly utilitarian purpose. Her sculptures emphasize the objects’ more poetic characteristics. Though solid and consistent in appearance Bidart exposes the many layers that form the whole. Her work easily lends itself to various metaphors.
Erno-Erik Raitanen‘s site specific installation, Cotton Candy Works, is built to crumble. For the installation Raitanen builds a wall of cotton candy. Visitors lick or pull off the cotton candy. Within hours the entire installation returns back to its original nature – the fluffy sugar reverts back to its crystalline form. The installation is definitely playful and looks like for gallery visitors. Its more serious ideas of creation and destruction can’t be ignored.
Ben Bunch lives and works in New York. Using EVA foam, foamcore, chipboard, glue, paper collage, paint marker and spray paint Ben Bunch constructs intricate small-scale sculptures that resemble organized electronic components. The contraptions show a reverence for the color and geometry of 80′s consumer devices and sometimes cross over into the video game world. Because of the heavy use of foam in the work Bunch’s sculptures are soft to the touch even though they represent hard objects. “Bunch is interested in the intersection of craft and industrial fabrication. Consumer and fashion trends saturate our life in an endless echo chamber of branding and nostalgia. Bunch enjoys peering into this chasm through a solitary hands-on sculptural practice. Nowadays, many artists employ the same methods of manufacturing that are found in the consumer landscape. Outsourcing, fabrication, and mass production are well-established tools in the contemporary artist toolbox. However, Bunch rejects these processes of artistic industrial fabrication to address the issues of pop imagery and consumerism in a different way. Using materials of humble scale, weight and substance (mostly foam) his objects are hand-made employing basic tools in the most time consuming manner. The end result is an object that mimics the look of industrial fabrication and relishes the geometry and beauty of consumerism.”
