Craft

Delicate Embroideries Feature Anatomically Accurate Lungs, Brain, and Facial Vessels

The key to a healthy heart is a diet full of fiber, and Emmi Khan is ensuring her heart—and lungs and brain—don’t miss out. The Cardiff-based artist embroiders anatomically accurate organs and systems, from a multicolored double helix to a profile view of facial vessels. The artist often weaves in floral and natural elements, bolstering the connection between beauty, anatomy, and the environment.

Khan tells Colossal she began the craft while studying biomedical sciences and has continued creating throughout her graduate study in medicine. The further she delves into her education, the more precise her brightly colored stitches become. The artist says allowing science and art to converge is natural, and she compares the two as “different approaches towards observing, processing and presenting the world around us.”

Science looks to understand the world in an objective and empirical manner, often stumbling upon beauty along the way, and presents it intellectually. Art takes the world and lets the human imagination run wild with it, presenting a product of feeling and often beauty with this. I wouldn’t say they are one and the same thing, but they do go hand in hand with respect to the goals they set out to achieve.

Check out Khan’s Instagram and Etsy shop to see more of her biologically focused embroideries, including one piece that even outlines the telomere effect.

Art

Minimalist Paintings by Prudence Flint Emphasize the ‘Emotional Weight’ of Womanhood

Focusing heavily on the female figure, painter Prudence Flint combines pastels and flat, geometric shapes in her minimalistic works. Rarely showing their faces directly, Flint’s oil paintings often portray women lying down, sitting, or performing daily tasks like showering while they look straight ahead, adding to the pieces’ pensive atmospheres.

In a recent interview with Juxtapoz, the painter expounded on why she mostly centers on women, saying she wants them “to be all things, whole, boundless, perverse, and representative of humanity. I want to give voice to this experience of being alive, now, in this culture, as a woman.” The ways Flint constructs female bodies exemplifies these ideas of womanhood, as she often paints small heads on top of broad torsos and long limbs.

As a woman, I feel constantly up against the idea of what is meant to be happening to me versus what is actually happening to me … I think I have found a solution by distorting the bodies, which becomes representative of what experience does to you. It marks you and creates emotional weight.

Flint’s self-portrait “The Wish” is on view from January 16 to 30 at High Line Nine in New York as part of ME, an exhibition that considers the relationship between identity and the face. If you can’t see the Melbourne-based artist’s paintings in person, head to Instagram where she shares much of her work.

Art

Enormous Metal Sculptures by Selçuk Yılmaz Embody Chaotic Effects of Climate Change

By hammering and welding more than 20,0000 metal pieces together, artist Selçuk Yılmaz (previously) creates massive sculptures that manifest the energy of the natural world as it becomes more damaged by humans and climate change. The Turkey-based artist’s latest project, Blue Planet, took almost two years to complete and features a human figure in addition to Yılmaz’s usual animals, like a nearly 10-foot-tall lion that weighs approximately 220 pounds.

Yılmaz tells Colossal he wanted the project to speak to environmental destruction, so he placed a human hand at the bottom of the arranged piece to signify it being the root cause. A lurking vulture waits nearby, hoping to eat the other animals after they die. “The woman holds her hand on a blue planet as if (to) save everything. It’s like a chaos,” he says. For more of the artist’s imposing creations, head to Behance or Instagram.

Animation

A Bustling Coastline is Disguised as a Peaceful Bedroom in Short Film by Charlotte Arene

Paris-based director and animator Charlotte Arene has created an uncanny stop-motion film centered on sleep that wavers between a nightmare and a peaceful slumber. Released in December 2019, “La mer à boire,” or “Unrealizable,” is shot in a typical bedroom, although the sheets, closet doors, and slippers move similarly to an energetic coastline. The animated work is set to sounds of waves and birds calling to each other, and it features a young woman who glides up and down her bed, seemingly retreating back into the water, and under the blankets, with the ripples. Canonical sea literature, like Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, occupies the bookshelf that resembles lapping waves, as well. Find more of Arene’s short animated projects on Vimeo.

Photography

Through Light Painting and Stenciling, Artist Fabrice Wittner Illuminates Life Near the North Pole

Inspired by Inuit iconography, Fabrice Wittner (previously) describes his latest series as “an invitation to enter the polar night.” The Northern Lights, a project in which the artist superimposes figures onto the Arctic phenomenon, involves painting with a light source like a torch on an extended-exposure photograph, illuminating those he depicts. Wittner combined this technique with his use of leatherette stencils, which are inspired by archived Inuit images from the early 20th century, to create his complex and layered portrayals. Committed to environmentally friendly processes, Wittner produced his low-pollution cyanotype prints using found and recycled materials, such as scraps of Dilite aluminum plates and pallet wood.

Originally from Alsace, France, the artist is interested in the ways climate change will affect native polar populations. As the sea ice melts and water levels rise, the hunting resources in the area inevitably will be affected, changing daily life for these groups of people.

The interdependency between the lifestyle evolution, global warming, the threat upon wildlife, and the consequences on the northern populations should lead us to reconsider our whole society. Inuits from Greenland and the North American continent, Sames from Northern Europe, and ethnic groups from Siberia will be on the front line of global warming. As the first climate refugees, only their memory and the spirits of their ancestors will remain on their lands.

Wittner regularly updates his Behance and Instagram, where you can find more of his ecologically conscious projects.

Sponsor

Join the School of Visual Arts Division of Continuing Education for Spring 2020 Info Sessions

Spring 2020 Info Sessions 
Courses begin January 27
School of Visual Arts, Division of Continuing Education

From one-day workshops to semester-long courses, take the opportunity to immerse yourself and be inspired. 

Courses are available in the following areas:

• Advertising
• Animation
• Art & Activism
• Design
• Film and Video
• Fine Arts
• Illustration and Cartooning
• Performance
• Photography
• Professional Development
• Visible Futures Lab
• Visual and Critical Studies
• Visual Narrative

Find more information on sessions and workshops, how to register, and advice on courses on SVA’s site.

About School of Visual Arts

School of Visual Arts has been a leader in the education of artists, designers and creative professionals for seven decades. With a faculty of distinguished working professionals, dynamic curriculum and an emphasis on critical thinking, SVA is a catalyst for innovation and social responsibility. Comprising 6,000 students at its Manhattan campus and 35,000 alumni in 100 countries, SVA also represents one of the most influential artistic communities in the world. For information about the College visit sva.edu.

School of Visual Arts, Division of Continuing Education
sva.edu/ce | E-mail: [email protected] | Toll-free telephone: 877.242.7200

Art Colossal

Interview: Rob Woodcox Discusses His Boldly Energetic Conceptual Photography of the Human Form

Photographer Rob Woodcox is known for his images of bodies stalled in motion, from his conceptions of a human wave to his striped portraits. In the latest interview, our editor-in-chief Christopher Jobson sat down with the artist to to discuss his masterfully composed images of the human body, his deep commitment to social awareness in his practice, and his upcoming book Bodies of Light.

Get deeper insight into Woodcox’s creative process by becoming a Colossal Member. You’ll gain access to this interview, in addition to other perks. And if you join at any level before January 19, 25% of your membership will go to Wildlife Victoria to aid in the Australian bushfire crisis.