Crystal Burger, 2022, by SphericalArt
This is a gorgeous short animation by SphericalArt, who works with geometric planes of polygonal and polyhedral spheres. It’s fun to see a (normally static and rigid) crystal do a little dance.
The title, Crystal Burger, signals a winking Pop-art humor to the composition that’s not immediately obvious. But once you know it’s there, the diamond-like hamburger cannot be unseen.
Aurora, 2021, by Chant
When I was a kid, my family would occasionally take summertime drives to Crater Lake, Oregon, a majestic body of water inside an imploded volcano. The site looked like this artwork — minus the glowing orbs in the water and aurora in the sky.
I suppose Chant‘s scene is postapocalyptic, with the boat perched on the rocks. Still, it’s a magical and inviting landscape.
Home Sweet Home, 2021, by Nogland
Welcome to the funtastic nightmare world of Nogland. Not since Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder were making their highly details paintings, around 500 years ago, have the infernal realms looks so cute and comical.
Pé de cajú, 2022, by Patricia Costa
Brazilian artist Patricia Costa enjoys deconstructing figurative forms in her work.
This particular piece, titled Pé de cajú (Portuguese for cashew tree), resembles a playful mix of Picasso’s jarring Cubist portraits and Miró’s floating biomorphic shapes, but updated with 21st-century colors and textures. Brava.
Archeology of the Future, 2017, by Martin
At first glance, this slowly developing animation appears cold and impersonal, but the heart warms upon learning it reconstructs the little house where the work’s Argentine artist, Martin Marro, was born, on the site of an old gas station.
Self Portrait, 2022, by Shilo
Shilo self-identifies as an “artist, cult escapee, generational trauma disruptor, therapy goer, truth seeker, parent, avid reader” and sees art making as a healing modality.
Many of Shilo’s NFTs use the same dichromatic palette of light pink and dark red, a savvy signature look that instantly identifies a work as a Shilo. It’s not easy for artists to limit themselves two colors, but Shilo does so masterfully, filling this self-portrait with expressive motion and heartfelt emotion.
Details of 0X[Y].gen 0.1, 2021, by Joan Heemskerk
This highly technical conceptual artwork is by Joan Heemskerk, of the Dutch duo JODI. JODI! — the pioneers of net art in the early 1990s, found in today’s art-history books and major museum collections.
Heemskerk describes the piece thusly: “0X[Y].gen 0.1 has No Fake Time. Evolving endless generations [Y] in the light-time-zone. Every millisecond produces binary 0.1 values in a time-horizon. Training photo synthesis fake faces breathing in/ breathing out 0X[Y].gen to obtain energy to fuel all our living processes in the cloud.”
That explanation doesn’t clear much up for this art writer, but I do know it’s a historic and meaningful piece. Because . . . JODI!
