Anders Oinonen, of Ontario, Canada, just opened “People people”, a solo show at Cooper Cole in Toronto. For a while now, Oinonen has been pushing the features of the face to new bounds in his paintings. The artist has removed familiar eyes, noses, and mouths from their intended plane, and  inserted them along the lines of an Expressionist landscape.  Such a presentation of the face -associated with communication of our inner life more than any other part of the body- in tumultuous states of despair and incredulity as stimulating blocks of color masterfully applied to canvas arranges a statement which is hard to miss and extensive in depth.

You can also read a copy of Beautiful/Decay Issue: Z to read an in-depth interview with Anders.

Brett Amory’s landscapes are characterized by anonymous people in stark geometric abandoned city scenes. They’re breathtaking and heartbreaking.

Rune Guneriussen is a Norway-based artist who photographs orchestrated installations. Household objects are granted an anthropomorphic quality — they appear to be captured in a natural setting. Guneriussen believes “that art itself should be questioning and bewildering…” and would rather “indicate a path to understanding a story” rather than limit a viewer’s experience by being too prescriptive.

I’m loving this scanographic imagery by Portland based artist, Brandon F. Wilson. While Wilson does not explain his specific process on his website, I like to imagine the artist running through vast landscapes in Oregon, with a large scanner, to create these distorted images. More after the jump!

Brandon is also the founder of an awesome organization, We Are Fucking Awesome, which is a global artist collective dedicated to the support and development of emerging artists. Enjoy a lot more of his work on his website.

Lulu Wolf’s collages are clean cut and leave a lasting impression. She does a lovely job of balancing her composition, with shapes and touches of hand work, creating tiny worlds from bits of imagery from the past.  Her work is geometric and fluid, embodying both urban and rural environments, with human vigor.

Kevin Guitierrez Haugen is a Portland based photographer and writer. His images are haunting, dramatic, and almost uncomfortably personal.

Image maker Suzy Poling seems to believe in the unreal. Her work breaks the formalities of typical photography, by utilizing many different methods for production. Some of her work has hints of  Andreas Gursky, while other parts have the the surreal air of Tim Walker. Her work feels like a documented rapture, where nothing exists where everything once did.

Andreas Fischer’s “Ghost Town” is currently on view in our lovely city of Chicago. Ghost Town, which is on view at two separate venues, Hyde Park Art Center and The Gahlberg Gallery, shows us two distinct selections of Andreas’s portraiture and imagined landscapes. There is a nice anonymous quality to these  locations and figures, with titles like “Original Location” and “Sunday Best”. Plus, the work actually becomes more engaging after you read about it, which in my opinion, is often not the case.

And just look at those handsome brushstrokes! See more work here @ HudsonFranklin.