Bianca Chang lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Using only a surgical knife and stacked paper she creates minimal geometric forms. Hundreds of sheets are stacked, hand-plotted, and cut until a sculptural object remains. Works change dramatically depending on what is removed and what is left behind. Some of the blocks achieve depth by the digging out of shapes while others rely on protrusion. The stark white of the paper allows subtleties and gradients to appear in the form of shadows.
LIKE KNOWS LIKE is an ongoing video series inspired by the globe community of artists now connected with social media. Created by award winning photographer Marije Kuiper and documentary filmmaker Bas Berkhout, the Amsterdam based duo has interviewed a variety of different artists from all over the world that they originally became acquainted with through social media. Watch the videos after the jump.
The stark sculptures of Al Farrow are jolting in their simplicity. His Reliquaries series of sculptures are houses of worship and reliquaries (a container for holy relics) built from weapons and ammunition. Stacks of bullets form walls, barrels form steeples, and muzzles form minarets. Farrow’s artistic commentary on violence in connection with religion is a powerful one. Using a provocative medium to create loaded imagery (seriously, pun not intended), Farrow’s work easily elicits strong responses from viewers.
Zach Lewis lives and works in New York. He has just released his book There Are No Sins Here which is a 6″ x 9″ 110 page survey of work from 2010-2012. Lewis describes it briefly saying it is a “A narrative driven documentary photography book reflecting the sentiment of contemporary American life.” It serves as an honest portrait of a twenty-something taking in the city of NY during a time of political unrest. We see the push and pull of organized religion and ideologies of faith. Current events like the death of Osama bin Laden and Steve Jobs are presented as a reminder of the speed and influx of information in our current culture. Joy, paranoia, frustration, and hope are presented in equal measure. You can pick up a copy here.
If you’ve been enamored with 3D printing as much of the creative community has been you may be interested in the 3Doodler. A Boston based company recently developed a pen that takes your doodles off your page – a pen for three dimensional drawing. The pen extrudes a heated plastic which which cools and solidifies quickly enough to hold its shape. In addition to drawing free hand, stencils to help create little sculptures, such as a mini Eiffel Tower, will soon be available to print out on the company’s site. [via]
Estonian artist Eiko Ojala expertly creates illustrations using paper. His complex collage pieces are at the same time simple in execution. His background as an illustrator is clear in each of these pieces. Ojala is able to communicate a considerable story with minimal imagery and medium. Whether a series of trees interacting through different seasons, or portraits, Ojala weaves interesting narratives using simple poignant scenes.
Facundo Arganaraz lives and work in San Francisco. Using entirely found imagery and a crisp design sensibility Arganaraz alters and skews in order to create a modern dialogue with vintage visuals. His subject matter and acrylic with screen print technique is reminiscent of Christopher Wool and Andy Warhol as he too utilizes a design based aesthetic in which he incorporates text, multiples of the same imagery, and washed out color fields. In his own words: “Living among the vestiges of cultural entropy, I am using anachronistic elements and discarded images not for their nostalgic value but as remains (debris, waste, etc.) of 20th century utopias on the making. Mostly comprised of found photographs, photocopies, and pages from vintage books depicting modern designs and/or environments, I recruit this imagery (retro esthetics) as a mark-making tool, already packed and charged (ready-made?) with pictorial formal elements. Their core forms serve only to organize visual fields into dynamic, constructed compositions that hold a structural relation to the surface they organize.”
You might be asking yourself why Beautiful/Decay is posting images of traditional Chinese Landscapes but if you look just a bit closer you’ll see that in fact these images are highly sophisticated digital manipulations of mounds of garbage and landfills. Yao Lu, the Chinese artist responsible for this brilliantly deceiving body of work begins her process by photographing mounds of garbage covered in green protective nets which he assembles and reworks by computer to create bucolic images of mountain landscapes shrouded in the mist inspired by traditional Chinese paintings. Lying somewhere between painting and photography, between the past and the present, Yao Lu’s work speaks of the radical mutations affecting nature in China as it is subjected to rampant urbanization and the ecological threats that endanger it. (via)
