Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Justin Plunkett’s “Con/struct” Series Imagines Future of Urban Sprawl

South African designer Justin Plunkett’s “Con/struct” series has more in common with the digitally-fabricated renderings of speculative architecture than documentary photography, but it illustrates an eerie collision of both formats. The images are built from a combination of photography, 3D modeling and substantial post-production editing, to form street-level perspectives of futuristic urban fantasies.

South African designer Justin Plunkett’s “Con/struct” series has more in common with the digitally-fabricated renderings of speculative architecture than documentary photography, but it illustrates an eerie collision of both formats. The images are built from a combination of photography, 3D modeling and substantial post-production editing, to form street-level perspectives of futuristic urban fantasies.

The logic of unplanned settlements and slum housing, of conglomerated building materials and integrative global advertisements, suggests both snapshots from developing nations and storyboard sketches from films like Blade Runner or A.I. Renderings of the buildings take on a glossy veneer, as if formed from the distorted aggregate imagery of satellite photography, coated in a layer of post-production vaseline. “Con/struct” then depicts both the symptoms and representative methods of contemporary architectural discourses, built upon the scenarios of “man on the street” photography.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Silvie De Burie was an avid scuba diver for 15 years before deciding to bring her camera with her underwater. Originally from Ghent, Belgium, she began diving and snorkeling off the island of Bunaken in Indonesia in her mid-twenties. Her passion for observing marine life now comes through in her high-definition underwater photographs of hard coral reefs. De Burie zooms in on the bright, repeating patterns of the coral to expose the psychedelic details on these precious organisms. She says that she hopes that her photos will educate and inspire her viewers to be more conscientious of the fragile state of the world's oceans.
Appropriation art has boomed since Dina Goldstein began her “Fallen Princess” photo series in 2007, which debuted at CHG Circa last Saturday. All over the world, artists seem to be re-contextualizing pop-culture characters in unfortunate situations. Goldstein’s new work may fit into this trend, but she isn’t making a commentary about Disney. As a female visual artist and pop surrealist raised in Tel Aviv, she’s taking an honest look at the challenges that modern women face. Hers is a tongue-in-cheek remark about ideals of beauty and dreams, and how that fits into real-world ‘happily ever afters’. Read more after the jump.
Alma Haser is known for adding surreal, sculptural twists to her portraits. One of her new series sees the photographer creating puzzles out of images of identical twins, then swapping every other the piece of the separate portraits for absorbing results. Haser didn’t know where facial features would end up in this process, offering a surprise to both the artist and the viewer. Haser was featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 31.
While it's been a long time since most Western countries have experienced a war on their own soil, our mass media is rife with gory imagery that often fetishizes death and destruction. This idea was the starting point for creative director Anna Burns' and photographer Michael Bodiam's series, "Silent But Violent." For the body of work, Burns fashioned mushroom clouds of out benign, household items such as balloons, watermelon, and bouquets — even the embroidery on a quilt. Shot in domestic interiors, the miniature mushroom clouds speak to our desensitized consumption of violent content.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List