Science never ceases to amaze us with its bizarre, powerful and sometimes even beautiful. Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has managed to create tiny flower like sculptures out of crystals. Now crystals are commonly known for having hard jagged edges. However Noorduin’s crystals buck convention with their organic shapes that were created by manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid through a chemical reaction between Barium Chloride and Sodium Silicate. (via)

“For at least 200 years, people have been intrigued by how complex shapes could have evolved in nature. This work helps to demonstrate what’s possible just through environmental, chemical changes.” -Wim L. Noorduin as told to Caroline Perry

With your face close to Jacob Everett‘s ball point pen drawings, you’ll notice they look very similar to the endless swirling pen marks of a distracted mind.  The kind of meaningless doodles we may do while speaking on the phone.  If you zoom out, however, the doodles turn into detailed portraits of celebrities.  For his Well Known Faces series, Everett painstakingly arranges the tiny swirls to create huge portraits.  First, he sketches and graphs his subjects before layering them in swirls section by section.  He says of his work:

“I am interested in the contrast between the minute, repetitive mark-making and the highly personal image that is created. The process is similar to mass production. I work from photographs, concentrating on one section of the face at a time. Over several shifts spent in this way, the work culminates in a finished product which is, paradoxically, an authentic and personal portrait.”

In a way, endlessness is a fundamental characteristic of gifs.  However, the work of Turkish artist Erdal Inci, highlights this aspect of a medium in a style that is especially hypnotic and creepy.  Inci has worked in video for nearly ten years.  He’s since translated work into gifs using his same clone and light effects.  In them, he seems to produce an endless hoodied army of himself marching, sliding down handrails, hopping up and down stairs.  Though the action is brief, its repetitive nature makes it difficult to pull away your eyes.  All of the Erdal Inci clones in lockstep trudge on together until we manage to close the window.  [via]

Whether through painting, illustration, sculpture, or installation, Kenny Scharf displays an aesthetic saturated with bright colors and playful figures. Think: Pee Wee’s Playhouse + Keith Haring on acid. With his work, Scharf seamlessly integrates pop culture into fun and fluid forms. With his pop culture appeal, it’s no surprise that Scharf has been commissioned to do commercial work by companies such as Kiehl’s, Vans, and Swatch. While other artists might have a different viewpoint on commercial work, for Scharf, the opportunity to bring his playful forms into everyday products is of significant cultural value, “One very important and guiding principle to my work is to reach out beyond the elitist boundaries of fine art and connect to popular culture through my art,” Scharf writes in his artist statement.

Mike Leavitt’s Intuition Kitchen churns out a plethora of playful and multidimensional pieces. From portable homeless shelters to wedding cake toppers and DIY vending machines, his career in the creative world knows no boundaries and ignores all stigmas. He just grabs inspiration and goes for it. For instance, Leavitt pays homage to Christo by shaping his image from polymer clay, a staple at Michaels or any craft supply store. This, and other Art Army Action Figures, embrace a lovely contrast between materials and content in an loveable and pitch perfect manner. It’s not just cheap plastics imported from overseas factories, nor is it about elitism in the commercial art world, nor is it a rebellion against any of it. Each art star figurine is simply built from hand in a limited edition of 10 with a raw passion and appreciation for the entire spectrum.

Working in her studio in Sausalito, CA, sculptor Sophia Collier uses a combination of acrylic block and algebraic function (with a little help from a CNC router), to carve sculptures of wind. The clear, floating relief works look like freeze-frame slices of the water’s surface. She spends a great deal of time replicating the effects that both wind and light create on a large body of water using custom rendering software and sound recordings of the wind. Collier carefully mimics its movements and reactions with a series of digital “brushes” she has created, working to develop unique strings of information to carve out each piece. The sound waves move and fluctuate in the digital space just as they do in the physical realm—and the result is a crystallized portrait of the wind, giving the visual effect of sunlit water. She outlines her entire process here.

It’s Tuesday and time once again for our exclusive artist feature in partnership with premiere website building platform Made With Color. Each week we join forces to bring you some of the most exciting artists and designers working today who use Made With Color to create their clean and sleek websites. Made With Color doesn’t just help artists create gorgeous websites but allows them to do so in a few minutes without having to touch a line of code.This week we are excited to share the mysterious and surreal photographs of Roya Falahi.

Using the realism of large-format photography, Roya Falahi captures surreal imagery – finely crafted portraits, and narrative ‘tableaux’- that often explore disguise and veiling within the context of recent geopolitical events.  With an emphasis on self portraits, Falahi’s works are resonant with visual and psychological impact, layering multiple references to create new and complex connotations.

Informed by her Iranian-American heritage, popular culture and style, as well as hard-rock music, Falahi’s work comprises a compelling investigation into contemporary issues surrounding identity and culture.

Bae Sehwa’s steamed bentwood furniture ripples in airy and sinewy ways to curve around the human body. The precision in each piece is not accidental. It’s acutely planned. Sehwa digitally renders and manipulates geometric forms then returns to the actual physical form, steaming and bending the wood into a mold under a tight watch. The result is functional, organically smooth, and flawless.

According to R Gallery, “Bae Sehwa’s work is derived from the Korean concept of baesanimsu, meaning the back of the mountain and front of the water and he draws heavily from the profound connection to nature in traditional Korean theories of divination. The steam bent wooden frame of this lounge offers a narrative that includes both the tranquil, meditative qualities of flowing water and the strong, comforting silhouette of a mountain.”

Ballroom Luminoso is a wonderfully different kind of ballroom.  A series of six chandeliers by artists Joe O’Connell and Blessing Hancock hang under an overpass in San Antonio, Texas.  The chandeliers are constructed from recycled bicycle parts, structural steel, and custom LED fixtures.  Shadow patterns of bicycle sprockets paint the surrounding area alongside colorful light.  Accompanying the bicycle parts are carefully carved imagery referencing the areas Hispanic, agricultural, and ecological heritage.  The artist statement goes on to say:

“The medallions are a play on the iconography of La Loteria, which has become a touchstone of Hispanic culture. Utilizing traditional tropes like La Escalera (the Ladder), La Rosa (the Rose), and La Sandía (the Watermelon), the piece alludes to the neighborhood’s farming roots and horticultural achievements.”    [via]

Kevin Francis Gray’s neoclassicist-inspired sculptures are beautifully minimalist. Most of his work is created with leather, bronze, marble or fibreglass resin, depicting a stunning color palette of white, black, grey, brown, and gold. His subject is the human form and much of his work features shrouded figures. Gray attends to the detail and subtlety of the drapery that contain his figures, sometimes with a shocking element. His work exudes a familiarity and universality that is at once haunting and captivating.  His work recently appeared in 2012′s Snow White and the Huntsman as a darker version of the mirror man. Gray was born in Northern Ireland and currently lives in London

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Artist and designer Haley Ann Robinson has a passion for exploring shape, color, line and simple forms—something that translates well into her hand-shaped wooden objects. She treats some of the smooth, angular sides of each object with a vibrant selection of colors, designed to highlight specific visual planes and grain patterns in each piece. Robinson pulls a great deal of inspiration from geometry and nature, resulting in objects that display a playful engagement with shape, medium and surface.

Ceramicist Matt Wedel continues to make strong headway in the gallery world while maintaining an impressive creative autonomy in Athens, Ohio, where he builds, glazes, and fires each larger than life sculpture on his own terms . . . by himself . . . without assistants.

“Sheep’s Head,” his most recent exhibit at LA Louver, proves to be a wonderful example of what a little focus, patience, and isolation can create. Each cumbersome piece collects to convey a vibrantly glossy world: renderings of a twisted contemporary animal kingdom and its surrounding vegetation.

Of this particular series, David Pagel notes, “Cookie jars come to mind, as do centerpieces for fancy dinners, elaborate candle holders, ships’ figureheads and decorative figurines. So do works by Picasso, Botero and Baselitz, as well as ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan statuary, Cylcadic sculpture, Olmec totems and carved saints from medieval churches.”

From everyday objects to art history and human artifacts, Wedel’s healthy dose of contemporary dreaming bends the familiar into something imaginatively powerful. On view, we encounter angelic mutants who have been hardened over time, perhaps altered by a sorcerer’s wand or depicted to honor one final futuristic freeze. Likewise, while roaming the floor, we meet flora and fauna which structurally blooms in a childlike manner, but not without a bitter taste of science gone awry with color dripping and drooping.

Piece after piece, a creative storybook of bright possibility or dark youthful mystery unravels, and this is exactly why we strive to look deeper- it’s a hoping to engage not only with the work, but with our own innermost children.

Check out the video after the jump to see the artist at work and meet his 3-year-old inspiration.

Matt Wedel: Athens (2013) from L.A. Louver on Vimeo.

The work of artist Ted Lawson reveals a persistent interest in the human body.  Though his work is attractive to look at, or at least hard to pull away from, there is clearly a deeper fear being expressed.  His art investigates processes related to the physical body such as growth, its needs, its decay and death.  Really, these sculptures are physical representations of modern psychological concerns.  The tenuous relationship between the body and the mind has been a highly scrutinized theme throughout much of contemporary art.  Lawson’s work, though, has a way of striking an especially carnal chord.

César Biojo defines his work as the controlled result of multiple accidents; the coexistence of two opposites: creation and destruction. Biojo starts with the figurative— constructing a character—and when he feels it is perfect he destroys it with the abstraction of extra paint and spatula rips and drags. The result is a perfect imperfection: a focus on the fragility and ephemerality of the human existence that asks if we were perfect for a moment? And then reassures you yes… but that moment has passed.

Biojo’s process is also outlined in this short video: César Biojo • His Work

Superstition aside, these sculptures made from shards of mirrors were created by artist Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen.  If you look at the photographs carefully, in addition to the sculptures a person in a similar mirror-suit moves throughout the gallery.  The gallery also projects a video for this exhibit featuring  a person in this mirror-suit moving through commercial spaces in South East Asia and Denmark.  It is interesting noticing the virtually  universal nature of mannequins.  Rasmussen brings out that they allow us to imagine the way clothes will look on us, but on a deeper level we project what we want to be on them.  Similarly, these sculptures literally reflect those gazing at them.   [via]

Floating high above the sky Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale hot air balloon is a thing of wonder. Commissioned by The Centenary Of Canberra the massive flying sculpture that is a cross between a turtle, breasts and prehistoric fish will be making the rounds in Australia during 2013.

Here’s what creative director of the COC had to say about this project:

“Observing Canberra’s continuing love of the spectacle of hot air balloons , each autumn gracing the airspace over the national capital, I wanted to offer this highly visible ‘canvas’ to an Australian artist as a Centenary of Canberra commission. Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia’s most successful ‘sculptors’, her work seen in major collections in Australia, and a survey show broke all attendance records for the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery: she has had recent exhibitions in Nashville, Istanbul and London. Her highly imaginative work invites us every time to think about the human condition, and it was this relationship with the very concept of ‘life on Earth’ that made me think of her. Many special shape balloons have started to replicate characters or animals, but they are mostly caricatures and in the realm of kitsch, rather than art.

To my delight, Patricia was immediately responsive to the idea of her work in a new form, and insisted that it would not be a novelty, but a continuation of her ouevre and its years of investigation into the way life has evolved. This is exactly what the new work is, and we are so proud to have been able to find the resources to help this great artist make it happen. That Patricia was educated in Canberra, also makes this a celebration of the fine talent that the national capital has, and continues to produce.” (via)

Watch three fantastic videos with the artist in her studio as well as footage of the Skywhale in flight after the jump!

Wyatt Kahn’s wall sculptures are built from a series of stretcher panels and raw canvas beautifully pieced together to make one collaged structure. The crevices and peeking back wall help create compositional depth, captivating the eye, revealing clean and simple, yet geometrically intricate work, which is devoted to the complex juxtaposition of space more so than color.

Of Kahn’s art, Sam Cornish writes, “Broadly the type of illusion Kahn employs is one that comes after the reduction of minimalist painting. The flat, object quality of each part is in one sense simply accepted. There is no hint of the surface being broken, of a window open to an atmospheric or light filled space beyond (however shallow).”

Submergence, Oslo from squidsoup on Vimeo.

Submergence is the newest project from the artist collective known as Squidsoup.  Chains of multicolored LED lights – 8,064 lights to be exact – are carefully hung for the installation.  A colorful and immersive environment, Submergence is intended to be experienced from within the installation. The piece performs complex programmed patterns and is responsive to movement.  In fact the piece runs through a four parts to create a twenty minute movement-responsive piece.  Check out these four parts in the video after the jump.

When Brussels, Belgium based street artist Oli-B isn’t busy creating his fluid abstractions on the walls of europe he is working in the studio on a variety of personal and commercial collaborations. Starting as a traditional graffiti artist that dealt with the manipulation of typography, Oli-B has gradually transitioned from lettering to characters and finally to the present where the characters have evolved into amorphous shapes and colors that only hint at the presence of a figure with the occasional eye or mouth. (via)

Artist and designer Fabrice Le Nezet‘s series Measure precariously positions concrete blocks.  Using metal tubing, Le Nezet supports the concrete in way that makes the industrial materials seem nearly organic.  The brightly colored pipes cling to the concrete like webs.  His intention with the work was to make the materials and its weight easily felt.  He says:

“I worked here on a physical representation of the idea of measure. The objective was to ‘materialize’ tension in a sense, to make the notions of weight, distance and angle palpable…This work lies in the context of my search for purification around raw materials such as concrete and metal. This is why I played with simple shapes which catch light and transcend the volume structure.”

Jon Kessler’s installations respond to our current information-saturated culture where the search for the self often occurs within the realm of digital media. His most recent exhibition, “The Web“, immerses viewers in our technology obsessed world. Cameras and surveillance equipment abound, constantly capturing and clicking photos and videos of participants. The installation itself is a conceptual clusterfuck that suggests our importance of ritualistic clicking over what’s actually being captured with the clicks. His other work similarly addresses themes of capture, surveillance, fame, and mass media by using related techniques. These installations confuse us and ask us to consider the nature of reality and the authority we grant to technology and mass media with regard to our own identities.

Photographer Sohei Nishino creates unique maps to document memories more than geography.  An avid traveler, Sohei snaps countless photographs on his trips around the world.  By hand, he recreates the city from his many images as one large collage.  Not intended to be accurate representation, the ‘map’ is a record of the city as he experienced it.  He’s recorded trips to cities such as London, Paris, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Osaka, Berlin, and more.  To get an idea of the way the concept works check out the first two images – a ‘map’ of New York and details from the collage.

Reveling in the small, quiet corners of everyday life, Bay Area photographer Amanda Boe explores themes of isolation, curiosity and mise-en-scene in her strange, stunning work. When looking through images from her series Here and There, it’s easy to let your mind wander into each frame, gently prompted to think about time, place, and what it feels like to be “passing through.” The crisp simplicity of her work is charged with her natural sensibilities as a curious, highly-engaged observer—collecting visual treats as she moves through the world. Boe investigates the places in-between the larger moments of life, and reports back with work that is meditative, personal and poetic.

Chinn Wang creates an eye-catching brand of pop art.  Primarily working in screenprinting, she’s executed these piece directly on wood.  The work retains a charming flatness associated with screen printing while adding depth by printing on wood.  Her mix of new and old imagery and contrasting colors makes her art hard to pull away from.  Her Heraldry series is an excellent example.  Just as medieval heraldry made use of complex symbolism, Wang crests likewise make use of modern imagery.