Artist Josh Poehlein is working on a series of photo collages called Modern History. Interestingly, they are made exclusively of screen grabs from YouTube videos. They are big, bold, and raw. And best of all, he is offering free links to download hi-res versions of the images, which can be used to make large prints of the work.
Russian artist Tebe Interesno is a bit of a mystery to me. Mostly that's because his site is in Russian and there's not a lot of text that becomes clear using a tool like Google Translate. Even his name is not clear. Tebe Interesno actually means "you are interested" in Russian. One thing is obvious -- he has a fascinating imagination and is amazingly prolific.
Some may consider Giles Walker is a man ahead of his time. He's been working with robots for the past twenty years... well, not exactly with them, more like on them. As a sculptor, he's experimented with the convergence of movement, recycled materials and music.
Hektor, this week's Artist of the Week, is a spray painting device created by Jurg Lehni and Uli Franke. They were looking to create a contrast between the low-tech wobbles and drips of a real object and the high-tech engineering instructing the device.
Stefan G. Bucher is an artist and illustrator who turned a blog about drawing monsters into a great video compilation and an interactive project. Visitors to the site created names for the monsters, as well as stories about them, which they posted in the comments for each entry.
The Mars Phoenix Lander worked for 151 days on the Martian surface taking photos, digging, and testing samples. Along the way, it confirmed the presence of water ice on the red planet, and discovered that Martian soil has been inundated with water in the past, leaving carbonates, nutrients, and chemicals in the soil. To say that this little guy expanded our understanding of one of our closest neighbors in the universe would be an understatement.
Zadi writes in the Vimeo entry for this video:
I met artist Kevin Morgan in Venice Beach while on a photo shoot with the Bui Brothers. We gravitated toward his freestanding rock sculptures from far away wondering if they were people. Once in close range, we realized what they were and Kevin was kind enough to share the backstory.
PS: Sorry about the wind. I only had my little Canon Powershot on me.
Artist Know Hope hails from Tel Aviv and is only in his early 20's, but he has gained notoriety around the world with his street artwork and group exhibitions. His debut solo show took place in San Jose, California in October and included a site-specific installation made specifically for the show.
Much of his work is created around the idea that everything is temporary. Indeed the title of his solo show was "Temporary Spaces." On the street, art is always temporary. Someone comes along and covers it, or nature takes ownership. But what about creating art for galleries? Does that mean the work is no longer temporary because it's created to exist and be a part of someone's collection, or their life?
The artist known as Mr. Brainwash, or MBW, is a French filmmaker named Theirry Guetta who spent years making a documentary about graffiti. Along the way, he discovered his own approach to street art, from stickers to billboard-sized paste-ups.
Artist James Jean has been successful in both the commercial and fine art worlds, and it's not hard to see why. I always love to look at artists' sketchbooks -- it's the closest you can get to seeing the world through their eyes. There are lots of indications of the thought processes, and tons of small gems to discover. And in Jean's sketchbooks, we get to see the exquisite draftsmanship and sensitivity of his undeniable natural talent.
Artist Phil Hansen does some unusual projects. Many of his works involve the aggregation of small marks or objects into a larger work. The work above was the result of 600 moments that were shared with him, which he then turned into a huge circular painting by writing out each moment during a 136-hour work session during which he only took breaks to go to the bathroom.
24-year-old artist Justin Aerni is definitely prolific. On his website and in his Flickr stream he has dozens of works, many of them dealing with dark and fantastical imagery. My favorite stuff, especially around this time of the year (Halloween!) are the doll head scultptures.
Artist Harriet Russell decided to see how dedicated the mail carriers in the United Kindgom really are. She sent 130 letters to herself and obscured the address with ciphers, puzzles, and cryptograms. Turns out those Royal Mail carriers take their jobs very seriously; only 10 letters were not delivered.
Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has to be one of the most fascinating artists we've featured on EPIC FU. My immediate impression from his drawings and sketches is that he is a superb draftsman. Great drawings are, to me, always the most important indicator of ability because drawing is about the eye, not about technical skill.
Delvoye is best known for the work pictured above, Cloaca, which is a machine that duplicates the digestive process, including excretion (crapping, to put it bluntly). When the machine was installed the museum had a chef cooking two meals a day for it, which it would process all the way to the end result. Each day collectors could purchase a shrink-rapped piece of Cloaca shit for $1,000! Very reminiscent of Piero Manzoni's work, except I think the intention is very different.
To Twitter-philes, Yiying Lu isn't a household name, but she should be. She is the creator of the omnipresent "FailWhale," a lovely illustration of a whale being lifted and carried by birds. Twitter chose to use this illustration when the service was unavailable or overloaded, and as such it gained the nickname of the FailWhale.
The German graffiti artist DAIM doesn't just bomb walls -- he creates graphics, illustrations, commissions, and exhibits in galleries around the world. He started at 17 "...just going out and doing some stuff." After his parents and teachers found out he was doing graffiti art, they gave him a wall at a youth club and at school so that he wasn't getting into trouble with the authorities. It wasn't long after that that he was able to start using his spray can to make a living.
Australian artist Ron Mueck creates realistic, amazingly detailed sculptures of people but uses scale to add a whole new twist to the way we look at them. He's had an interesting career, first as a model maker and a puppeteer, even working on the film Labrynth. He created his own company in London making hyper-realistic props and animatronics that tended to be viewed from one vantage point before moving to fine art.
Following up on yesterday's post about artist William Lamson, who we featured on this week's episode, I got the inside scoop on the inspiration for the banana mask from William himself:
how did I come up with banana mask... well, the piece is about frustration. Like the desire to hit yourself in face if you are frustrated with yourself, but you dont actually do it, because you like your face, so instead, you blow up bananas on your surrogate face.
Sounds like we could all use a banana mask once and awhile. Thanks William.
William Lamson created a 6 minute long video called Think Globally, Act Locally in which he exploded a bunch of bananas on a mask attached to his face. We featured pieces of this video on an earlier episode of the show without our realizing the wonderful array of work he has on his site. Luckily we found it!
It's easy to dismiss Chinese artist Liu Bolin's work as "camouflage art" because, well, that's the title of this particular series. I can say "look how cool -- they painted people to match their surroundings! Wow, that must have taken a long time." That would be missing the point. At least for me.
Yes. At first glance, you can't help but be in awe of the precision and attention to detail and the astounding amount of patience an artist must have to complete a series like the one shown here. At second glance... at a longer glance... things get more complex.
Margot Quan Knight is able to achieve an amazingly wide range of reactions in her photographs. At once I'm amused, intrigued, repulsed, and just a tad bit titillated. It's no easy feat to conjure up that many emotions from a viewer. Not to mention that she gets us past the fact that these are all works of digital manipulation, which is so easily a ruinous distraction. Generally her work is fascinating and possesses great depth, and much of it makes me wonder about the story behind the photos.
Plenty more after the jump.
The amazing sculptures of Jeremy Mayer are all made from old typewriter parts. Talk about an endless supply of material! In our new media world, this is a beautiful way to re-use material and create fascinating art.
Beijing artist Li Wei has gained quite a following on the web with his seemingly impossible photographs. Many of them depict the artist in a precarious or life-threatening situation, and they are accomplished by an unsettling combination of performance art and photography. Sometimes the artist is indeed in a very dangerous situation, suspended by wires from great heights.
Arborsculpture is pretty fascinating stuff. Wikipedia defines it as follows:
Arborsculpture is the art and technique of growing and shaping trunks of trees and other woody plants. By grafting, bending and pruning the woody trunks and or branches are grown into shapes either ornamental or useful.
This past Tuesday on EPIC FU we featured Marius Watz as our artist of the week. I don't remember exactly how I came across the impressive work that was exhibited as part of the 5 Days Off festival in Amsterdam, but I'm sure it caught my attention because of the brilliant melding between art and technology.
Watz, a Norweigian artist, had been working on a project called Generator.x, investigating computational models of creation. An exhibit titled "Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen" brought together artists and architects to contribute their own creations to his project. These works used audio analysis and custom-created software to take audio data and map it to fabrication processes such as rapid-prototyping. In essence, we get to see what sound "looks" like.
On the show this week we highlighted surrealist/fantasy painter and illustrator Ryohei Hase from Tokyo, Japan. He created works for book covers, the web, games, and magazine, and he exhibits his paintings regularly in Tokyo. More of his work after the jump.
In the spirit of Comic-Con 2008, this week's artist of the week is Paul Duffield, a newcomer to the comics world. I found him through the online comic FreakAngels, where he and writer Warren Ellis shaped a future steampunk universe about a group of telepaths who brought about the apocalypse. For Duffield it was a major score to work with an established writer like Warren Ellis on his first major project, and for fans we get to enjoy all twenty episodes of the comic online for free.
The works of Alexey Titarenko hang in many museums around the world, but thanks to the web we get to see them whenever we want, and we get a chance to experience the painterly and haunting photographs from his Black & White Magic of St. Petersburg series. More images after the jump.
Our Artist of the Week this week is The Me Nobody Knows, otherwise known as TMNK. His work is reminiscent of Jean Michel Basquiat -- except his styling is completely fresh. He takes his surrounding experiences and translates them on canvas, resulting in a body of work which is personal, rich, authentic, narrative and slightly melancholy.
There is more to my community than violence and drugs. There's beauty, and there's culture, and there are talented positive people, just like "me," that nobody knows.
On this week's show we profiled the artist Above, specifically his Sign Language Tour project. He's obviously influenced by graffiti and pop culture, and it's interesting that the mission statement on his website asks more questions than it answers. And if you want to buy any of his work, you are required to fill out a questionnaire first. Heh. :)
This week we're really digging Munk One's work. If you haven't yet heard of Munk One, you may have seen his band artwork for artists like Smashing Pumpkins, Korn, My Chemical Romance and many others. He's a contemporary American illustrator and fine artist based out of California. Since 2003 he's been exhibiting his work in galleries and shows no sign of stopping any time soon.
Paul "Moose" Curtis is considered the pioneer of reverse graffiti art, also known as clean tagging. Graffiti usually gets a bad rap, because it's associated with vandalism or property damage. Reverse graffiti spins that on its head by doing the exact opposite.
This week's Artist of the Week is Anton Raphael Miriello, or Mr. A.R.M., the founder of The Secret Society of Odd Acquisition. A collector of all things odd and unusual, Mr. A.R.M.'s custom collection is nothing short of mesmerizing.
Lucy and Bart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess. It combines McRae's interest in the relation between the human body and its environment with Hess's work in the manipulation of the bodily form.