Andrew melted our eyes with his staggering experimental short Solopsist and went on to smash expectations on a collaboration with Icelandic legend Bjork for her track Mutual Core, which premiered at MOCA to much ado. Coming from a fine art background, what better a brain to pick than his in our search to unearth the artists you should have bookmarked, Tumbld and Tweeted.
Evan Mann
The frothy, milky world of Evan Mann first caught my eye with his film “Real Ethereal,” (see above) which then lead me to his larger body of work spanning drawings, printmaking, sculpture and installation. It’s easy to get lost in the churning rhythm of fantastical bodily systems in his earliest film “The Body,” the baptismal cycle of reemergence in “Katharsis,” or the baroque flowering designs of impossible anatomies in his detailed illustrations. The recent RISD graduate’s work was featured this year at the FILM+DESIGN festival at Dutch Design Week, and is also recently showcased at SELECT Fair at Art Basel, Miami.
Hugh Zeigler
I’ve been smitten by Hugh Zeigler’s paintings since 2010, and I’ve been excited to see his work make appearances at the Johansson Projects in Oakland, New Image Art and Steve Turner Contemporary Gallery in LA this year. With repetitious collage work Zeigler tears through the grid with acid lattices, fried and scrambled planets, fields of drop shadow hieroglyphs, and snaking data worms. Zeigler’s procedural act of repeated tearing, cutting and arranging fragments results in graphic acrobatics reminiscent of digital visual duplication, versioning and pixel-pushing in the Photoshop era.
Jon Rafman
My first encounter with Jon Rafman’s work involved his hilarious and absurd experimental guided tour of Second Life with Kool-Aid Man. This was soon followed by his virally successful curated snapshots from Google Street View seen on his ongoing blog 9-Eyes. Rafman’s philosophical love affair with Internet visual culture and its zeroing effect on history, cultural identity and the experience of our physical world arrived in its latest manifestation in this year’s May exhibition “MMXII BNPJ” at American Medium in NYC. Featuring Rafman’s “Brand New Paint Jobs,” the exhibition showcased ordinary objects whose surfaces are repainted and remapped with historical canonized artworks, suggesting that history is ultimately wrapped around and involved in whatever we do.
