I like the works of Berlin pixel art design trio eBoy. Chances are you have already seen some of their work somewhere around the web. They build three-dimensional elements and assemble them in huge illustrations filled with heaps of crazy details and references that will make the geek in you happy... Check out Oslo here and here or Tokyo. They have a great eye for picking up and mixing relevant details of pop culture with our daily consumer environment and concentrating them into visual feasts.
"Lady in the Water" photographed by Toni Frissell and first published in Harper’s Bazaar in December 1947, is one of my all-time favorite. I can't help but stop every time I see it. It was shot at Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida, which has a tourist attraction called the Weeki Wachee mermaids, where young women swim around in the lake. People can watch from an underwater viewing area, where the photo was taken.
It also served as the cover of Bill Evans and Jim Hall's 1962 great Undercurrent album on Blue Note Records.
“In exploring the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals, I am working towards rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals.”
Gregory Colbert is one of the artists whose works I admire and love most. Born in Toronto, Canada in 1960, he began his career in Paris in 1983 making documentary films on social issues. Filmmaking led him to fine arts photography and for the next ten years, he did not exhibit his art or show any films. He traveled to India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Dominica, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tonga, Namibia, and Antarctica to film and photograph interactions between human beings, including himself, and animals - elephants, whales, manatees, sacred ibis, Antigone cranes, royal eagles, rhinoceros hornbills, cheetahs, and many other species.
In 2002, he presented his work, the Ashes and Snow exhibition, for the first time at the Arsenale in Venice. It was the largest solo exhibition ever mounted in Italy. In spring 2005 the show opened on the Hudson River Park's Pier 54 in New York City in the first-ever nomadic museum. The exhibition and the museum have since moved to Santa Monica, California, Tokyo, and Mexico City. Ashes and Snow exhibition has no final destination, and many new species are added as the project evolves.
Japanese architect Shigeru Ban did a great job designing the nomadic museum. Filled which huge prints and movies projected on giant screens, it feels both monumental and intimate, thanks to deep shadows and natural textures of wood and granite, and evoques as much an exhibition space as it does a sacred temple.
Walking through it is a quasi mystical, out-of-time experience. He obviously goes to great lengths to share his contemplative vision of a spiritual, pure, unstained world where all animals look like serene, ancient gods. The works are very sensual and primal in a sense. I appreciate that the photographs and videos have not been manipulated by digital technology. Animals and humans were really there, everything you see really took place.
He has also recently started initiated the “Animal Copyright Foundation”, which aims at "renegotiating our contract with nature by collecting one percent of royalties from companies using images of animals in their ads, and distribute these funds to conservation projects around the world". He believes this could become the largest environmental fund in the world. It is common practice to compensate people for fair use of their images in advertising but this has not been the case for nature and animals. Whether you agree with the initiative or not, it is nice to see people proposing new pragmatic solutions to give back what we take.
“Morpho Towers - Two Standing Spirals” is an installation by Sachiko Kodama that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that move synthetically to music. The iron bodies of the electromagnetic spiral towers have an helical design so that spikes of ferrofluid move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the spirals when the magnetic field is strong enough.
Depending on DC bias voltage and AC pattern corresponding to the music metadata such as beat position, chord progression, and melody block information, the tower’s surface dynamically morphs into a variety of textures ranging from smooth, black fluid to spikes spreading like fractals, defying gravity.
Again what I love in this sort of installation is that the piece is not an end in itself. It is not just art, or self-centered. Beyond the sheer aesthetics and physical abstraction of the constantly evolving shapes, it is just full of possibilities. We are surrounded by digital data and yet it is still pretty rare to see it actually transformed into any kind of analogue physical phenomena beside sound or light - something palpable. I am completely fascinated by the soft, organic pulsations as if the fluid was breathing, with the complexity and apparent unpredictability we usually associate with living beings. With the current progress in nano and biotechnologies we'll probably end up seeing devices or even androids made of similar stuff one day.
From Sachiko Kodama's website: "In this art we want to harmonize several opposing properties, such as hardness (iron) / softness (fluid) and freedom (desire for design) / restriction (natural powers such as gravity). This work emerges as an autonomous transformation of the material itself: sometimes it seems like a horn, sometimes a fir tree, and sometimes even like the Tower of Babel." She also has a number of similar interesting projects here.
There's something intriguing about American photographer Troy Williams’s images. His series "I Want to Know What Love Is, I Want You to Show Me" is "strongly influenced by late adolescence, a time when everything is very intense and fantasies are heroic and often based on slices of popular culture". He also mentions references to 1970s and ’80s TV shows and movies such as ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind mixed with lyrical expressions of teenage romance such as love declared in graffiti or fireworks. I like the atmospheres - kind of reminds me of Gregory Crewdson's works - and I'll be sure to check out his new works in the future.
Aaron Hawks captures powerful, melancholic portraits of artists, sex workers and fetishists in hand-built sets he designs in his warehouse. Noir, intense, symbolic images in which I find a lot more depth that most nude works today.
I love the works of Paris-based community of digital artists Pleix. Unpretentious yet sophisticated, fun, inspired, and nicely sarastic, it just doesn't get much better than this. Who doesn't love flying doggies, giant rabbits and the Simon game anyway?
Great images from New York photographer Amy Stein. I really love the "Halloween in Harlem" series but be also sure to check the three other excellent series on her website, Domesticated, Stranded, and Women and Guns, that are equally interesting and consistent in quality.
I like the stillness, the simplicity and the expressions of Ethan Aaro Jones's In Water series.
"As a young adult entering my twenties, I found myself full of questions and I began looking for answers in the photographs I was making of my peers. Still showing glimpses of their youthful innocence, these new adults are wading, beautiful and naked, in the chilly waters of Lake Ontario during cool, early fall mornings.
Photographing with my hands and camera resting on top of the water, I have brought the viewer into the situation as a witness to what I encountered with my peers. Each person walks into an aura of pure water and undergoes a transformation. This numbing bath causes social cover–ups and facades to be unveiled by the uneasiness of the water and the entire situation. This act makes the subjects vulnerable and exhausted, presenting a less comfortable yet more honest person.
The variety in physical and emotional responses among similar yet clearly different people defines the series. From statuesque arms to nervous fingers and goose–bump covered bodies, the subjects’ appearances display a powerful transition. This newfound tension causes some people to appear totally lost while others maintain their composure. Eventually, all of the subjects’ pretenses are left behind.
Through this singular experience everyone is similar. We are here together, not alone. The sense of trust and love, tension and anticipation, emergence and energy displayed in the portraits ultimately speak to the emotions involved for us all as we enter our twenties."
Ethan also has recently started Pause, to begin, a new photography competition currently accepting applications until April 1, 2008. The selected finalists will be announced online April 15, 2008. Ethan and David, the founders of Pause, to Begin, will hit the road in May, 2008 with Bruno Tore, a Portuguese documentary filmmaker, to visit the selected finalists and record the time they experience together.
