A core tenet of human culture is connection: to each other, to the Earth, and to the unknown. These colossal themes of culture are visually compressed in the vivid and mind-bending works of Brooklyn-based California artist Matthew Day Jackson. Utilizing a long list of materials that speak to nature, human culture, and death, Jackson collages an alchemical process combining silk-screen, resin, bronze, lead and more to compose extraordinary landscapes, still lifes, portraits and abstracts. By combining toxic man-made materials with imagery from national parks and flower arrangements, his art collapses life and death onto a single plane. There, they contend with American exceptionalism declared by a cleansed history of beauty, technology, and warfare. Working to dispel these myths, Jackson pools and scrapes lead on stainless steel to then be brushed, painted, and stained, generating similar tones and glows of precious stones or mountains in a fading sunset. At once a wry tribute to art history’s great male artists and a nod to impending climate change, his compositions reverberate between astonishment and alarm, a place the artist has deemed the “horriful,” where beauty and horror exist simultaneously.
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Coney Island Series
Melbourne artist Mark Ogge lives and works in an old church in Clunes, in country Victoria. He was the first artist commissioned by Spiegelworld, creating an entrance archway mural in 2006. Mark has long been fascinated by the iconography of the circus and fairground, exploring the dichotomy between enchantment and disillusionment.
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Absinthe Under The Brooklyn Bridge
The unpredictability of Steve Horlock’s paintings may come from his pervasive curiosity about life; or perhapshis ten-years experience body painting; possibly his fascination with mythology and the complexities of the world. Whichever it may be, this self-taught Las Vegas artist knows no bounds when it comes to painting ideas:whether inspired by Vegas’ historic Miss Atomic […]
