In the ever-expanding pantheon of open-world video games where combat, survival, crafting, and anarchy reign, the simple idea of taking a virtual walk while chatting with a few friends might seem pointless. A new video game from Melbourne-based developer House House begs to differ, though, turning a casual stroll across dreamy landscapes into a uniquely collaborative game, where puzzles and the lengths required to solve them take center stage. Some areas of Big Walk render players speechless, forcing you to devise innovative ways to communicate. It might just be the antithesis of Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto.

This friendly, casual, and playful approach to game design may come as no surprise from the makers of the critically acclaimed Untitled Goose Game, which is centered entirely on a hapless goose that navigates everyday environments while avoiding the unwanted attention of nearby humans. “As much as Big Walk is a game about walking and talking, it’s also about exploring, and getting lost, and doing challenges, and sometimes, not really doing anything at all,” shares a game trailer.

You can play this “cooperative online walker-talker” on Steam, Switch 2, and PlayStation 5 beginning August 4.

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The Colombian artist Delcy Morelos describes her hometown of Tierralta as “a paradise full of butterflies and unpaved streets.” In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Morelos spent her days in her grandmother’s garden, running barefoot and gleaning what it meant to live in connection with the land. When paramilitary and guerrilla troops moved in, though, the region was plunged into a chaotic state of grief and fear.

In her earliest works, Morelos translated the death and destruction plaguing her home into two-dimensional compositions. As she details in a new segment for Art21, acrylic painting was not long her primary mode of working, and quickly, she returned to the earth, incorporating soil, straw, and grass into large-scale installations. The film follows the artist as she installs a sepulchral mound in Seville’s Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, a former Carthusian monastery turned art museum that once housed Christopher Columbus’ remains.

Throughout the film, we witness Morelos grab gobs of straw-laden soil and affix the chunky material to a standing structure, which eventually grows a range of produce native to both sides of the Atlantic. In contrast to the space’s colonial ties, the artist’s work presents a way of creating and living that’s entwined in natural rhythms. Visitors are greeted by notes of cinnamon, cloves, and fecund soil before being enveloped by towering walls of growth. Within the vaulted monastery, Morelos’ indomitable forms offer a direct tie to the sacred and divine right beneath our feet.

“Many people believe they are in a bubble, and that is why they can do things that harm nature, harm others, and also harm themselves,” she says, demonstrating a profound sense of care for and connection to all that gives life.

This segment is part of Art21’s Human Nature episode and is available to watch on its site. Find additional films on YouTube.

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As collector Jochen Raiß (1969-2022) scoured flea markets and antique stalls for the better part of three decades for snapshots, he began to notice a running theme. Over time, he amassed a trove of photos by anonymous photographers with an unusually high number of portraits of women posing in trees. Swiss newspaper Züricher Tagesanzeiger asked, “What are they all doing up there?” And German paper Der Spiegel posited that the arbor-climbing might be a “forgotten popular sport.” Whatever the reason, the mystery is nearly as fun as the photos.

A hardcover edition of Women in Trees from Hatje Cantz, published in German and English, follows two titles published in 2016 and 2017 that celebrate these quirky images. Find your copy on the publisher’s website.

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“Matter is memory, and memory is a medium,” says artist Annalise Neil, whose surreal cyanotypes brim with animals, fungi, geological specimens, shells, and more that she augments with watercolor. Recently, the artist has been adding rich, earthy tones with natural dyes such as wild strawberry leaf, oak gall, loquat leaf, and chestnut. She has used botanical teas to shift the natural blue color of the cyanotypes for quite a while, but the sepia tonality has emerged as a larger focus lately, which allows her to layer hues like browns and purples.

Neil’s experiences in nature profoundly influence her individual pieces in a process that she poetically describes as “melting, rolling, pinching, sanding, walking across meadows, cheek on sun-warmed boulders.” This year, she’s a resident artist at Volcan Mountain Foundation in Julian, California, which merges artistic and scientific inquiry. “I endeavor to create work that will lead to contemplation and reflection and that invites a thoughtful examination of our relationship to reality and our surroundings,” she says.

“For my site-specific work, I begin by hiking for many days and photographing intriguing things I find, including birds and mammals, plants, geological forms, and insects,” she says. “As I photograph specimens in wild and cultivated spaces, I capture a brief version of their existence that I transmute into a negative and then into a cyanotype.” The images are then supported on hand-carved wooden panels.

Neil’s work is currently on view in Fast Forward: Analog Photography as a Third Space at the Los Angeles Center for Photography and Sanguine Glimmers at Hey Books! in San Diego, among others. See more and follow updates on the artist’s Instagram.

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Known for his vibrant palettes and flattened perspectives, Belgian artist Kristof Santy translates common sights and everyday objects into vivid tableaux. His paintings often highlight fruit and vegetables, tabletops, and modes of transportation, particularly those involved in industrial labor.

A new body of work continues Santy’s inquiries into the mundane, this time extending into fashions and furnishings. There’s a striped sweater vest with a nearly imperceptible wrinkle hanging from a rod and a modernist chair in fuchsia pushed against a kelly green wall. Earlier investigations appear, too, including a short, roll-up ladder dangling from the door of a helicopter as it hovers in the air sans operator.

This new body of work will be on view this fall at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels. Until then, find more of Santy’s work on Instagram.

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When we think of tarot cards, there’s a standout that probably pops to mind right away: the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. It was illustrated by British occultist and artist Pamela Coleman Smith, and more than 100 years after its publication, it remains the most widely used deck by readers. But the cards are far from being the first. Later this month, The Morgan Library & Museum presents Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions, which delves into this centuries-old tradition of divination.

The exhibition celebrates some of the earliest examples alongside modern artists’ versions. Three surviving decks from the 15th century, commissioned by the Dukes of Milan, tap into the lively Italian court culture that produced the cards, plus how the imagery evolved and laid the groundwork for fortune-telling practices.

A complementary display emphasizes how artists throughout the 20th century reimagined the imagery, including Smith’s iconic deck from 1909, plus iterations by Surrealists André Breton, Victor Brauner, and Remedios Varo. The connection isn’t coincidental; Leonora Carrington devised a gilded deck in the 1950s, and Salvador Dalí also contributed his own version.

Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions highlights how artists have turned to the practice to explore what the museum describes as “an alternative to the strictures of modernist aesthetics, allowing them to explore other universes and imaginative possibilities.” The show is accompanied by a catalog, which you can order from The Morgan’s shop. See the exhibition from June 26 through October 4 in New York.

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As Brendon Burton continues to pursue the strange corners of rural North America, the Portland-based photographer has discovered a newfound interest in the people who once inhabited them.

No longer entirely devoid of human figures, his isolated landscapes step into the walls of abandoned homes and provide a setting for enigmatic narratives. Burton’s quiet introduction to life through the presence of domestic, intimate objects allows the viewer to piece together a speculative story about their previous owners.

From a pair of worn boots and aged portraits to a patterned quilt resting upon a bed that was once made for the last time, photography introduces an element of permanence, preserving existence while original context has long faded away.

Burton has turned to direction and video of late, working on five music videos slated to release within the next few months. He has also published a second edition of his book, Epitaph, which you can pick up on his website. Follow Burton on Instagram to tag along on his travels and adventures.

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From the beaded phrases of Jeffrey Gibson’s sculptural weavings to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s canoe series to Raven Halfmoon’s fingerprint-textured tributes, a new exhibition marks the largest presentation of American Indigenous work in the U.K. to date.

Opening next week, Hold to This Earth at Yorkshire Sculpture Park features nearly 70 pieces by 38 artists, which in turn represent 35 Tribal Nations. “(The artists) reference and honour ancestral knowledge whilst being steadfastly contemporary, asserting a powerful presence and countering narratives of erasure that too often position Indigenous cultures only in terms of the past,” says a statement from Tia Collection, from which the pieces are drawn.

Colossal readers will recognize works by Cannupa Hanska Luger, Dyani White Hawk, Nicholas Galanin, and more. The range of media highlights the diverse materials and approaches that Indigenous contemporary artists use and nods to cultural traditions, heritage crafts, and precious landscapes while also considering socio-economic issues, visibility and representation, and technology.

“Materials such as clay, hide, wool, beads, and natural pigments become carriers of powerful stories, memory, and tradition, rooted in connection to the earth,” says Tia Collection. “Newer modes of expression and understanding growing out of digital culture also speak to the shifting landscapes of Indigenous life in the 21st century.”

Hold to This Earth opens on June 13 and continues through April 18, 2027, in Wakefield. Keep up with exhibitions featuring works from the Tia Collection on Instagram.

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“There was a moment when I was walking between forests and mountains in Tepoztlán, Mexico, while dandelions floated across my face,” Alexis Mata says. “In that instant, I experienced a strange sensation, as if I were standing on another planet, in another time, confronted with an entirely new landscape.”

As the dainty seeds drifted through the air, Mata began to think about the ways life forms travel and embed themselves in new ecosystems. He was drawn to the idea of landing, of rooting and growing, which quickly became the basis for a poetic exhibition at Thinkspace in Los Angeles.

Titled Lost Landing, the show features Mata’s glitched landscapes in which familiar terrain appears otherworldly. Plants, skies, and stones slide into a sort of visual glissando, overlapping and converging in abstracted forms. “Landing functions as a metaphor for discovery, but also for reconnecting with the creative impulse and with the capacity for wonder,” the artist adds.

Dandelions gone to seed appear in several works, alongside cacti of various sizes and shapes. Thriving succulents that can live for centuries are contrasted with the dying flowers, collapsing time in an already surreal and fantastical geographic plane.

The exhibition “ultimately proposes a space where forms seem to mutate, drift, and slowly colonize their surroundings,” the artist says. “Each piece functions as the trace of an unknown landscape, a fragment of an expanding world where ideas disperse, float, and find new ways to grow.”

Lost Landing is on view through June 27. Explore more of Mata’s works on Instagram.

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“Ice burns, and it is hard for the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost,” wrote A.S. Byatt in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami characterizes ice in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman as a capsule that preserves the past “cleanly and clearly,” but possesses no future. In the ephemeral performance “MIZU,” frozen water takes on the form of a woman in an enchanting and emotive meditation on memory, time, and impermanence.

“MIZU” is the brainchild of puppeteer and director Élise Vigneron’s Théâtre de L’entrouvert and Companie Furankaï, which encompasses the work of choreographer and circus artist Satchie Noro. The composition highlights the fragility of our existence, the necessity of water, and “the passage from form to formlessness, from individual to cosmos,” Vigneron says.

The human body is around 60 percent water; the earth is covered by more than 70 percent. In “MIZU,” the title of which is named for the Japanese word for water (水), the human-size puppet double can be interpreted simultaneously as a unique individual and the dancer’s twin, with whom she communes and watches gradually disappear. “The melting of the ice reveals the nature of the double,” Noro says in a poetic statement. “The reflection slips away before I can escape it / After the ice, there is another material / A framework to explore / Dancing to find oneself again.”

The setting for the performance combines Noro’s interest in unique architectural apparatuses and environments outside of the traditional theater and Vigneron’s explorations of puppetry and creating forms with ice. Puppeteer Sarah Lascar controls the figure from the side and sometimes joins the dance to create a trio as is immersed in water.

“Mizu” is slated for performances throughout the summer at festivals and venues throughout Europe. Learn more on the production’s website. You might also enjoy revisiting Néle Azevedo’s “Minimum Monument.”

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