We are definitely looking awry at Looking Awry by artist Shanti Grumbine, in the vain hope of unravelling the wizardry behind her images. The acclaimed newspaper, the New York Times, is her material of choice; manipulating and mutilating the pages, she creates intricate collages that turn your daily (dull) read into dizzying scenes.
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Grumbine must have the patience of a saint. Scalpel in-hand and an exact eye, her process is extremely laborious and repetitious, but generates such a visually complex effect. For the series Looking Awry, she divides up enlarged prints of front-page covers, mounts these sections onto wood and reassembles the original image into wall reliefs of undulating depths.
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The result is an assortment of colours and shapes that look like pixels on-screen, or fragments of a windowpane or waves rising and falling out at sea. Through squinted eyes, you can almost tell the initial image – remnants of a woman’s face or a human body. However, step back, and the picture is lost again to the distortion.

Grumbine is master of carving new meanings into a material with a pre-existing meaning. What we find particularly exciting about her work is that lost in translation idea – she is championing vagueness, evoking emotion rather than the communication of information. She is like an alchemist, transforming everyday media into transcendental portals. So despite, the ghost of former purpose, you can literally see anything you desire inside her creations.

www.shantigrumbine.com

Trickery at its simplest and finest; French photographer Marwane Pallas is employing perspective to deceive you into thinking our internal organs are just laid out bare. So what seems like a severed brain, is actually just a cabbage.
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The inspiration of this series, The Doctrine of Signatures, stems from the folk belief that herbs resembling parts of the body could have medicinal effect, treating the corresponding part. There is something rather grotesque and repulsive about seeing a pair of human lungs reduced to a peeled grapefruit. But then again, there is definitely a hint of cheekiness to Pallas’ work – how could we not chuckle, as a dissected apple becomes a bottom?
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All we know is that we will never look at fruit or veg in the same way again.
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www.marwanepallas.com
www.instagram.com/marwanepallas

Conceptual photographer Bobby Becker creates surreal and disturbing scenes that reflect a world where reality and the impossible intertwine – or more appropriately, they look like something straight from a horror movie.
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Becker clearly has a tendency towards the darker side. In the photographic series, History, we see a glossy black liquid oozing and dripping from outstretched fingers and mirror planes. In another image, Becker himself features, yet as a fictional character with elongated arms, tangled in knots on the floor – a monster disguised in human form. The terror only continues: in Haunt we imagine the zombie-film cliché of hands clawing at windows to reach the people inside, and yet this time, they are trying to escape.
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Becker captures eerie imagery in a sophisticated and minimal way, using a black and white perspective that is visually striking. Although, his photography does much more than frighten – it evokes ideas of fear and captivity, nothingness, and depression. His work is highly emotive, portraying and revealing the instability, which lurks within all of us.
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www.flickr.com/photos/excavate
www.instagram.com/excavatephoto

Berlin based artist, Wolfgang Stiller has taken the expression ‘burnt-out’ perhaps too literally in his installation series Matchstick Men.
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Stiller uses thick bamboo wood, and carves into the material scary realistic depictions of dead human faces, charred to a crisp and laid to rest in oversized boxes (which distressingly resemble coffins). Leaning or freestanding, these anthropomorphic creatures bend, twist, and contort in various forms– mutating into figures fit only for our worst nightmares.
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The Matchstick Men are creepy, sinister and provocative, playing a powerful role as they warn against the modern day model of overworking until a point of absolute exhaustion. Staring into the soulless and vulnerable eyes of these forsaken beings manages to evoke a personal connection, which makes them even more haunting.
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However, despite all the morbidity and mortality, Stiller’s sculptures are very compelling. We wonder whether it is almost in human nature to be most drawn to the things that are most gruesome and terrifying.

www.wolfgangstiller.com

Looking at Alex Gardner’s paintings it is easy to see a Salvador Dali reference – a surrealist dreamscape. And yet, he insists that is not his intention, rather taking inspiration from the everyday – the morning commute, habitual routines and passing conversations. “All my subject matter is based on real life: I’m not trying to access the subconscious or the unconscious dream state”. Although, that does not mean his paintings aren’t kind of dreamy.
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Identity is a major theme for Gardner’s practise, the artist himself coming from Afro-Japanese decent; however, instead of playing on a racial agenda, he is going back to basics. The human form is reduced until utter anonymity, with each character painted in the richest, deepest black. Black is such a controversial colour choice, but similar to Malevich’s Black Square, it illustrates purity, whilst allowing the viewer to project whoever and whatever onto the non-specific figures.
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Based in Los Angeles, we can almost see the LA influence on Gardner’s work: each creature is super stylised, superficial and almost plastic-looking, like the stereotype would suggest. Although, their effect is far from shallow and much more moving.
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Ultimately, obscurity is the vital component to his paintings; the bodies appear at once dancing, maybe fighting, and then resting. Despite Gardner’s assertion against surrealism, his use of simple shapes, open narratives, and minimally expressive compositions, engages our imagination to unravel the plot at play here.
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Alex Gardner has his first UK solo show at The Dot Project
from October 7th to November 20th.
www.alexgparadise.com
www.thedotproject.com/alex_gardner

A universe of pastel tones; we transcend into cosmic galaxies where faces are masked by flora, clouds and paint strokes. Then, riding the breeze, scarves traverse seascapes and figures fade into the foggy expanse. This is the world conceived by young Portuguese artist Teresa Freitas, who publishes her take on escapism solely on her Instagram account.
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Freitas gains much of her inspiration from her surroundings: waves of the sea, leaves of the trees and clouds in the sky. She captures moments, and then bestows upon them a surreal and magical twist. Who doesn’t want to enter a land where constellations fit in the palm of the hand?
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Speaking of hands, they are a repeated motif in Freitas work. We see them barely touching each other, fingers gracefully outstretched and left to dangle. This inclination of tenderness is quickly removed by the instances of obscurity – her images are just as intimate as they are distant. Optical illusions and mirror portals serve to daze the viewer, whilst fragmenting the images – the reflection we expect to see is not there. The contradictions continue, as despite the intransience of photography, her scenes possess an ephemeral quality, like we are bearing witness to a fleeting passing in time.
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Freitas epitomises how young artists are now engaging with Instagram as their own gallery space. As we scroll through her account, we are instantly bewitched, and falling upon us is a sense of serenity and calm that was not there before.
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www.instagram.com/teresacfreitas/

Whilst away in New York City, we are not just making the most of the sun; we are also soaking up as much art as physically possible. At the private view for Marlborough Gallery is where we happened to discover our recent fixation, the work by New York based artist Manolo Valdés and his lovely ladies with botanical adornments.
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Cold metal meets dancing butterflies. Drawing inspiration from the relationship between art and nature, Valdés’s towering bust sculptures are innately feminine yet materially hard. As the stereotypically rigid transforms into something that is as fluid and delicate as an autumn leaf falling to the ground.

Valdés conjures up impossibilities; redefining the material characteristics of stone, aluminium and steel, what we once thought as unmalleable is now crafted into intricate twists and turns. Ferns, butterflies and windblown palm trees flourish from ambiguous faces – everything seems in growth, blossoming, but captured in one point of time.
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The underpinning contradictions in Valdés’s sculptures is what we find most beguiling: between the organic and inorganic, between hard and soft, between the ephemeral and permanent. Valdés’s work may appear just like some pretty flowers, but there are multiple layers to unearth.

http://www.marlboroughgallery.com/galleries/new-york/artists/manolo-valds