Daniel van Nes, a Dutch artist, draws, paints, engraves, and creates installations and virtual reality experiences in a “machine noir” world. Projects like “SellFable City: Circuit Circus” are immersive experiences that invite visitors into physical and virtual representations of the artist’s charcoal renderings and other traditional work. The circus, hosted by Tetem in Enschede, Netherlands last spring, relates the various talents of Nes.
Official descriptions for the fictional world of SellFable City, which has appeared in various forms over the past couple years as street art in New York and Berlin, include this line: “Sellfable City is a machine world, that thrives on the energy of its inhabitants. Like an ink stain, it slowly creeps into our world.”
You can still tour the virtual reality experiences created from those charcoals pieces on Roundme. The artist’s work has been shown in galleries, fairs, and streets across the world. He graduated from the Royal Academy of the Arts in Antwerp in the mid-1990s, and went on to be nominated for Dutch Artist of the Year. His “illuminated engravings” are a self-generated technique, in which he implements methods from copper-engraving and wood-engraving to create works only viewable through the use of light.
Asheville Art Museum has unveiled its new building in North Carolina, and with it, a slew of opening exhibitions. The museum's own collection is known for its ties to the former Black Mountain College, the N.C. school open between 1933 and 1957 that was tethered to Bauhaus and faculty and students that included Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Ruth Asawa. Their collection has been reinterpreted in a new display at the venue.