Every Shoe Has a Story // Original, 2022, by Chris Hurtt
There are other items out there, besides NFTs, that people obsessively collect in the 2020s, like vintage basketball shoes.
Chris Hurtt‘s montage features some of the most legendary Air Jordans, all piled together and rendered in a slick, comic-book style.
Mammon, 2021–22, by Angie Taylor
Angie Taylor based her Mammon on an 1884–85 painting of the same name by George Frederic Watts, who supposedly wanted to place a statue of the ferocious fallen angel in London’s Hyde Park. Mammon represents greed and smashes personifications of Innocence and Beauty under his hand and foot while sitting on a skull-festooned throne and wearing a crown of ass ears.
Taylor programmed the 3D creation for augmented reality, meaning its owner could see this monumental Mammon in Hyde Park, as Watts had intended.
Wave, 2022, by Aksana
Aksana‘s delightful animation calls to mind the invisible waves, vibrations, links and parallels that undergird the material universe, according to quantum physics. There’s something soothing and almost healing about this looping, abstract motion picture — and that’s intentional.
“If you feel calm and happy, you will be able to send signals from the universe on a good wave,” the artist says. “The universe takes your emotions and reflects them right back at you.” Breathe in. Breathe out. Ahhhhh.
Triple Portrait of E: RGB, dv1, 2021, by Sophie Kahn
A triple-header? Three heads are better than one? Whatever pun you use, Sophie Kahn‘s fragmented 3D scan of a model’s head is like a Cubist portrait but thrice as nice.
Monument to Bad Sportsmanship, 2021, by Shamus Clisset
Shamus Clisset concocts with twisted, futuristic versions of imagery that would not look out of place on the posters of a teenage boy’s bedroom wall in 1991: an impossibly shiny Lamborghini Countach with an equally gleaming nude figure posed on the hood, a person (also naked) soaring spread-eagle to dunk a basketball in a crazy tall hoop.
Monument to Bad Sportsmanship is a bit more sinister, with a mysterious switchblade sticking out of a flattened basketball as it twirls on a skinny finger. The title tells us a sore loser may be to blame.
Mining Nightfall Quintet Cube, 2021, by Daniel Ambrosi
This interactive 3D model is based on a sculpture Daniel Ambrosi constructed to experiment with the idea of framing and displaying images. The five landscapes/cityscapes are modifications of photos he snapped in New York’s Central Park.
Ambrosi used his architecture background to come up with the ingenious, industrial box. It’s all a marvelous mix of clarity and distortion, nature and engineering.
Last Human Mother and Baby, 2015, by Julia Beliaeva
What’s happening here? Is the mother kissing, shushing and soothing the baby to keep him quiet, or is she about to eat his head? Either way these “last human mother and baby” may be in trouble, as a jungle cat and sinister birds lurk in the lush background.
While the content may be troubling, the style of Julia Beliaeva‘s digital artwork resembles a gorgeous, postapocalyptic update of Henri Rousseau’s lively Postimpressionist paintings from the late 19th century.
