music art film review – REDEFINE magazine

Art

Multi-disciplinary, mixed media arts journalism with a focus on psychedelic, surreal, and experimental photography, painting, collage, etc.

I discovered the work of Belgian artist Arn Gyssels years ago, thanks to Flickr. At that point, he seemed like he was just beginning to hone in on a tripped out collage style full of decay, glitches, and geometries, and I was instantly captivated. Now, on May 25th, 2012, Gyssels has a solo show in Antwerp, at the H.O.T.F.O.X gallery. Binary Fluidity will showcase “a series of contrasting fluidic forms that are believed to represent, within our own streams of consciousness, certain aspects of reality. It is exactly this content of experience and discovery in all its simplicity that will give the observer a visual tour on the border of an ectoplasmic experience.”

Gyssels has come a long way in defining his style, and in working his worldview more and more into his visual style. Below is a short Q&A — just an introductory preview of the artist before a more in-depth collaborative feature with Gyssels and his girlfriend, Line Oshin.

 


(R) “This is one of the creatures that came out of putting black and white acrylic paint on a paper, scanning it in, and mirroring it from one side. You can see some form of underwater intelligent entity.”

 

“Love and light. Everything should be treated with the utmost respect and understanding.”

 

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Binary Fluidity: A Short Interview With Belgium Artist Arn Gyssels
Though the relationship between sound and moving images is certainly easy to define, the relationship between sound and non-moving art is much more understated, for obvious reasons. Russian photographer Stansislav Markov is the first to work with REDEFINE in an audio-visual experiment of highlighting the musical inspiration that strikes one’s soul just as powerfully as visual cues might.

After Markov’s minimal photographic compositions were used on an album cover for Jesu, they caught my attention for how well they paired with Jesu’s music. I immediately began to wonder what type of musical cloud Markov lives in, as his photographic works are characterized by shadow, haze, and muted color palettes. They are rich and decadent in the most elegant and minimal sense, and I soon discovered that Markov’s musical tastes follow some of the same underlying tendencies as his photography.

Below is a 43-minute mixtape created by Markov. It contains mostly lush, minimal electronic sounds that are to be paired wit fifteen of what he describes as his “most significant images” of the moment. Listen to the mix while focusing on his Markov’s images, to gain a better understanding into his mindset and to be swept into the moment of creation.

 

DOWNLOAD MP3

 

TRACKLISTING

Married In Berdichev – Light Comes
Vektroid – Wildlife Diskette
Geotic – The Logs Burn Slower Here
Silence Set – So Will Everything We Love
Bnjmn – One Sea (Lukid Remix)
Jonsi and Alex – Howl
Another Electronic Musician – Green And Olive
Our Sleepless Forest – White Bird
Hammock – North

 

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Stanislav Markov: A Lush Photographic Universe Presented As Sound
Art expertly captured in the most fleeting of moments. European artists Berndnaut Smilde and Ryan Hopkinson manufacture weather for some truly awesome temporary installations.

 

Berndnaut Smilde

Hanging high up in the skies above us, we often forget that clouds are real things made out of materials and circumstances that are very much present in our daily lives. In his Nimbus series, Netherlands artist Berndnaut Smilde regulates temperatures and moisture in rooms to trap cloudy bodies within their walls. Truly a rare and appreciated sight and concept. You can see more unconventional works of art on his website.

 

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Temporary Colors By Brice Bischoff + Clouded Rooms by Berndnaut Smilde and Ryan Hopkinson
Coinciding with bright spring threads come a fascination with brightly-colored, geometrically-minded embroidered works! In this post, we examine works from artists who painstakingly thread through paper to vastly different ends.

 

Shaun Kardinal

This year, Seattle’s Shaun Kardinal has taken a bold leap from minimally embroidered postcards to more involved pieces set upon multi-layered collages. By reconstituting rare pages from 1950s LIFE magazines, Kardinal explains what he calls “a long-time fascination with radial compositions and mandalas” in his Connotations. Expect a joint interview between him and Erin Frost within the month.

 

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Embroidered Works: Shaun Kardinal, Erin Frost, Stacey Page, Jose Romussi, Peter Crawley

The dream-like figure paintings of Norwegian artist Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen have been so striking to me that the above image has been my Facebook profile picture for the past half year, at least. Uldalen’s blue-tinged characters may be shaded like ghostly apparitions or bloodlet cadavers, but the weightlessness and lightness of spirit they possess seem to define serenity, even as they are being whisked off of buildings and freefalling in impossible positions.

As Uldalen was born only in 1986, it seems fair to say that these oil paintings are only the beginnings of a whimsical artistic career.

 

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Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen‘s Characters Float In Dreamy Atmospheres


VOLCANIC REMNANT, MAELIFELLSANDUR, ICELAND
Bright green moss has colonized a hill in the middle of Maelifellsandur, a black desert of lava and volcanic ash in Iceland. The hill is all what remains of a once active cinder cone, ground down by ice of the nearby retreating Maelifell glacier.

 

Bernhard Edmaier is an aerial photographer living in a small village in Germany, but his photography takes him to exquisite corners of the world, where his interest in natural phenoma thrives. There and beyond, he documents the colors and patterns of the Earth’s surface that are astounding, mind-blowing, and full of grandeur. All of the images below are paired with geologic explanations from his website — where you can see more photos.

(via butitdoesfloat)


PAINTED HILLS, OREGON, USA
There have been volcanoes in the Oregon area for 30 Million years ago, blasting huge amounts of ash into the sky. Winds and rivers carried the ash to where the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument now lies. This volcanic ash built up, layer after layer, continually burying the marshes and forests that flourished in the moist and warm tropical climate of the period. The heavy stroms that rain down here today carve gullies into the soft layers of ash and, over time, have created the striped landscape of Painted Hills. The yellow and red layers owe their colour to eroded volcanic materials, while the dark blurry flecks are the remains of dead vegetation.

 

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Bernhard Edmaier‘s Aerial Photography Is Out Of This World…

“There are ongoing themes in my art that involve the clash of technology with the natural world as well as my own human guilt for being a part of that encroachment by default.”

With variation in degrees of shading and texture, the black and white watercolor and graphite pieces by Ottawa’s Nimit Malavia seem to be caught in varying degrees of completion. The epic 26 Point Stag, above, seems like a page out of Greek mythology or a fantasy novel, while Arranged, below, bleeds and combines geometries like a page out of a manga or graphic novel.

These pieces are showing now at Spoke Art (816 Sutter Street, San Francisco), through April 28th, 2012.

See more colorful and poetically romantic images, such as the ones on the bottom of this post, on her website, along with more black and white whimsies.

 

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Nimit Malavia Finds Togetherness Through Black And White Linework

UK musicians Amplifier are offering an insane limited edition treatment for their album, The Octopus, complete with silver cover made of KEVLAR, an animation, and a three-disc box set. Limited to 750 copies, below is a sampling of some associated graphics, created by artist Goni Montes. Watch as a male character gets swallowed up in a burst, an infinity symbol, and an octopus — which, as a spirit animal, traditionally symbolizes the infinite. Incredible!

 

Says Goni of the project: “Sel [Balamir of Amplifier’s plan was to create a sequence of paintings inspired by fractal imagery. The process was exciting as Sel gave me this one solid starting point then urged me to run with any possible inspiration that came of it. Like walking a dog to the park and taking the leash off, I went crazy.”

Below, the full fractal sequence, followed by initial sketches and links where you can purchase the epic collection (for a fairly reasonable price, all things considered).

 

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Goni Montes Illustrates For Amplifier’s The Octopus Special Edition 2.0

Often by way of the unrefined medium of ballpoint pen, UK artist Mark Powell turns vintage envelopes into portraits of the elderly. His high-contrast black-and-white images find their strength in wrinkles, as though making some sort of meta-commentary about aging faces upon aging trees. Creases separate mouths from noses and stamps and seals make fanciful bindis, stressing that there is a story to be found in every one of these century-old envelopes, whether infused with Powell’s artistic intentions of not.

 

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Mark Powell‘s Portraits Heap Age Upon Age