Sure, we all want love, but what lengths would you go to find it? Swedish animator Anna Mantzaris once again captures the gamut of human emotion in a stop-motion film that plunges headfirst into the pitiful and cringy. As its title suggests, “PLEASE” is about wanting and attempting to find love through increasingly unhinged acts of desperation and neediness. Mantzaris’ signature felt characters light fires for marriage proposals, sob in the chip aisle, and hug puppies while waiting for the train.

The writer and director tells Creative Boom that she got the idea for the short film during the early days of the pandemic, when most people were trapped at home. “We became more obsessed with our self-image because we saw ourselves on screens in Zoom calls all day. We spent a lot of time looking at ourselves while feeling disconnected from other people,” she says. “I wanted the characters to try to break out of this bubble, to reach out, to show their longing, but in a not-so-perfect way.”

“PLEASE” is the latest addition to Mantzaris’ growing collection of dark comedies, although this film also counts Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, who just this year was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Sentimental Value, among its cast. Presented through a series of vignettes, the felted puppets weave in and out of the animation, and we witness their most heated and pathetic moments.

“I’m interested in the difference between what we show the world and what we actually feel,” she adds. “Presenting the ‘ugly’ feelings through the puppets makes us feel seen. They get to do it for us, so we feel we’re not alone.”

The short film is currently making the rounds on the festival circuit, although a wider release is in the works, too. Watch the trailer on YouTube, and find additional clips—including the dating profile of a particularly discouraged 21-year-old—on Instagram.

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Known for his painstakingly intricate mixed-media sculptures, Canadian artist Chris Millar continues to test the bounds of scale and detail. Two recent works epitomize his ongoing explorations: “A Prize Every Time” and “Loom Beneath the Loam,” the latter of which contains eight tiny paintings, two relief sculptures, and numerous sculptural elements attached to a brass frame. Cartoonish pendants, vignettes with faces, branch-like tendrils and more lend the piece an enigmatic contraption-like quality, as if the pull of a hidden lever will send the entire thing into motion.

In a departure from his multimedia pieces, “A Prize Every Time” is a meticulously rendered acrylic painting containing some 90 portraits of notable figures from Alberta who populate a map of the province, where the artist originally hails from. It has the look of a tourism map merged with a look-and-find book.

“To an American audience, a lot of the Alberta-centric easter eggs will go over their heads, but even if they don’t know about Alberta’s history or geography, it’s a pretty fun painting to look at!” Millar says. You may recognize a few famous individuals, such as Michael J. Fox and Joni Mitchell, both of whom were born there.

See more on Millar’s Instagram.

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Across an expansive lawn at Minneapolis’ Boom Island Park earlier this month, Franco-Swiss artist Saype painted a monumental public artwork directly onto the grass. Part of his Beyond Walls series, which has so far seen 22 iterations around the world, the piece marked the first time the project appeared in the U.S.

Minneapolis found itself in the global spotlight earlier this year when ICE descended on the city and spurred several weeks of turmoil, protests, and violence. Especially tragic were the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti during interactions with agents. The city is no stranger to the ripple effects of police brutality, especially in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the subsequent surge in Black Lives Matter protests around the world.

What Minneapolis also has in spades is a deeply felt sense of community. It’s the sort of place where neighbors help to shovel each other’s sidewalks and find innovative ways to support one another. A recent study by State of the Nation ranked Minnesota number one in the U.S. for quality of life.

“I found an incredible humanity in Minneapolis—in the welcome of its people, their stories, their kindness. I’m deeply grateful for that,” Saype says. “And this is the power of art: to bring people together. I hope this work will make people dream—here and far beyond.”

Saype’s 310-by-75-foot ground mural stretches across the entire width of the park. It sits adjacent to the Mississippi River, which the Indigenous Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) people treat as sacred and call Misi-ziibi, or “Giant River.” The painting, created with a biodegradable medium the artist has developed over time, is designed to gradually fade as the elements and occasional mowing run their course.

During the first weekend in June, hundreds of residents turned out to see the work in progress and link together in a human chain to demonstrate solidarity, resilience, and togetherness. An official print edition of the completed work is available for purchase on Saype’s site, and proceeds support additional murals. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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Alternating between felted wool, crochet, and embroidery, Holly Guertin summons moments of peace and reflection through nature. Lifelike lambs serenely nod off or stand in front of ornate backgrounds, while vignettes of foliage and flourishes incorporate colorful fiber. In her practice, the artist seeks connections between patterns and adornments and flora and fauna. “The brilliant color work in a hummingbird’s feathers, the spots on a pufferfish, even the stripes in a blade of grass are all ordinary moments of spectacular ornament,” she says.

Some of these pieces will be on view in the artist’s solo exhibition Hand in Hand at Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, North Carolina, which runs from July 6 to October 10. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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Albert Einstein once said that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” For Dr. Elliot McGucken, the sublime enigmas of nature form the basis of his explorations of landscape and light.

McGucken traverses North America’s most beautiful and striking terrain, including Death Valley where he captured a wildflower superbloom earlier this year. He revels in all kinds of natural phenomena, from the vicissitudes of the Rocky Mountains to brown bears fishing in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve to the ghostly, flood-carved walls of Antelope Canyon. He also happens to be a physicist whose research focuses on an artificial retina prosthesis that can help restore sight to those who are blind.

Although photography and physics may seem at first blush to be a world apart, they intersect in many ways, especially through the use of advanced lenses that manipulate light to create images. In this way, McGucken channels a limitless fascination with perception and seeing in which scientific inquiry drives his photography as much as the aesthetic and technical qualities of the medium. He’s also really into Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics, and that’s where an ongoing series called Spacetime Light Cone Sculptures dx4/dt=ic comes in.

McGucken delves specifically into the study of the fourth dimension, drawing on Einstein’s 1922 book The Meaning of Relativity, in which the renowned scientist illustrated a “light cone” that represented “the deep, physical relationship between space, time, and the velocity of light,” McGucken says. This almost hourglass-like shape, with two cones that meet at their tips, forms the basis of Spacetime Light Cone Sculptures dx4/dt=ic.

McGucken describes the works as “sculptures upon nature’s exalted easel,” utilizing contemporary technology to illuminate theories of existence and the cosmos. He sends a drone into the air over dramatic and remote Southwest landscapes to capture long exposures of conical spirals of light. Over the years, he’s visited the Trona Pinnacles in the California Desert Conservation Area and the Mobius Arch rock formation in the Alabama Hills, among other places.

See more on the artist’s Instagram and purchase prints on his website. You might also enjoy Rueben Wu’s glowing light paintings.

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To open a new film from Art21, artist Lenka Clayton encapsulates her way of thinking and making: “Looking at things that are supposed to behave a certain way and purposefully misunderstanding how they should be used, it’s really important to me,” she says.

The Cornwall-born artist works across media, creating both meditative animations via typewriter and immersive installations of gathered artifacts. Collecting is central to Clayton’s practice both materially and conceptually, and she often works from her own experiences, particularly those around becoming a parent and her life in Pittsburgh (she even started an open-source residency program for artist mothers).

In the short documentary, we see Clayton’s culinary installation of colorful tongs hung in a grid on her studio wall alongside a project completed when her son was a baby. Each time she retrieved a spool of thread, button, acorn, bottle cap, or myriad other object from her child’s mouth, she documented the tiny finding and created an enormous, photographic grid that speaks to the care required to protect young life.

“There is only connection in life,” she says, “and my work is just looking at those connections, so that we can create a shared experience.”

This segment is part of Art21’s Human Nature episode, alongside Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, and both are available for viewing on Art21’s website. Find more from Clayton on Instagram.

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When we think of traveling circuses, the “big top” tent likely springs to mind with its acrobats, clowns, tightrope walkers, and other entertainers and pageantry. Sometimes the traditions are controversial, such as the use of elephants and lions for performances. But visions of bedazzled animals or the swinging trapeze are nevertheless etched in our collective memory.

In the former U.S.S.R., the tradition took on a whole new meaning. Circuses had been nationalized in 1919, a few years before the Soviet Union was formed. Along with theater, opera, and music, the genre was also co-opted by the socialist government as a propaganda machine, turning family-friendly entertainment into a channel for Communist Party ideological messages. And with its enormous popularity, venues were in demand.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, the U.S.S.R. commissioned dozens of arenas across the nation, conceived as year-round event venues. Their strikingly geometric, brutalist designs are eye-catching and modern, reflecting the government’s fixation on expressing its power and technological progress. In the 1960s, the Space Race exemplified the Soviet Union’s critical role on the world stage. Arena architecture was yet another way to demonstrate the nation’s might, even occasionally resembling flying saucers.

Cirk, a new book from David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka of Zupagrafika, highlights the wide range of permanent circuses still standing around Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and further afield. “These arenas combined socialist modernism, experimental engineering, and choreographed spectacle,” the publisher says, adding: “Together, they reveal a lesser-known chapter of postwar modernist architecture shaped by ideology and mass entertainment.”

One of Cirk‘s more playful features is a series of pop-out paper models of actual buildings including state circus buildings in Bishkek, Chișinău, Dnipro, Moscow, and Tashkent. Find your copy on Zupagrafika’s website.

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Thousands of handmade ceramic tiles nest together like a puzzle on the facade of the Torre San Luis hotel in Guadalajara, Mexico. Abstract shapes evocative of a lush garden ecosystem burst across the outdoor wall in a collaboration between Alex Proba and the artisans of Cerámica Suro.

Titled “Shape of Movement,” the large-scale public work melds Proba’s organic visual language with a color palette that reflects the local environment. Earthy neutrals, alongside dusty pinks and blues, mimic the sun-drenched landscape, while the dynamic forms appear as if they’re mid-motion.

“The work is about the movement we carry through spaces every day,” Proba shares. “I wanted the mural to feel as if the shapes are interacting with one another and flowing through the architecture itself.”

This is the second collaboration between Proba and Cerámica Suro, following a vibrant swimming pool installation at a Miami home. Find more from both the artist and the studio on Instagram.

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Whether it’s a large-scale wallpaper reproduction of Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” or pages of deconstructed Artforum magazines, David Daigle’s detailed punch-cut compositions delve into the material and conceptual possibilities of layers, depth, and what is revealed or concealed.

Daigle’s forthcoming exhibition, The Death of Beauty at Track 16, investigates intersections of identity, consumer culture, and desire through a kind of sedimentary approach to commercial imagery, which he excavates with precise holes each revealing tiny tableaux. This method of décollage, which involves building up the surface and then removing elements, literally peels away the meanings and intentions behind contemporary visual culture.

“The Birth of Venus” serves as the foundational composition for Daigle’s “The Death of Venus,” which has been completely overwhelmed by the artist’s hole-punched interventions. Tiny vignettes of people, things, and colorful dots completely erase and replace the titular figure. The masterpiece of 15th-century art has been reduced to an inexpensive, mass-market object for home decor and is further disarticulated by a sea of anonymous eyes and mouths. What could be more symbolic of our era of ultra consumerism?

Daigle digs into a wide array of photographs and printed media, from bus shelter advertisements to a panoramic photograph of Gaza taken around 2020, in which almost all of the buildings have been subsumed under the cratered surface. It’s symbolic of the real devastation the city has experienced since the war began in late 2023. In a broader sense, the artist’s works reveal something akin to a visualization of the media’s often obscured undercurrent.

“I am interested in sublimating technical images designed to generate desire,” the artist says. “Through the subversive act of perforation, I search for the meanings trapped behind them. I want to see past the imagery, through the photograph itself, and ask whether media can become so untruthful that it ultimately consumes both itself and us.”

The Death of Beauty opens on July 18 and continues through September 5 in East Hollywood. In the meantime, explore more on the artist’s Instagram.

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For Willie Cole, the convergence of material and concept is as important as emotional and even spiritual links to history. Whether repurposing salvaged musical instruments, creating enigmatic visages from stacked stilettos, or arranging hundreds of single-use plastic bottles across a surface, his imaginative sculptural assemblages tap into a range of global traditions, eras, and social and environmental issues.

Cole explores our associations with physical objects by removing them from the context within which we’re accustomed to encountering them. Time-honored African masking traditions and figurative sculptures made of high heels meet modern symbols of labor and culture, such as repeated ironing board motifs or a handful of saxophones that have been reimagined as a bird.

Mind, Body, and Soul, Cole’s current solo exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters, combines new works with pieces made throughout the past couple of decades. The selection emphasizes the artist’s interest in reframing and enriching everyday objects into assemblages of cultural significance.

“His practice transcends specific media or subject matter, moving fluidly across genres and iconographies to explore history, consumerism, and environmentalism,” the gallery says. In the era of fast fashion, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and an accelerating climate crisis, consumable and disposable objects contrast how we value our history and customs.

Mind, Body, and Soul continues through July 10 in New York. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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