Downtown Los Angeles
FriendsWithYou's fantasy factory is tucked quietly away in DTLA, right down the street from us. They're super neighborly neighbors.
They’ll help to take things way-out tonight at Summer on 7th's rooftop party — also just down the way — with a bunch of other friendlies.
Yugoslavian Bernharda Xilko‘s illustrations are stark nightmares packed with active nudes and foreboding giants exploring unfolding landscapes and black-eyed lovers. Xilko’s sexually charged figures climb scaffolding, push open folding screens, and confront over-sized replicas in barren mountain ranges where platforms unstably rest. There always seems to be a sense of teamwork, but it is teamwork that is either ignorant of the task’s ultimate result or work that feels intentionally ominous. When clothing is adorned it often feels as if it is from the decades of black and white television which provides a conceptual link for the lack of color, and the garbs warn feel blue-collar and commonplace, making these figure’s lives and mission feel almost ant-like in its diligence and insignificance. The work shares the vibe that the Twilight Zone often evokes but in a more grotesque and explicit manner.
Bernharda is also a co-founder of NOVO DOBA, an annual Belgrade comix and underground culture festival that shares his aesthetic of dark worlds. You can also see more of his work here.
The post Bernharda Xilko’s Sexually Charged Stark Nightmares appeared first on Beautiful/Decay Artist & Design.
L’Algae-graphie, ou quand le photographe et artiste Lia Giraud réalise des expériences afin d’imprimer des photographies sur des micro-algues photosensibles. Un projet de photographies vivantes réalisé avec l’aide de Claude Yéprémian, biologiste au Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris. Une série qui rappelle la Bacteriography de Zachary Copfer.
Images © Lia Giraud / via
(via hushaby)
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Antonio Basoli was an Italian artist who lived between the 18th and 19th century, and was a man with a vision. He created this architectural alphabet engravings called Alfabeto Pittorico (Pictorial Alphabet). The images don’t just depict letters, but elaborate buildings that use letterforms as their structure. It includes every letter except for the j, because it doesn’t exist in the Italian alphabet. They called it i lunga and it’s written with an i.
Soft, monochromatic images are full of intricate details, and we’re able to see every brick of a building in addition to the billowing clouds in the background. With each letter, Basoli creates a different setting and mood. Some landscapes are tranquil and idyllic-looking, filled with lush vegetation. Others are war-torn, and we see giant cracks in the foundation of buildings. Whatever the occasion, each is its own story with a compelling narrative of men versus themselves and also versus nature. (Via Sploid)
The post 18th Century Engravings By Antonio Basoli Feature Intriguing Towns Made Out Of Typography appeared first on Beautiful/Decay Artist & Design.
Sergei Isupov is a ceramic artist born in Stavropol, Russia 1963 and now living in Massachusetts, US, where he has been represented by the Ferrin Gallery.
(via turecepcja)
Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou. Untitled (Vodou Series), 2011.
Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou’s photographs of the people of Porto-Novo, Benin (formerly Republic of Dahomey) are drawn from street life, his friends, family and studio customers. Benin is all about colour – Porto Novo is like a visual assault.In Leonce’s impressive portraits, wild combinations of locally designed Dutch imported textiles create extreme gradations between background, foreground, person and clothing. Leonce is part of a generation experiencing rapid change and his photographs capture the energy and unfettered zest for life of a people caught between tradition and progress.
The aquatic caddis fly begins its life in a larval stage, and must build an artificial carapace in order to survive into adulthood. When artist Hubert Dupras discovered that they build these cases out of whatever materials are at hand — including sticks and rocks — he had a strange idea.
Edgar Ende (German, 1901-1965), Die Jagd nach der Taube [The hunt for the dove], 1933. Oil on canvas, 69.5 x 89.5 cm.
(via blastedheath)
What a magnificent snapshot of the 90’s.
"The Last Great Generation: The 90’s"
Instagrammer waverider_ aka Liam The Lion is a real gem of a human. Here he is dressed up and impersonating celebrities.
Lola Dupre’s collage visions can make Hilary Clinton look like Jaba the Hutt and Virginia Woolf look like a camel. Dupre cuts and pastes her pieces by hand, stretching or shrinking features of the face and/or body of politicians, celebrities, and anonymous characters. Strange though this may sound, her approach to collage seems so obvious it’s almost surprising no one’s thought of it before. This is what makes her work so strong. A really great idea can often seem familiar because it makes so much sense.
In her most recent work, Dupre has been transforming nude figures into unexpected (and sometimes ‘Human Centipede’-like) forms. Whereas in most of them she multiplies limbs and genitals, she throws you a curveball in Osa Desnuda, where she sticks a the top half of a teddy beat head on a nude woman with an ample drooping breast and strange proportions throughout. This one in particular is reminiscent of Wangechi Mutu’s work. She also creates hybrid forms with women’s bodies: confusingly erotic while also disturbing and unexpected, though Mutu’s work is more extreme than Dupre’s.
Although the images are made manually they don’t escape the digital. They reference (accidentally or intentionally) a computer screen that has frozen up where the user has tried to drag the image across the screen, only to have all the repetitions of the image remain as it is moved along. Though similar imagery could probably be made on photoshop, the handmade aspect is essential. The images would loose the sensual textures of skin achieved in the overlapping paper, and the process itself is more mysterious.
The post Lola Dupre’s Collages Get Long In The Face (And Body) appeared first on Beautiful/Decay Artist & Design.
Nuclear reactors that have never been activated, Scottsboro, Alabama. Photo by Carol Highsmith.
