The self-taught german photographer shows the foggy side of his versatility in this series of haunting photos.

View more of Matthias’ work here.

Also In This Issue:

• Funktionsorte

“Kinsey’s work captures the universal essence of the human condition mainly through an energetic portrayal of urban figures. Working spontaneously, and utilizing a range of mediums, he constructs multi-layered, textured environments easily likened to the complexities of contemporary life. His images depict beings who are both triumphant in their defiant stance to their surroundings, and tragic, as they transmit a visual display of raw emotion and jangled nerves.”

• See more of Kinsey’s work at kinseyvisual.com

Anthony Kurtz examines darkness in nature and displays his skill with this series of long exposures.

The first time my eyes fell upon an Alyssa Monks painting, I thought I was looking at a photograph. Monks’ skill with the brush is clearly evident in this series of beautifully rendered flesh, steam, water and glass.

“Monks’ work explores narrative figuration. Currently she is playing with the tension between abstraction and realism in the same work, using different filters to visually distort and disintegrate the body. The islands of steam and water droplets on the glass distort the illusion of the face or figure as the flesh reshapes itself by pushing against the glass. In this shallow painted space, the subject is pushing against our real space with pulsating vibrations of color that can make a painted body seem to have blood pumping through it… Striving for anatomical and realistic accuracy, it is her intention to convey an arresting vision that compels the viewer to feel their own humanness. It is Monks’s intent to relate visually the contemporary female experience with sensitivity, empathy, and integrity.”

Oil and Water will be on display at DFN Gallery in NYC April 7 through May 8.

Created primarily with India ink and often on found paper, Jon MacNair’s work is brimming with symbolism. His fantastical scenes, strange creatures, and outlandish characters invite immersion and stimulate the imagination. In taking a look at his work, you might find yourself kicking around inside MacNair’s head; When asked to descibe his work in a word, his response was ‘personal.’ While the work is personal to Jon, I see a mutual human element present that most of us can relate to and even become privy to. You can view more art from this prolific creator at jonmacnair.com. To find out more about his process and shows, check out his flickr stream.

In his own words:

Undoubtedly my work is narrative in tone. I like to create scenarios that play out on the paper; vignettes in which the viewer can ponder the origins of and hopefully imbue with their own personal meanings and interpretations. There is a sense of darkness and mysticism that permeates my landscapes and characters. Often I place these characters in a nighttime setting. At night, nothing is what it seems; shapes shift and shadows loom, tricking the eye and making us question what is reality and what is imagined. Revolving heavily around themes of birth, death, fear, love, joy, and the complex relationship of man versus beast, the images I create often reflect the most basic human emotions.

• More from Jon MacNair on Fogged Clarity: Scenes in Ink

“As I begin a painting a subject physically, it emotionally and spiritually reveals itself to me. Each brushstroke speaks to the subsequent stroke, carrying out a dialogue, linking my subject and I as if we were meeting for the first time. I find this uncertainty exciting and embrace the indecisive nature of my work.

Artwork is love made visible…”

“Self-taught and focusing in pencil, ink, and digital paint, Rory has carved out his niche as a unique voice in the illustrative community. Working with digital media allows his paintings a greater amount of versatility, and faster production time, which makes all the difference when meeting deadlines. His influences are spread out across the respective wolds of literature, fashion, art, film, & music. His work isn’t easy to define, as he tends to shift from one style to the next and back again, but the individual pieces seem unified by a shared sense of fantasy in a modern reality.”

Ivan Suta

Ivan Suta

During a semester of work I studied intensively forms and light. My goal was to abstract architecture with photography. I worked with a large format camera, which is both time consuming and fairly complex. Sharp contrasts play a major role in my work because they create new spaces.

Recently the dissonance of my own life and the larger world has become increasingly apparent. As if a mirror to my thoughts, the “skin” of my drawings, the encaustic paint, became less dominant while the under paint asserted itself. The nature of the medium that I am using, a layer of wax hiding the under painting, led me to think of the duality of our public and private lives.

I chose the title, Skin Deep, because so much of what we experience in our lives is a fabrication constructed from, and simultaneously masking, an invisible infrastructure. Much of what we believe to be reality hides the labor and environmental costs that make our comforts possible. Skin Deep alludes to the corporeal. Skin, like paper, may be fragile and easily torn or cut. It is generated by what is underneath, and can be destroyed by it as well.

Françoise Nielly’s painting is sexual. Her colors are free, exuberant, surprising and explosive. Her knife incises and her pallet bursts.

A. Andrew Gonzalez achieves a sculptural look by airbrushing acrylics onto gesso panels, then lifting pigment with an abrasive eraser. This is followed by the application of transparent layers of paint. In darker sections, he may repeat these steps many times over. Claybord provides the best surface for this technique, but on rare occasion, the artist will use canvas.

Each meticulously crafted painting can take many months to complete. The level of detail often requires Gonzalez to wear a magnifying visor.

His final pieces are a combination of pre-planned and spontaneous forms, the latter discovered as his eraser technique reveals hidden designs.

Influenced by idealism in the mystical, visionary and esoteric traditions, Gonzalez’s work is contemporary tantric or transfigurative art that explores the dramatic union of the sensual and spiritual. His work is akin to a revival of classical neo-platonic ideals centering on the figure as both temple and vessel, sublimed by transformative forces. His best known piece is Unio Mystica.

My goal is to create art that reflects the very essence of our ever changing world. I believe that to force creativity is to go against its basic nature, and to constrain it is harmful to individuality. Therefore, creativity must be allowed to flow, dreamlike, expressing the tangible and intangible simultaneously.

After a month and a half of staying in India, I felt like I lived there. I ventured to the country in order to work with my creative partner on a Polaroid project asking local people what they wanted to do before they die. My own goals for the trip included a spiritual restructuring, getting healthy, and drinking in the surrounding culture. The ideas for these pieces originated from my visions during meditation while staying at the ashram, and the drawings of them were done before returning to the states. These works were finished in Chicago, and are also greatly affected by the tumult that overtook my life upon reintroduction to the West. All of the materials found below were picked up off the litter-filled streets of Indian towns: Delhi, Amenebhad, Kochin, and Varanasi. The writings (on the back of each piece and journal-style on paper) serve to reflect both my time in India and life since coming home.

Nightlines was shot in Ørestaden near Copenhagen. Ørestaden has turned into the Manhattan of Denmark, with an array of new architecture rising. This series was shot along the metro lines and aims to place emphasis on some of these recently built structures.

Also in this issue:

These trees were shot close to where I live in Kirke Værløse – in the “the black moor” section of a nearby forest.

Also in this issue:

It all started one day. I picked up my first digital camera and so many days later here I am. Nothing has changed. Well, we all still wander with our eyes closed, overlooking the beautiful world in front of us. It’s not truly our fault .. lifestyle, work, family, friends, and life distract us. Don’t worry, that’s why there are photographers.

One was shot from a single location in a duration of about 45 minutes in a secret place close to Portland, Oregon.

Digital Flowers is a series of illustrated experiments examining shape and color. My intention is that each flower blooms before the viewer’s eye.

Diptych is a two part work consisting of a male and female countenance. This small series is an attempt to understand shape in relation to form-deconstruction.

There are two components to the artwork that I am currently producing. First is the process; The challenge of composing images and code that create sprawling abstractions with multiple levels of detail excites and inspires me. I am especially interested in the use of generative and emergent processes combined with traditional composition of color and line. Second is the emotional aspect of the work, which I liken to classical music. The thing that makes classical music great is its ability to invoke a subconscious feeling in the listener, even though they haven’t been exposed to any sort of back-story. There is a deep emotional reaction on a level beyond the surface of conscious thought, in a spiritual place where narrative is less important than raw feeling, where rhythm and harmony speak to the soul. This is the place I am most interested in touching with these works.

Often while riding my bike through the alleys and streets of Chicago, my mind gathers the imagery and often peeks through the windows of neighbors and strangers. I began collecting these images in drawings and later making them into relief prints, carving linoleum to create my pieces with a sharp, clean illustrative quality. However, I found these prints to read as static and flat, and as much as I loved the process of carving and multiples, I was not as interested in creating editions. To remedy this, and to make further use of the vocabulary of imagery I had amassed, I began to cut and collage the prints, making them more dynamic. I was able to change the colors and create arrangements that were completely unique even if I repeated motifs from piece to piece. The end result combines the things I love the most: the bouncing imagery and stream of consciousness of city life, drawing and carving.

My work is principally concerned with contemporary man’s mutable conception of Nature. Growing up on the rural Delmarva Peninsula, I became acquainted with the local flora and fauna at a young age. Whether working at field chores, hunting, fishing or simply playing, many of my experiences in the “natural” world were similar to those of Lewis Carroll’s Alice; Carroll’s premise, that “things get curiouser and curiouser,” guided me through many a childhood adventure. I anthropomorphized animals and cast them as key players in an epic production, of which I too was a part. For me, as for Alice, the natural world was enchanted and, although by no means idyllic, ethical in an unsentimental way.

As I matured, however, my childhood love of Nature evolved into a fascination with biology and ethology, an intellectual ontogenesis like that impelled by the Enlightenment. In the 16th century, educated Europeans began to distinguish between storied meaning and fact. They gradually abandoned enchantment, myth, and magic in favor of analysis and rigorous experimentation, hallmarks of the scientific method. This preference holds true today. Yet, incidentally, we’ve realized that this divide between the imagination and reason is unfortunate, even unnatural. The English poet and critic, John Ruskin, alluded to this schism when he wrote of “the broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought and feeling, and truth and faith.” Although we learn an increasing number of facts about Nature, our experience of it is less complete.

For our ancestors, Nature was understood as an extension of self. Both the man and the rock he sat on were part of the same rich story, a story in which every player — a wolf, eagle, tree, mountain, river — had a voice. Art and dream acted as a channel between human consciousness and animal or natural phenomena. Today, many people dismiss such “primitive” spiritualism, but, as critic Donald Kuspit writes, “while it is hard to know what is special about nature in our increasingly unnatural world, and to recognize that we remain part of it however removed from it we think we are, we continue, however unconsciously, to feel the need for a passionate, unpressured relationship with [nature] as an antidote to the daily pressure of our lives.”

The existential experience we channel when contemplating animal behavior or participating fully in the world is altogether distinct from the more nuanced world of advanced self-consciousness and technological civilization. We humans are exceptional creatures and our extraordinary accomplishments should be celebrated, not diminished, yet Nature affords us an opportunity to confront denial of our animal antecedence, to increase wonder and joy, and to extract lessons of mortality and morality. Ethology, the study of our animal brethren, is inextricably entangled with anthropology; this knot binds essential truths.

The current body of work is borne of these ideas and questions, but also responds to our contemporary cultural and political climate. The paintings are celebrations of Nature, but they also respond to the anxiety and uncertainty endemic to our time by returning to the traditional Sublime, picturing an ambivalent world that delights and inspires as surely as it destroys and awes. They depict a melting world, a Nature torn apart and dissolving. But this dissolution is also an opening of the senses, the seepage of magic and mystery back into the picture. The drawings are similarly alchemical, poetic investigations of belonging (or not) to the greater whole.

My art uses collages of photography, drawing, painting and patterning to create layers of images and meaning. The works deal with a variety of emotions about the coexistence of our urban landscape, nature and humanity. I am continually inspired by my surroundings, todays urban and natural environments, and have drawn some inspirations as well from Dada, Surrealism and Pop art.  Along with architecture  and urban themes,  in many pieces I also bring in rural and natural landscapes. There is sometimes humor, irony as well as melancholy in these pieces, and these evocations always thread through my work in some way. I desire to create a surreal vision of the world that incorporates the past, present, and future of our worlds landscapes, causing reflections on where we are today.

The main themes in my work concern relationships; those between individuals and those between ourselves and nature. The isolation of the individual and the collective, universally shared human experience are central tenets in my work. In these pieces I use color, light and shadow in real and surreal ways, allowing these images to be both familiar and strange. I select my subjects for their narrative affects, and endeavor to reveal only a hint of what each picture’s story may be, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks and interpret meaning. It is my aim to make the viewer an active participant in my artwork; completing an interaction between artist, work-of-art and observer.

The working title for this ongoing series of paintings was “Crate”. The subject of a figure in a box originated from a search for an image to represent the escapologist which could take its place beside various circus performers in a suite called “Smoke & Mirrors” . However, the works may now be considered as a stand-alone project. The composition of figure physically enclosed within the confines of the frame should also be regarded as a visual metaphor for

A] social isolation

B] political oppression

C] high risk strategies employed in acts of voluntary and coerced, illegal human trafficking across continents.

The paintings are all squares in format, with dimensions ranging from 10cm to 92cm, and have all been painted and designed to hang any way up. The works preview later this year and the pictures will be rotated by 90 and 180 degrees at the start of each day so that the exhibition re-invents itself visually throughout the run.

Homecoming is a short animated film exploring the work of Franz Kafka through his homonymous story. The story follows the homecoming of a wayward son back to his fathers’ farm where he spent the first years of his life.  The piece focuses on his inability to connect to the environment, and on his hesitation to make any step of approach. This film attempts to capture the feeling and atmosphere of Kafka’s work, and also serves as an exploration of the imagery the text evokes in my own mind.

The Windows is my attempt to visualize C.P.Cavafy’s poem of the same name. The animation was created in 2003, and was a personal project reflecting certain aspects of my own psychology at the time. A translation of the poem can be found below:

In this series of oil paintings I examine stereotypes of femininity in contemporary Ukraine. Well known images of Eve, The Virgin Mary, Helen of Troy, and of Kateryna, the heroine of the emblematic Taras Shevchenko’s poem, along with the glamorous “cover stars” serve as role models for the socialization of Ukrainian girls. Women should be nice, spiritual and beautiful. These repressive stereotypes don’t reflect the diversity of choices for women in contemporary society. Real women can be ugly, fat, bald and nevertheless – interesting and charming individuals. As a project, curated by Tamara Zlobina in 2007, “Females and Ovipositions” was exhibited in a few Ukrainian cities (Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Ivano-Frankivsk) and elicited different responses and opinions. The most remarkable of which occurred in the provincial town of Drogobych (Western Ukraine). My exhibition was prohibited by local authorities because of an outrage against public morality and Christianity. Drogobych moralists proved that women in Ukraine can be naked (and almost are on TV and in advertising) – but only if their nudity is aesthetically pleasing.

This series of nudes is something very close to my heart. The subjects were friends of mine; the lady, a childhood friend and the man her husband. The idea behind the shoot was to capture their natural and beautiful love with no distractions. Gone are the clothes, the jewelry, the makeup.  The day was filled with love and laughter as we moved from scene to scene on the beach. Each pose came as naturally as the last. The “Egg” photo was to be a symbol not only of their love and connection, but also of the yin/yang of the female and male form coming together as one whole. Every other photo from this shoot was as simple as me pointing somewhere for them to lay or sit and let them just love each other.

Primarily, my work is accomplished with ink. I use all sorts of applicators, from pens and metal nibs, to quills and brushes. The inherent dynamic of the line is at the heart of my aesthetic. I attempt to achieve infinite simultaneous realities within each piece. Consequently, each image looks very different over distances. From afar it appears as an almost abstract anthropomorphic form, but as one closer approaches the image itself, the viewer discovers the multitude of separate levels and sections of imagery within the piece. More is always there than initially meets the eye. This is true with my work as well as my life. The work’s relation to the reality surrounding us is the fundamental and a conceptual essence of my aesthetic. I work in a permanent medium and I work as close to an open flow of consciousness as possible. Rarely do I do any preliminary sketches or treatments to work up the image. When working with ink, there are no mistakes or failures that can prevent the artist from pressing on. One must improvise, adapt, and overcome; transform a mistake that could potentially destroy the flow of the piece, into a working constituent element. One cannot go back in time, just as I cannot erase my ink. However, when something goes wrong in either my artistic arena, or the arena of my reality, I choose to learn from it, improve upon it and move forward. I endeavor to make it work and to sustain the visual communication.

This is what I strive for as a creator. My intention is to keep crying out in this novel visual language that I’ve created.

The smallest thing can set me off, like the shape of a line, or the contrast of a color. In doing the pill paintings, I was thinking of our cultural addition to quick fixes, and how sad and funny it is. Pills are fun objects to look at and play with, they really remind me of candy, adult candy.

Ryan Daly

“Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.” ~Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

Time is complex, mysterious and convoluted. Viewing common scenes through a simple distorted frame of time causes patterns and dynamics to emerge that would otherwise go unnoticed. In Palindrome, I use time-lapse photography and digital techniques to show the dynamism of natural and human processes. The patterns that surface provoke ideas unlike those which would be conjured from static images or real-time video. Suppose these processes are circular, as the above quote suggests. Palindrome embodies this idea.

As a side note, this video is meant to be played in tandem with another video containing the same imagery, only in reverse (or ‘forward’…) So basically, both projections play the same imagery moving opposite the other, and are meant to loop perpetually on different walls in the corner of a room… Much of the effect is lost to the restrictions of this space, but this should provide a good idea of the concept. Also, I recommend listening with a decent sound system as the aural aspect of the piece is quite crucial.

Special thanks to Mr. Keith Woogerd for waking up early… hangover and all… to assist my vision.

Kyle Jones

The world is constructed of lines and angles, shapes and wavelengths; I have presented these elements in a way that envelops them as cohesive compositions.

The examination of composition is common practice among artists and historians. In an effort to understand my own reasons for creating art, I began to analyze the relationship between human form and environment. By using line to deconstruct these images, the work became an observation of a single subject in her environment. As a constant in the work, the repetition of her form is a control factor in a series of visual experiments. The environment becomes the variable. The geometric shapes of the architecture and sculpture contrasted the free, organic shape of the model as I documented her experience with the space.

Because the images are InkJet translations of computer language, there is also digital information that must be taken into account when creating or viewing the images. As a digital artist, I manipulate this information and render it into a completed image. By engraving the information onto Lexan, I have peeled back the skin to expose the digital skeleton that bears as much weight as the polished exterior of the final image.

Peter Ciccariello

Words from a room is a serial operatic investigation into the process of shifting contextual space, the ability of referents and real world textures to maintain meaning and poetic discourse through a series of deliberate truncations, amputations and deconstructive sheerings, and a visual record of how meaning and content can transfer and interact in alternate relationships. This visual poem series was created by collaging textural photos, bits of poems, and random text, all texture-wrapped on the skin of a three-dimensional modeled digital environment. The initial source libretto consists of a text that develops and expands from eighteenth century gravestone carved letterforms to arborglyphs and manhole covers.

The resultant images are master printed as archival, fine art limited editions.