Frrresh visual arts magazine issue 11
Welcome back! We know it’s been a looong month without your favourite magazine so we put together a lot of interesting artwork and amazing artists in this months issue. Your support and kind words mean a world to us and the artists. Thank you for supporting and enjoying art <3
Featured artists:
Jose Romussi Jiwoon Pak Brooks Shane Salzwedel Lina Cofán Lilli Waters Pam Wishbow Willy Verginer Maz Dixon Christos Skouras Danijel Milčić
Jose Romussi about Jose Romussi was born in 1979. in Chile in where he studied landscape design. Over the past few years he has gained a significant following for his silk screens and collages in which he combines black and white photographs with colorful forms of embroidery. Since 2011 he lives and works in Berlin. “The new series is one of the most exciting works I have done so far. It’s a step towards the artist that I want to be, sealing my style with embroidered photographs.” statement “My work is a constant search to express and represent my ideas. The occurring artworks are a reflection of my inspiration. This start with imagine, that moves or inspires me in certain way by the act of embroidering it. I am always searching for a new sense of interpretation for my pieces. My technique for that is using thread as the medium to merge different time spaces. I am not afraid of breaking a picture. The important thing for me is innovating my technique and forget that I am stichting into the papers. This is a part of the process. I intervene images by applying my own perception of beauty to them. Sometimes by given them a new design or a different aesthetic concept. It’s the chance to give this image a new emotion, a new life, a new interpretation of beauty through embroidering.” cargocollective.com/joseromussi
Jiwoon Pak
â&#x20AC;&#x153;We realize a cold but romantic reality in a natural principle or phenomenon. Willingness of frustration and creation and destruction are constantly overturned in it. It is moving only forward. But sometimes, it comes back to where it was before. Although it seems to be in its original place; however, it is quietly changing. This is a story that is equivalent to the interesting and also unstable reality of us who are living in the nature.â&#x20AC;? I am an illustrator and also an artist working in Seoul. I majored in fine art in France and I have been doing mainly digital painting works after I came back to South Korea. I got aspired from Koreaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s traditional painting called the folk painting. Initially, each of the materials of the folk painting (animals, plants or insects) has a symbolic and mystic meaning such as wealth and long life. However, the old paintings, which have lost their owners, seem to have lost even the symbols or desires. Rather, the lesson of Vanitas to remember the death of Memento Mori. My works during the early days had focused on re-interpreting the colors and impressions obtained from these traditional and old things by the digital work. In recent years, I have been devoting to expanding the themes with the irrationalities and ambivalent feelings as to the life itself that should be inevitably faded and disappeared away just like those things and expressing them with natural materials or principles as a motif.
www.jiwoonpak.com
Brooks Shane
Salzwedel
Brooks Salzwedel’s work evokes the fragility of our environments, natural and unnatural, often by showcasing the junction of urban development and natural landscapes. These works simultaneously display the transition between unnatural encroachments on the natural and natural reclamation of environments. The main comparison is between urban development and landscapes as it is the most visible study of creation and destruction. Salzwedel’s graphite, colored pencil, and mylar works are cast in resin. The resulting serene yet eerie landscapes are full of depth. The artist writes of his work “My work is made from hand-drawing graphite and colored pencil on mylar, tape and other semi-transparent materials then cast in resin. The resin and the tape I use in the work feel toxic and pollutant giving the fairly surreal landscapes a weathered, unhealthy look. I hope there is seen to be a beautiful contrast between the subject matter, drawn delicately then held together by something so off-color and dirty feeling. The content usually consists of the fight between urban development and nature, as well as a similarity in natural landscapes and the human body.” Brooks Salzwedel received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at many institutions, including group shows at the Hammer museum and MOCA, as well as work acquired by The Houston Museum of Contemporary art, and the Portland Art Museum. His work has been featured in American Art Collector, New American Paintings, Cercle Magazine, Entre Magazine, ArtWeek, Los Angeles Times, ArtReview, Juxtapoz Magazine, and many others. Salzwedel has been collected by many respected persons and organizations including The Four Seasons Hotel Washington DC, Jon Hamm, Betye Saar, Rose Apodaca, Jennifer Westfeldt, Mattia Biagi and private international collectors.
www.brookssalzwedel.com
Lina Cofán My name is Lina Cofán am Spanish and I live in Madrid. I studied at the School of Ceramics in La Moncloa in Madrid. I have also studied etching and photography. And for three years I have worked with groups of alternative theater in Berlin (Off Theater) coinciding with the fall of the wall. Now I’m working on a sculpturas dedicated to the cactus. The cactus is a plant that attracts me for its extensive range of green and whimsical shapes, different each other, acquire a stately. ¨Cofán Lina‘s work uses images taken from the landscape, but the language of nature based on the study and observation is not to supplant, but rather recreate a simple mechanism capable of generating an image clearly present in the environment and of dynamic systems as intuitive and natural way to explaining the processes in nature given tool. The sensuous beauty is that which is directly in the work of art, but this identification of beauty as imitation of reality, as an abstraction from concrete reality to show the essence of nature has a lot to do with Plato’s cave, according to which what we see is but a reflection of a perfect idea deformed.¨ -Jose Miranda. Spanish Ceramics for the XXI century.
linacofan.blogspot.com
Lilli Waters
Lili Waters was born in 1983 in Armidale, NSW. Fascinated with a world of fantasy rich with ethereal themes, Water’s work is a mix of both digital and analogue photography using heavy layering processes to create fantastical and somewhat unsettling moods. In her portraits she exposes an enigmatic sense of her past and surrounding environment, mixing brutal realism and chaotic settings which resists the serene and awkward beauty of her subjects. Waters has held several solo exhibitions, including the World Trade Centre in Melbourne of survivors from the Black Saturday bush fires, also a selection of works for a group exhibition at Brick Lane gallery in London towards the end of 2013. Some of her career highlights include being a Finalist in the Head On Portrait Prize 2013, Highly Commended in the Moran Prize in 2012 and Qantas Spirit of Youth Awards in 2012 & 2013. Waters dedicated her ‘She Raw’ photographic project to preventing violence against women, in launching the She Raw book she raised over $1000 for the White Ribbon Foundation in 2012. She is currently working on the ‘ANJA’ project, focusing on nude portraits of her female peers.
www.lilliwaters.com
www.sheraw.org
Pam Wishbow I’m an illustrator based in Seattle, WA. I love colors and shapes, I especially love to make them mingle together to create new, interesting shapes and colors. I treat making my illustrations like a puzzle. What’s the least amount of information I can put in this to make it read? How far can I distort this object so that is still reads as the thing I’m intending it to? I like throwing little symbols and objects into my work, I have a soft spot for weapons, plants, and the occult. I like the idea that I can put in an object that can either add to my work if you interpret it with the same ideas I had for it, or it can just look cool. I’m not the type to push too hard on that, I just love it when it works out that way. A little rune here, a small dagger there.
pamwishbow.com wishbow.tumblr.com
instagram.com/pamwishbow
Willy Verginer Italian artist Willy Verginer creates enchanting figurative sculptures. His pieces are often sole figures, the forms of people delicately positioned. These lifelike sculptures are typically carved from solid linden wood then painted with acrylic paint. Their subtle but strange gestures coupled with unexpected objects give the sculptures a quietly surreal atmosphere. Verginerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peculiar style of painting his work adds to each pieceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s enigmatic quality. Rather than realistically paint each individual detail, Verginer applies large swaths of color to his sculptures. The pieces nearly seem to be dipped in pools of pigment. These large fields of color work in contrasting against the realism of each sculpture.
www.verginer.com
Danijel Milčić Old but free. Here are some cars from Croatian island “Iž”. I fell in love with this place, its “outlaw” energy and simple, unburdened people. They often drive old cars without registration - peace and cooperation by choice, not imposition. I found that liberating and took pictures of this new symbol of freedom - unregistered car. Old but free. This collection is exclusive for frrresh magazine. Thank you, Dan
Maz Dixon
Maz Dixonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paintings and collages challenge the prescriptive nature of souvenir media. Souvenir manufacturers photograph the scenery and attractions of a holiday destination, and reproduce these scenes for mass consumption through postcards, view-folders, tea towels. These items become instruction manuals for viewers, showing them how they are to experience a particular place. Mass-produced imagery becomes mass-produced experience. Through the remixing of figures from landscape, the relationship between viewer and souvenir is realigned. With context removed, the viewer is free to create their own narrative around figures or landscapes.
mazdixon.com
Christos Skouras
bychristosskouras.tumblr.com flickr.com/photos/55829620@N05 behance.net/ChristosSkouras
Photos and text: courtesy of each author Editors: Rafael MilÄ?iÄ&#x2021; and pekmezmed Contact: mail@frrresh.org