ART_Jennifer Angus Bug Wall

Artist Jennifer Angus is known for creating large-scale artworks that incorporate real insects as the focal point. Angus has devoted much of her time in southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand and Malaysia, where she has gathered thousands of insects to display in her art. This piece in particular lived in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Although her work incorporates a large amount of dead bugs, Angus emphasizes that none of these are endangered species and she has collected them over the span of years, giving them up only to decay or when donating bugs to schools so children can learn from them. Angus is adamant about bringing attention to the wildlife that are losing their natural homes and hopes her artwork will inspire curiosity and urgency in saving these creatures.

jennifer angus

VISUAL ARTS - COLLAGE By Jorge Chamorro

ART- Ashleigh Ninos

This is a series by California based artist Ashleigh Ninos titled, quite appropriately, “Contour”. 

PRODUCT DESIGN - Knit Desing by Monomoka

MONOMOKA

Arw twin sisters, who practically from the time of their birth were of one mind in the development of  creativity and in perception of the world. Grown up in Poland during the bleak era of a decadent socialism, which made them determined to find different aesthetic values from the ones that surrounded. Limited access to a "colourful" western world, and the desire to develop their own style, forced them into creative thinking. 

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 SLIPPING MICE

The name MONOMOKA is a symbol of  inseparable sisterly connection which has, so far, resulted in a collection of 13 unique objects. The painstaking hand crocheting which we personally carry out means that each unique piece has taken many months to create.  

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Enjoy

ART- Joana Vasconcelos

Celebrated Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos showcases the beauty of handicraft techniques from her home country in the Bestiary series.

Known for her show-stopping interventions and gravity defying pieces, Vasconcelos focuses on smaller scale as well. Manipulating animals made in earthenware pottery from 19th Century artisan Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro; each over-sized creature is carefully covered, or better yet, protected with extraordinary crochet lace from the Azores region.

Joana was the first woman and youngest contemporary artist to ever exhibit in Versailles Palace, such a relevant and strong statement of her skill and sophistication is easily recognizable in her body of work.

PHOTOGRAPHY - Hollis B. Thornton

Artist Hollis Brown Thornton has taken these questions into serious consideration and uses his work as a way to explore life’s uncertainties. 

The main themes used include memory, reality and the unknown, almost every component of his work has a meaning attached to it. 

  
Thornton’s work ranges from acrylic paintings to marker drawings of wallpaper, VHS tapes, erased faces and outdated media, which all play a key role in ‘uniting the fleeting present to a lingering past.

ILLUSTRATION - Lee's pen art

Korean born, Brooklyn based Il Lee is best known for his ballpoint pen abstract artworks which he has been doing for more than 30 years. It is stunning to think about the labor that goes into each of these works, and not to mention how many pens it must takes to do the larger pieces, as big as 8′ x 12′ feet. I especially love the blue works featured here.

ART - Jean Wells

 

Coke and Hamburger.
2 feet tall x 0.5 foot diameter and 1.5 feet tall x 1 foot , 2010.

 

American artist Jean Wells began sculpting in the late 1980's using a beguiling array of materials and objects, large and small. Playful, paradoxical and full of technical finesse, Wells offers not only visual pleasures, but stimulating food for thought with her Pop icons of ice cream, soda and pin up queens.

 

Fitting neatly into an art historical discourse that revolves around the loaded topic of consumerism, a conversation that includes such twentieth century stalwarts as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons, among others, Wells also invokes more rarefied luminaries such as Nikki de Saint Phalle, Wayne Thiebaud and Takashi Murakami. Like many postmodern artists working with a blend of pop culture iconography and autobiography, Wells' work is charming and nostalgic, yet packs a punch with its satisfying bite of underlying poignancy, offering an authentic and personal undercurrent that balances the lyrical. 

 

Wells is deeply inspired by her sumptuous materials, and works with an exquisite palette of beautifully colored glass that she has custom created for her sculptures. These unique glass creations provide her with an incredibly wide selection of tones, qualities of reflection and color gradations, allowing her to shade forms, variegate and layer colors with great precision and nuance. Wells hand cuts the glass, and keeps a reserve of tiny scrap pieces that allow her to add details and touches of color that keep the surfaces lively and variable. Like many artists, she relies upon her personal history, imagination and even her dream life to arrive at the ideas she will pursue as actual objects.

 

Raised in the wholesome landscape of the evergreen Pacific Northwest, Wells was born into a large artistic family with a strong traditional skill set grounded in such old world techniques such as fresco secco, realism and mosaics. At an early age the young artist apprenticed with her father, mosaic artist Thomas Wells, and learned the painstaking craft and iconography of classical Byzantine-style mosaics as he completed a large commission for the prestigious and architecturally celebrated St. Demetrios Greek Church in Seattle. Having worked for a number of years in paintings and ceramics, Wells has recently rediscovered her love of mosaics and in keeping with her playful, trickster nature, she prefers to turn the traditional uses of this medium on their head and make sculpture instead of murals.

ART - Sculptures by Diana Al-Hadid

ILLUSTRATION - by Ray Morimura

ART - JOHN VON BERGEN

John von Bergen is a US born artist who has been based in Berlin for the last eight years. His studio, a large space in Wedding, is a true working space – John works primarily with sculpture and installation, and his material experiments, works-in-progress, and many completed works are installed around the walls.

 

Everything is installed in such a way that it was virtually impossible to tell where the wall ended and the sculpture began. Protruding out, the work appears as a fantastical extension of the wall reaching out into the room. For his show at the project space Smack Mellon last year, John took this strategy to an extreme – creating a 45 foot (15 meter) large-scale, site-specific work that appeared to emerge from the walls of the gallery itself. The piece, Whip Lash, appeared to involve a large metallic pillar (cast from an actual pillar in the gallery) being supported mid-air by two huge wall ‘protrusions.’ The usually neutral and austere white wall of the space was transformed into an almost antagonistic force – one defying physics, logic and reality.