Category: Art

‘Modern Leisure’ is a collection of color oil paintings and greyscale drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Danny Heller. The series explores the glamorous architecture and mid-century design that is quintessential to Palm Springs in California, capturing the essence of the iconic city in true retro-futuristic fashion.

Just a small paint brush and ink pen are used to realistically capture the light, angles and mood on canvas of the city that has captivated Heller since his youth. The artist grew up a short drive from Palm Springs in the San Fernando Valley and says what draws him to 1950s and ’60s design is the strong lines and simplified forms typically associated with Palm Springs iconography. This includes in particular, The Palm Springs Modernism Movement, which is responsible for those beautiful mid-century Alexander Tract homes that distinguish the city from all others in the Southern Californian desert.

Heller paints lavish outdoor pool areas and the accouterments that go with them, classic vintage cars, and the historic Racquet Club, in a tribute to the once-revered mid-century design. His artist statement expresses concern for the groundbreaking ideas in form and social planning, saying that they are now largely undervalued in a culture that hungers for change. “My work exposes this period of innovation to the wider public, and especially to new generations”, he explains. “In doing so, I’m helping to build a new respect for the past, aid in its preservation, and learn from it in order to move forward”.

In these hyperreal renderings, plants with velveteen leaves spill from the frame, peach terrazzo tiles stand as backdrops for balloon-like lamps and furniture fit for gallery spaces abound. The series is named after lucid dreaming, a dream state“My memory of a dream naturally turns into a source of inspiration” in which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming—and can, therefore, control elements of their dream. Drawing upon both his own dreams, and the act of lucid dreaming, Brasch-Willumsen mentioned in a recent interview that this series was inspired by his own experiences: “I can recall even the smallest detail of a dream hours after I have woken up,” he explains, “my memory of a dream naturally turns into a source of inspiration—the kind of inspiration that no one else but myself would be able to find.” In ‘A Lucid Dream in Pink, Sleep Cycle No 17’ we are offered the kind of dream that Brasch-Willumsen may have had, where—by lucid involement—he altered elements of his dreamscape to suit his aesthetic desires.

Ohio-based artist Robert Roth paints the vastness of the sky and the power of the sun, capturing the horizon as blue melts into shades of bright amber and soft rose.

Though Roth is often considered a landscape painter, the horizons that he paints sit low on the canvas—the land secondary to the might of the sky. “Skies are a “Skies are a powerful form of nature, revealing endless compositions of light and color.”powerful form of nature,” Roth explains, “revealing endless compositions of light and color.” Yet, when every blazing sunset is captured and posted to Instagram, often artworks that render such horizons fail to inspire any great sense of awe. Yet Roth, with his fast, broad brushstrokes, manages to paint such scenes in new ways. His paintings transfer the infinite quality of sky, and its relationship to land and water, to canvas. “Within my paintings, I try to achieve that sense of vastness as the reflective light travels throughout the low horizon and across the waterways, lighting up the ground,” Roth tells us. “My paintings are really abstract studies of skies and the landscape just happens to sneak in.” 

In the ‘Valley Of Secret Values’ Los Angeles-based artist, Thrashbird, has transformed the crumbling concrete monoliths of an abandoned power plant in Lime, Oregon, into a visually arresting site of outdoor art.

Well known for utilizing public spaces to make socio-political statements about the issues currently affecting modern-day culture, Thrashbird’s latest project takes a different course: located miles away from any populated area, the dilapidated boulders are spray painted with elaborate stencils and resourcefully decorated with found materials as the designer bag accessories.

Speaking of how the idea came about conceptually, Thrashbird explains that he was on a painting expedition at the time, and stumbled across the maze of derelict boulders that immediately piqued his artistic interest. “To see [the stones] crumbling with the passage of time, returning to the earth as a dust, well the metaphor was too strong to disregard“.

In his own words, the ‘Valley Of Secret Values’ is part beautification project, part cautionary tale, and was thus produced to continue “Things and social status have become more important than our connection to each other”the important discourse surrounding society’s detrimental obsession with bombastic consumerism. The handbag installations themselves are used as a mechanism to display dissension at our self-preoccupation with wealth and status, a point that is flagged as personal for Thrashbird himself. The project “highlights my own struggle with ego and grandiosity; hence the scale of it”, he explains. “We grapple for status and purpose in society, and [consume] possessions to showcase how successful we are and to fill us with purpose, with complete disregard for the people and the planet affected by our careless overconsumption. Our measure of success has been skewed. We’ve come to a place in society where things and social status have become more important than our connection to each other”, he laments.

Having grown up in a household headed by a lighting designer, British artist Charlotte Taylor was no stranger to the works of Pawson, Bofill, and Barragan. Their influence took a hold of her and informs her digitally painted interiors.

With a degree from Chelsea College of Art under her belt and collaborations with big names like Elle Netherlands and the Print Club London, Taylor has refined and established her own unique style. Sometimes drawing from real interiors, at others from fictional ones, Taylor uses Adobe or 3D modeling software to render the space on her computer. The resulting images are reminiscent of the pastel-hued, geometric buildings designed by great postmodern and brutalist architects. Explaining about her design process, Taylor comments: “my practice comes together as a form of non-functional design, using architecture and interiors references but turning them upside-down.”

Using social and psychological references as a conceptual starting point, Toronto-based artist Toni Hamel illustrates the absurdities of human behavior through her satirical paintings.

Men in lab coats carry a giraffe that appears to have rigor mortis in a painting called ‘The Heist’, in ‘The Watch’ a child stands at the edge of a pier with a lead attached to a melting iceberg. Hamel’s paintings each explore a peculiar relationship or a socio-cultural phenomena. Why should a zebra be donning stripes? Why is a horse being painted pink? Do weathermen really fill up the clouds with water before a big storm? Hamel’s paintings inspire a childlike sense of curiosity and play, in them nothing is as it seems.

‘An Internet’ by Dutch multimedia artist Jeroen Van Loon asks us to consider how the internet may look if all data was temporary and ephemeral.

Using smoke and glass tubes arranged in the same order as our internet cables, Van Loon presents us with a possible vision of a future internet. It is an internet unbound by constraints and constrictions — where data (represented here by smoke) can spill over into the next The data in Van Loon’s ‘An Internet’ is produced and then disappears forever in a puff of smoke.cable. ‘An Internet’ works by having the smoke puffed into the glass tubes, when the tube fills up, the smoke passes through it and into another tube. Our current internet operates through a system of glass fibre cables that stretch across the ocean floor, connecting continents, countries, and citizens all over the globe in seconds. The premise is that you can have access to the same internet data wherever you are. While current data is produced and stored forever, the data in Van Loon’s ‘An Internet’ is produced and then disappears forever in a puff of smoke. He believes that this his internet creates a “unique ephemeral moment without any form of documentation.”