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.
La Catterdrale Vegetale (The Cathedral Grove) by Guiliano Mauri
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.
