Author: Jane Kenoyer

Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka created an installation that surrounded his artwork and filled a large gallery space in Miami with 2 million transparent straws. Tokujin has been designing works and creating installations that capture and filter light since 1988. He is an award winning designer and has designed for top companies such as BMW, Hermes, Toyota, Swarovski, and many more. Using his innovative design sensibility he transforms everyday materials such as glass, fabrics, plastic, and paper into elegant art objects. See more after the jump!

Italian artist Fuorisaloni Umberto Dattola created several sculptures entitled EVNI that were exhibited at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Marchina in February and again at Milan Design Week 2013. The EVNI sculptures were accompanied by the imaginative shots by photographer Fabrizio Contu who featured Dattola’s furniture objects in natural environments. Dattola’spassion for wood and craftsmanship continues outside of his fine art. He works as a leading member of the Italian design company called Clab4design. Clab4design focuses on creating contemporary objects that accompany daily life. See more after the jump!

Declan Lee is an artist from Adelaide, Australia who creates beautifully rendered portraits with a hint of melancholy. These illustrations are pastels on paper and are rich with iconography and symbolism. Some figures are surrounded by a circular glowing ring of light, this technique has been used in the iconography of many religions to indicate holy or sacred figures in Greek, Roman, Asian, and Christian art throughout the ages. Although the imagery is mysterious there is a clear indication that the big eyed female figures in Lee’s work symbolize a form of spiritual transition or moment of awareness. See more after the jump!

Artist Lori Larusso created a body of work featuring domestic scenes that she refers to as Shapes. Bold saturated colors are painted on in flat sections of cut panels that emphasis form. Her works are intentionally stereotypical and represent mundane middle-America suburbia. She eliminates any unnecessary details or extra space with a design sensibility reminiscent to modernism. Larusso depicts retro kitchens, pepto bismol toned bathrooms, and the avocado green mountains with vague subject matter that is deliberately left open, leaving room for the viewer to relate to the imagery. See more after the jump!

Artist Ian Berry creates monochromatic compositions depicting urban scenes that are carefully constructed out of varying shades of denim fabrics. Ian Berry changed his name to Denimu to further emphasize his obsession with blue jeans. On closer inspection the characteristics of the denim material slowly emerge and the hours of labor are revealed. These surprisingly detailed works are cut, stitched, and glued together creating large scale urbanscapes that represent society and popular culture in a democratic way. His work is currently on display at the Shooting Gallery in San Francisco, California. The group show is entitled Hard Time Mini Mall and was curated by Noah Antieau of Red Truck Gallery. The exhibit will be open to the public for viewing through May 4, 2013. See more after the jump!

Subject matter depicting brains, cow sculls, and pig heads sounds rather disturbing, however artist Angela Palmer creates elemental beauty out of unusual imagery. To make her body of work entitled Life Lines she engraved details from MRI and CT scans onto multiple sheets of glass. By layering the pieces of glass together she both separates and unifies these beautiful three dimensional line drawings.The human heads in this collection are self portraits and the other forms depict her interest in the anatomy animals. See more after the jump!

Illustrator Oriol Angrill Jordà creates portraits that dissolve into loose interpretive scenes from nature. The artist’s body of work that he referes to as Blendscapes feature landscapes, mountain rages, valleys, and vast skies entangled within figurative features. These unique paintings combine the Romanticism of landscape paintings with the emotional expression and humanistic characteristics of portraiture. His paintings are done in soft watercolor hues mixed with media such as graphite, colored pencil, and acrylic. Jordà studied Illustration in London, UK and in Palma de Mallorca, Spain where he currently lives. See more after the jump!

Artist Monika Malewska’s most recent series of paintings are large scale soft focus watercolors on paper that incorporate both the beautiful and the bizarre. Using photographs and digitally manipulated prints as inspiration she delivers complex compositions. These paintings are filled with unusual combinations of everyday items such as bacon and cheese puffs mixed with decorative natural elements like flowers and butterflies. At a casual glance they seem cheerful and bright but they are filled with symbolism that references mortality and the decay of the mundane. Although, Malewska largely depicts objects, her work differs from traditional still life paintings because the vibrant compositions have a distinct sense of movement and whimsy. See more after the jump!

Illustrator Sachin Teng lives and works in New York City. His work has previously been featured on Hi-Fructose and his illustrations have been in mainstream magazines such as the New York Times, Wired Magazine, and THE NEW YORKER. He created a body of work which represents the influence of design on the subconscious mind. These mysterious works branch from his illustrative background into the fine art realm. Teng feels that first and foremost he is a designer and is interested in art as a method of visual communication. He knows first hand from his personal experiences in advertising how subliminal messages in marketing, illustration, and design can influence our choices and bleed into our everyday experiences. See more after the jump!

For over thirty years renown fashion photographer Nick Knight has been bringing us iconic images that represent multiple generations of pop culture and challenge conventional notions of beauty. Last year Knight released 15 images from his acclaimed publication Flora which were exhibited along side his new photographs featuring flowers pouring out their colors. This idyllic exhibition took place at the SHOW studio in London in the Fall of 2012. His new works are a hybrid between photography and painting that have stunning aesthetic qualities. His work is brings to mind both the delicacy of 17th and 18th century still life paintings, such as Jan Brueghel's the Elder, and classic Romanticism and the timeless interest of an artist to capture the fragility of the moment. Knight made these images using his own technique in which he introduces heat and water into the printing process. The images seen in this exhibition took Knight over 10 years of experimentation to perfect. See more after the jump!

Professional photographer Peter Hapak, documented these outlandish hair styles which were created by the world’s most legendary hair designers in 2010. The unusual updos were featured in the African-American hair design show in Detroit’s city’s center called Hump the Grinder’s Hair Wars. This 25-year-old Detroit tradition was started in 1985 by deejay David Humphries aka Hump the Grinder. Some of the hair styles featured here took 10 hours to complete. This year’s Hair Wars event will be hosted by Queen of Kitsch, Allee Willis. All photos by Peter Hapak for Time. See more after the jump!

In the following interview the very talented Chicago artist Laurie Hogin reveals pages of her sketchbook and talks about how essential sketching and note taking is to her artistic process. Hogin’s fluorescent paintings illustrate fictional narratives that reflect facets of the human experience and pop culture. She is known for incorporating brilliant day-glo hues into paintings filled with personal icons, symbolism, and a variation of toy like species that resemble naturalistic specimens. Laurie Hogan is currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. See inside her sketchbook and read the interview after the jump!

Artist Sea Hyun Lee created a series of poetic landscape paintings entitled Between Red. Lee‘s monochromatic works are a combination of red oil paints with the bold contrasting areas of white canvas. The landscapes are of North and South Korean mountains and are covered with careful layers of crimson red washes. The bold red tones at first appear simple but soon draw the viewer in as we realize the complexity of the delicate details in the landscape. See more after the jump!

Illustrator Sandra Chevrier creates bold portraits by combining painting with collaging techniques to cover the eyes or mouths on her mysterious female subjects. Her work is full of familiar iconic comic book imagery, such as Wonder Woman and Super Man, that compound the social messages interlaced within each of her paintings. Chevrier currently lives and works in Montreal. See more images of her work after the jump!

Artist David Adey created a body of work entitled Gravitational Radius. These digital prints of body parts are cut by a laser and pined to foam panels. Adey’s work includes photographs of popular fashion icons and celebrities. He collects images of legs and arms from online sources and Google searches. See the artists process and laser cutting video after the jump!

Canadian artist Jen Mann from Toronto, Ontario created a body of large-scale portraits entitled Strange Beauties that are an expression of the subconscious. These dreamy paintings focus on ideas of freedom, perceived beauty, and identity. The combination of complimentary color schemes, solid bold backgrounds, and her expressive subjects really make the paintings pop! See more after the jump!

Francesco Romoli is an artist living and working in Pisa, Italy. Romoli creates mysterious digital artworks that represent the human condition, degradation, and isolation. The Imaginary Towns series is especially provoking and otherworldly. These digitally manipulated dioramas of towns have very little information identifying them which adds to their mysterious narratives. They are constructed out of cardboard and other objects and come to life with dramatic lighting and shadow effects. See more after the jump!

Kiel Johnson has been very busy since we featured him in Hi-Fructose Volume 14. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Johnson is known for his drawings and sculptures which are layered narratives and metaphorical representations of the world. His primary focus is creating drawings, however he also works with paper and other materials such as cardboard, styrofoam, wood, and metal to create complex sculptures. Johnson enjoys collaborating and he recently shared with us the new short film entitled Bot Prom which is a film incorporating the army of robots that were created two years ago at an educational workshop that Johnson led at Cypress College. The collaboration was an investigation of low tech colliding with high tech and all of the costumes were created by the students inspired by Johnson's artistic style and use of accessible materials. See more of his projects and his studio after the jump!

Laughing Squid spotted clever artwork of a man made out of blocks by Swiss photographer Fabien Nissels. The series of work is entitled Blocks and is a combination of photographs of the artists friend's parts that are an assemblage of awkwardly stacked blocks that are then photographed. These body part blocks are staged in such a way that they could almost convince the viewer that they are looking at a man doing mundane everyday tasks, falling down stairs, or climbing trees in his underwear. See more after the jump!

Fine artist Caleb Brown currently works in New York City creating oil paintings that are an expression of his view of the modern world depicted in highly imaginative and seemingly impossible scenarios. These exaggerated action scenes and alternate realities symbolize cultural allegories. The artist's relatively small canvases are filled with giant sharks, insects, and other creatures painted in great detail. Each of the works have a strong representational qualities that resemble science fiction scenes and seem to imply that they are a part of a larger narrative. Brown received his Master of Fine Arts in painting from Boston University in 2007. See more after the jump!

Through the art of photography Greek artist Anastasia Mastrakouli creates unique typography by incorporating the bare human figure. These naked silhouettes form gestures to create each letter of the alphabet as they interact and press against the pane of wet glass. The identities of the figures are obscured by the surrounding water and panel adding symmetry to the overall appearance of the letters. Mastrakouli's work exposes the connection between typography, art, and the human figure in a new and unique way. See more after the jump!

Peeta, also known as Manuel Di Rita, is a graffiti writer, sculptor, muralist, and painter who currently lives in Venice, Italy and has been making graffiti art since 1993. He creates unique 3-D images that spell out his name in the familiar urban graffiti style. His lettering is made up of masterful gestures, graceful lines, and convincing depth and volume. Peeta’s choice to represent his own name is his attempt to paint and express a form of self-portraiture. He also works with sculptural forms. His three dimensional PVC model sculptures are first built from a 3-D computer design. Although the two-dimensional surfaces he paints on change from canvases to large scale walls he transforms these surfaces with his signature bold graphic shapes that jump out at the viewer. See a mix of his sculptures and murals after the jump!

Artist Tim Ripley creates surreal oil paintings that begin with sculptural polymer clay forms converted to photographs and finally paintings. After digitally altering each photograph he creates a high quality print of the digital file and then translates the image with paint. The results are smooth, often gravity defying forms, that resemble biological masses and bridge the worlds of science and design. Ripley is an instructor at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois and has an upcoming exhibition entitled Soft Cell that opens April 4th at Denise Bibro Fine Art in New York. See more after the jump!

Artist Berlinde De Bruyckere from Gent, Belgium has created intentionally lifeless sculptures out of select animal parts. The unsettling “horse” objects are made out of horse hair and horse skin over shaped foam forms set in epoxy resin and displayed on tables or surrounded by enclosures made of iron, wood, and glass. Bruyckere intentionally forms the bodies without faces and some without heads, thus abstracting the familiar shape just enough to emphasize the inert object and the absence of life. She explains this further in her statement, “It is not because you never see a head that it looks like it has been cut off. It is, rather, that I no longer think the presence of a head is necessary. The figure as a whole is a mental state. The presence or absence of a head is irrelevant.” See more after the jump.

Los Angeles-based illustrator Ken Garduno creates nostalgic narratives of popular culture that have a style reminiscent of classic 60s and 70s milieu. His artworks are a delightful mix of media including the use of watercolor and inks on paper. I asked Garduno to let us peek inside his sketchbook for our ongoing Inside the Sketchbook Series. See his humorous sketches and read the interview about his daily "sketch parties" after the jump!

Digital artist and motion graphics designer Dan Hoopert lives and works in England. Using Cinema 4D Hoopert created a stunning typography project that re-created the alphabet with virtual 3D wire. This process stripped the serif typeface down to it’s essential architectural elements and forms, revealing line and beauty in what would otherwise be very basic letters. Hoopert also creates interesting alphabet sets where the 3D wire links the letters together in a way that resembles a spiderweb altering the form of the letters until they are an unintelligible abstraction. See more after the jump!

Laughing Squid recently featured German artist Wolfgang Stille and his creepy “Matchstickmen” installations. These large-scale matchsticks sculptures are made of trimmed lumber topped with human heads that resemble the burnt ends of matches. There are many of these human heads on sticks scattered about the space. These sculptures are disturbing both because of the separation of the heads from the figures' bodies and because the heads appear to burnt up. See more after the jump!

Artist Ben Grasso paints fabricated disasters and the destruction of archetypal houses flying through the air. These large scale theatrical paintings almost reach a form of abstraction. The action sequences that he depicts of exploding elements are created with oils on paper. In his paintings he captures movement and energy, zooming in on the origins of detonation and chaos. See more after the jump!

Artist Joseph Parra obscures his subjects faces in ways that transform these life size human figures into abstracted forms surrounded by unrelenting steril white spaces. Parra's mediums of choice are digital printing, printmaking, drawing, charcoal, and painting. Most of his digital prints are edited in an extreem way, some are cut, bent, or folded into three-dimensional forms while other areas of the photographs are left unmarked and unapologetically exposed, this pulls the viewer in while the abstraction and concealment of the faces creates a distance between the subject and the viewer. See more after the jump!

Artist Drew Young creates collage style paintings with strong narratives that have both abstract and hyper-realistic qualities. The paintings are filled with spontaneous and painterly areas that seem to melt into rendered figures and other hyper-realistic details in the work. Young portrays multiple perspectives and many facets of a subject as well as several painting styles cleverly mixed into one piece resulting in work that gives the impression that there is order among chaos. See more after the jump!