Hot Dogs: This strange yet interesting ‘IDK about these Hotdogs’ series, created by an anonymous photographer from New York, captures simple hot dogs in the most unusual situations and places, leaving the door open to the most absurd and funny interpretations. Mmmm delicious – Happy Friday! 🙂
Dulk: We love the amazing creations of Spanish illustrator and street artist Antonio Segura Donat, aka Dulk, who leads us into a colourful and dreamlike universe of fantastical creatures, fairy tales and surreal landscapes. He has shown his work in England, Germany, Holland, France, Italy and Belgium, where he has recently won a major international award. Dulk’s style is an explosive combination of influences, mixed with a bizarre, burlesque and affectionate touch that makes it compact, direct and very honest. He creates characters and stories based on his own dreams and everyday events, mixing fact and fiction, with a touch of pop surrealism and is one of the leading figures of the Spanish illustration scene. Awesome stuff! 🙂
Hueman: We love the beautiful street art creations by American artist Hueman, who divides her time between her studio and the streets of California. Equally at home on a canvas or walls, Hueman creates a subtle mix of abstract and figurative, of beauty and grotesque, always hiding the true meaning of her art between the lines. To view more of Hueman’s amazing work, check out her website. AWESOME! 🙂
Guillaume Kurkdjian: We love this awesome selection of retro animated GIFs by French animator and illustrator Guillaume Kurkdjian, who via his ‘Electronic Items’ series, pays tribute to iconic electronic devices from the 90s including the dot matrix printer, remote control car and handycam through to the fax machine and portable CD player. For more of Guillaume Kurkdjian’s work, pay a visit to his website. Fantastic stuff!
Alejandro Durán: We love the amazing ‘Washed Up’ series by Mexican artist Alejandro Durán who organises the discarded waste he finds in nature into beautiful and yet somewhat terrifying art installations. Alejandro Durán does not remove or add anything, but simply rearranges the garbage he finds on site. Alejandro Durán was born in Mexico City in 1974 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is a multimedia artist working in photography, installation, and video. His work examines the fraught intersections of man and nature, particularly the tension between the natural world and an increasingly overdeveloped one. About his current work, Durán comments “In my current project, Washed Up, I address the issue of plastic pollution making its way across the ocean and onto the shores of Sian Ka’an, Mexico’s largest federally-protected reserve. With more than twenty pre-Columbian archaeological sites, this UNESCO World Heritage site is also home to a vast array of flora and fauna and the world’s second largest coastal barrier reef. Unfortunately, Sian Ka’an is also a repository for the world’s trash, which is carried there by ocean currents from many parts of the globe. Over the course of this project, I have identified plastic waste from fifty nations on six continents that have washed ashore along the coast of Sian Ka’an. I have used this international debris to create color-based, site-specific sculptures. Conflating the hand of man and nature, at times I distribute the objects the way the waves would; at other times, the plastic takes on the shape of algae, roots, rivers, or fruit, reflecting the infiltration of plastics into the natural environment.” To view more of Alejandro Durán’s work, we recommend a visit to his website.
Tiffany Bozic: We love these surreal paintings from the portfolio of American artist Tiffany Bozic and have posted a selection of them for you below. It seems Tiffany Bozic has spent the majority of her life living with and observing the intricacies of nature. Her work has the traditional air of tightly rendered illustrations but with a highly emotional range of surreal metaphorical themes. In her paintings and sketches, she presents her vision of life’s struggles and triumphs that are largely autobiographical. Her wide array of subjects are inspired both from her extensive travels to wild places, and the research specimens at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California. Over the years, Tiffany Bozic has developed a complex process of masking and staining so the natural grain can collaborate with each composition using multiple layers of watered down acrylic paint on maple panels of wood. She has had several solo exhibitions featuring her large-scale paintings and installations. Her work has also been included in numerous group shows across the country and spoken about at international events. She was also the first ‘Artist in Residency’ whereby she collaborated with the California Academy of Sciences, to create the “From the Depths” exhibit on the public floor of the museum in November 2007. Tiffany Bozic is a self-taught artist currently living and working in her cottage in Marin, California. For more of Tiffany Bozic’s amazing work, we recommended a visit to her website. Enjoy!
Alexia Sinclair: We love the outstanding creations of photographer and artist Alexia Sinclair, including her latest series ‘Rococo’, which depicts a dreamlike world bathed by the influences of the 18th century and the court of Marie Antoinette. Alexia Sinclair notes that “Rococo is a series of theatrical artworks inspired by the lives, fashions, gardens and motifs of 18th century high society. Following the design aesthetic of this period, the series is sensual, playful and flamboyant. During this period, powerful women of the French court became fashion icons and their tastes swept across Europe. Their excessive, luxurious and exotic creations have inspired many aspects of the costuming within this series; from Madame de Pompadour’s porcelain flowers, to Madame du Barry diamond necklace, Marie Antoinette’s muslin chemise and the Duchess of Devonshire’s towering plumes. The floral backdrops within the series pay homage to the dreamlike landscapes of the Rococo period. Known as the pleasure playgrounds, their hidden gardens, mazes and wild flower meadows formed the backdrop of decadent garden parties and mischievous encounters.” Alexia Sinclair is an award winning Australian Artist and Photographer whose distinct style is easily recognisable and highly original. Using a visual narrative, Alexia Sinclair’s art is both dark and seductive, baroque and symbolic yet her multilayered photographs present contemporary notions of fashion and beauty through innovative digital media, whilst restoring antique notions of classicism, elegance and luxury. Sinclair is an artist who skilfully balances the worlds of Fine Art and Commercial Art. Whilst her evocative Fine Art imagery adorns the walls of museums and is held in important art collections, she often translates these skills and signature style into highly polished campaigns in the commercial arena for clients such as Harpers Bazaar and Canon Australia. Completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons I) and Master of Fine Arts, Alexia Sinclair is the recipient of a travelling arts scholarship, and two postgraduate scholarships. She has worked in New York as a digital artist and exhibited in numerous exhibitions including at the Australian Centre for Photography and the Art Gallery of NSW with her latest series ‘Rococo’ most recently on display at the Black Eye Gallery in Darlinghurst, Sydney Australia. Below is a selection of Alexia Sinclair’s amazing work but for a more detailed look, we suggest a visit to her website.
Below are a selection of the latest creations by Natalie Shau, a photographer, artist and graphic designer who combines illustrations and photographs to lead us into a dark, strange and surreal world populated with beautiful creatures. Natalie Shau is a mixed media artist and photographer based in Vilnius, Lithuania who has an amazing talent in fashion and portrait photography as well as digital illustration and photo art. Coupled with her personal work, Natalie also creates artwork and photography for musicians, the theatre, fashion magazines, writers and advertisements. Her specialties include digital art, painting, CD artwork, photo manipulation, book covers, illustration, CD design, collage, digital painting, art direction, production design, advertising and fashion photography. Her digital masterpieces have graced the pages of French Vogue during a Lydia Courteille jewellery campaign and her extensive client list of music labels includes Island Def Jam, Sony Music Entertainment, Century Media, and Nuclear Blast. Gothic horror fiction, fairy tales and Russian classics (e.g. Dostoevsky and Gogol) are among the influences she lists for her surreal and strange creations. Natalie Shau uses a range of media, mixing photography, digital painting and 3D and the quality she seeks is “at once fragile and powerful”. “My works are digital mixed media. I mix photography, 3D elements, vector elements and digital drawing. I also enjoy creating surreal and fashion photography. My photography and digital works are often surreal portraits of women; however, I love portraying animals sometimes.” Natalie Shau regards her works as ‘pretty motionless and doll-like’, but they express the burden of waiting, and the inner conflict that boils within the characters. You can sense this in their expressions or in some contradictory elements or symbols hidden in the work. When questioned whether there is a reason that most of her illustrations and images are of women, Shau notes that she does not choose her characters, they choose her – she’s unable to explain how this happens. Her influences are many however Alexander McQueen, Eiko Ishioka, Trevor Brown are amongst them. Describing her creative process, Shau reveals “I have a flash of an idea or vision and, after exploring it in my mind, I try to sketch it and see if I can express it. I collect all the materials I need for that, take portraits, photograph elements, find any elements needed, and then I start working on a piece.” Take a look at Natalie Shau’s beautiful work below and be sure to visit her website:
