Robbie Augspurger’s halo-framed, serious soft lit yearbook style photos of meta-mockingly universal avant-garde hipsters kind of look like every kid I went to art school with. Alone, meditative, satirically pleased in their undulous Alanis Morisette-induced irony, they hold symbols of their trade. Cheap beer, American Apparel headbands, bushy beards, outmoded key-tars, bad/good sunglasses (including post-op laser eye surgery senior citizen style & your weird Uncle’s shades) and Bill Cosby sweaters. You know the type. I can’t explain why simple headshots of people who look like extras in a Miranda July/Michael Cera movie, done in tasteful/tasteless late 80’s/early 90’s Kodachrome, are so endlessly amusing. But they are. Robie also does wedding portraiture. Fitting though, right?
Louise Despont explores drawing as abstract meditations, balancing and integrating symbols and forms to link her art to the inscription of narratives and to mystical or literary concerns. Employing and recasting a vocabulary of elements and constructions found within a set of architectural stencils and compasses, the artist renders her drawings on the pages of antique ledger books.
Despont has borrowed the geometries of Indian labyrinths, gardens, architecture, vessels and ancient Buddhist and Jain caves to offer balanced forms – particularly masculine and feminine principles—that engage past and present as indicators and provocations. While leaning towards strong poetic and lyrical translations, these drawings unlock a spatial perceptual field to reveal the formal qualities of surface, texture, scale and form.
While reinvesting introspection and the metaphysical into tropes of abstraction, Despont’s drawings are notable for their levels of sincerity, intricacy and refinement. Even in her larger works, the artist evokes an intimate experience with fine lines and subtle hatch marks revealing themselves only when viewed up close. The resulting works, charged with alternative legacies of cultural and personal, confront the binaries of abstraction and figuration through their encoded compositions.
Photojournalist Anthony Karen has a specific and refined talent. Karen’s website mentions that “his passion for photography began in Haiti, where he documented the various Vodou rituals and pilgrimages throughout the country.” Even with this first series Karen displayed a knack for capturing groups of people, specifically those marginalized from larger society. For his latest book White Power, Karen was granted rare access to photograph Ku Klux Klan groups freely. Rather than portray familiar dramatic images of hate, many of the photographs depict mundane daily life, yet are somehow all the more unsettling. Indeed, much of the series’ disconcerting undertones certainly springs from Karen’s ability to capture people with a certain candidness rare in front of a camera lens. [via]
Upon first glance, these paintings by Spanish artist Antonio Santin appear to be photographs of beautiful rugs with bodies hidden underneath. Take a closer look and you can see the amazing detailed work that Santin has created in order for these rugs to appear real. Using a deeply-rooted tradition of Spanish Tenebrism and his training as a sculptor, Santin paints using the play of light and shadow to create depth and a haunting realism.
Interested in the way bodies shape fabrics, in an interview with Hi-Fructose, he says, “Painting is essentially a superficial activity, the artist’s psychology translates into a certain colored texture that will in turn eventually trigger or host the unique psychology of the beholder. Thus, according to this transitional synesthesia, any represented face is an enlivened mask. My background is sculpture, a discipline that could as well be defined as the development of structural strategies that end up supporting a surface. Not being its main raison d’être, the surface does conceal and contain the essence of the volume, whose physicality permeates its vessel while existing often only in the territory of the imagination. Therefore, whether it is a face, a dress or a rug, for me, it’s all about grasping what is hidden or concealed. (via from89)
Dean Sullivan is like that doodling space-obsessed boy who sat behind you in kindergarten and claimed he really, honestly, for real had an alien abduction experience once and monsters living in his closet.
Craigslist’s missed connections is addicting for multiple reasons. It’s easy to spend all day reading about the possible love stories that surround us all day, and its also nice to read about people that may or may not be more desperate than yourself. Either way, Sophia Blackall’s illustrations of missed connections is the perfect accompaniment to otherwise image-less stories.
Norwegian artist Andreas Lie fuses wild creatures with landscapes in a subtle collection of animal portraiture. Using two different photographic images, he creates a double exposure where woods, water, mountains, and even the Northern Lights are contained within the bodies of beasts. Polar bears, foxes, and wolves are all featured, and their torsos become one with the ground.
The textures of trees (like evergreens) often works in Lie’s favor. It mimics the look of fur so while these images are undoubtedly surreal, they also look natural. And, that’s part of their appeal. They combine visually disparate elements of the natural world in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing. It comes in a nice, animal-shaped package.
Alex Lukas‘ Recent Works show at Steven Zevitas Gallery (April 19th-June 2nd 2012) in Boston consists of five new large-scale paintings on paper (the largest measures at twelve feet in length) and a group of work utilizing appropriated book pages. This body of work continues the Lukas’ exploration of our current cultural condition through the lens of the landscape. Executed primarily in ink, acrylic, watercolor and gouache, the artist also uses the process of silk-screening for certain elements of each work.
Thomas Cole’s well-known painting “River in the Catskills,” which depicts a pastoral landscape with a small train slicing through the scene in the middle ground, is a harbinger of things to come in the story of man’s attempt to gain control of nature. In many ways, Lukas’ landscapes, which combine sites real and imagined – with a healthy nod towards Hollywood and art history – tell the end of the story, as man-made structures yield back to nature. The works pivot on series of dichotomies: violence and quietude; the man made and the natural; hope and a profound sense of despair. They also grapple with ideas about national morality and societal fragility.