Mark Essen

Work from all-games.

“Game designer and artist Mark Essen started producing games for Adult Swim, and boy, are they cool. Take Pipedreamz, which features a hungry ghost who must secretly binge on meat in order to advance to the next level, which involves surfing for condiments like ketchup and relish. Or the comically masculine Turbo Turbo Turbo, where you smash into cars, win bar fights, and drink to gain points. Or Cream Wolf, where you play an ice cream truck driver/werewolf who must collect cones, feed kids and avoid cops. Every so often the game slips into a nighttime world, where the aim is to lure customers back to your lair with dreamy music. The games are a testament to Essen’s genius and unique sense of humor, so check them out!” – Rhizome

Bas Princen

Work from Refuge.

“Bas Princen brings together five cities from a region which over the past fifty years has experienced dramatic development. The five cities portrayed are Istanbul, Beirut, Amman, Cairo and Dubai. The images of Princen constitute architectural research and visual poetry at the same time. This survey has been commissioned and produced as part of the collaborative research platform diwan, initiated and curated by Philipp Misselwitz and Can Altay. Diwan brings together artists as well as leading academics, practitioners and experts from the field of architecture and urban studies in Turkey and the Middle East.” – via Refuge

Tatiana Grigorenko

Work from The Disappeared.

“an anti-portrait of a missing protagonist. inspired by soviet-era images that were manipulated to make individuals ‘disappear’ from history. the project is an exploration of memory, presence, invisibility and historical revision. blowing up my family’s snapshots to the point that their grain structure started to fall apart, i meticulously removed myself from each image using collage and/or paint.” – Tatiana Grigorenko

via i heart photograph.

Duncan Malashock

Work from his oeuvre.

“I’m interested in our relationship with technology, specifically within the context of the Internet as a day-to-day activity, and in light of the history of the use of technology as a way of representing ideals. I make analog videos that are concerned with the history of creative technology, and in exploring what I understand as the ideals of early computer art. I also make interactive websites as public artwork, and that work emphasizes exploring interaction and simulations as their own media. Lately I’ve also started making sculptural pieces using projections, either from laser light or digital projector, which explore both of these sets of ideas, with a focus on the interaction between the ”immaterial” content and physical spaces and objects.” – Duncan Malashock

Carlee Fernandez

Work from Man.

“…In her newest work entitled “Man,” Fernandez probes the power, aggressiveness, and macho beauty of the men who have been influential in her life and her art-making through contemporary self-portraiture. By juxtaposing her body next to or entwined with images of masculinity through photographs, video, and sculpture, the work is her dark reconciliation with her envy of “man.”” – Platform Gallery

Steven Brahms

Work from The Survival Project.

“Over the past year and a half I have been engaged in an investigation of contemporary man’s relationship with nature and himself, and how acts of imagination are tools for remembering our forgotten knowledge.” – Steven Brahms

“Each image is a demonstration, an investigation, an experiment of skills and techniques to be used in the event of a catastrophe. The images are the physical accounts of interior journeys. Together they create the document: a guide, which in turn transforms the viewer into another participant.” – Steven Brahms via Shane Lavalette.

Caroline Heider

Work from her oeuvre.

Caroline Heider bases her work on existing pictures, on a public world of images which is conveyed in magazines, for example. Media-related images are a reality of their own and have their reflexive effect on the world. The artist’s interests focus on this process and the social and cultural context of the pictures. In particular, she examines the question of how pictures function in the context of artistic production. Caroline Heider adopts strange pictures for her works, she removes them from their contexts and reproduces and processes them.

A decisive »trick« in this process is the fact that she folds them: in contrast with the method of collage, combining parts of cut-out pictures, the area of folded pictures remains in principle intact – as deliberate action the fold creates a two-dimensional picture body, in whose »shadow« parts of the picture still exist, even though they are hidden. Often, pictures of fragmented (women’s) bodies are created in this way, while the social meaning of the (fashion)accessories coding the body within society are highlighted. In the case of the »Pelzchen«- series showcased in the exhibition, Elfie Semotan’s models are derived from a printed catalogue of the Liska fur shop. The caption says Elfi-Semotan-Series, referring to the grande dame of Austrian (fashion) photography. Elfi Semotan got the idea for this advertisement through a volume of paintings in which she saw works by Raphael. The poses of the advertising catalogue are based on the painterly model. Thus the line between art and advertisement is not clear in Semotan’s work, in contrast to Heider’s.” – Rainer Iglar