VCA Curatorial Picks — Week 28th March, 2022
Welcome to this fortnight’s Vertical Crypto Art Curatorial Picks- our latest selection of creative innovators to watch out for in the crypto art space.
The four artists we are presenting this week stand out through their use of vivid, joyful colour palettes: Anna Lucia, Rose Jackson , Bearytooons and Anindya Anugrah.
The creative practices revealed in the selected works take inspiration from diverse sources, from textile traditions to Javanese mythology. However, they are unified in their vibrancy, joie de vivre and revitalisation of traditional artistic subject matter through polychromatic forms.
Let’s take a closer look…
Artist #1- Anna Lucia, Loom #147
Anna Lucia trained as an engineer but now combines her two passions, maths and making art, into the creation of generative art, distinguished by bold colours and geometric compositions. We have enjoyed her participation in our third cohort of residencies.
We have selected her ‘Loom #147’ for its woven effect in polychrome, created by an algorithm that mimics the mechanisms of a hand weaving loom. An additional algorithm distorts the loom grid to produce the impression of worn ancient fabric.
The ‘Loom’ was, in part, inspired by Lucia’s reading that ‘women studying at Bauhaus were often nudged into the weaving workshop because other crafts weren’t deemed appropriate for women at the time.’ A note which struck a chord with an artist who still felt she was ‘almost a century later, [stil] fighting relatable ignorances at work.’
More recently, Anna Lucia has created the series of ‘Art for Walls in Public Spaces’ in which she draws inspiration from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports’, where ambient music’s quality of being ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’ is explored.
She has also enjoyed recent collaborations with the generative artist, Raphaël de Courville, who is also known for his authoritative use of pattern and bold composition.
Artist #2- Rose Jackson, Camouflage
Like Anna Lucia, Rose Jackson draws inspiration from ancient textile traditions and embraces new technology to transform them into something new- with strong chromatic results.
Rose declares herself ‘an Australian textile and digital artist making magic with wool felt and movement’. Her art is a binary process, first using traditional wet felting methods to hand make wool felt and then combining the abstract felt artworks with animation and GAN.
Living in the bushland of the Blue Mountains in Australia, Jackson is concerned with exploring the relationship between the natural and digital worlds.
The correlation between the artistic, natural and digital spheres can be observed in her ‘Camouflage’, a stunning blue-hued creation that invokes the fluffy, tactile and irregular surface of the original wool felt artwork and simultaneously suggests a dramatic landscape, using GAN technology.
Having only entered the crypto art space in 2021, Rose joined our residency programme and has since developed into a mentor with current cohorts.
Artist #3- Bearytooon, Friday night
Our next artist, the Bangkok-based Bearytooon, takes an alternative approach to colour and line, embracing his love of abstract drawings and working with an intuitive process to create his dynamic, busy, upbeat compositions.
We’ve selected his ‘Friday night’, from his Doodle Collection, as it epitomises the celebratory mood his mostly illustrated, multi-coloured, works often conjure.
The lively composition demonstrates how his being guided by emotions and an engagement with nature, guides the line and shape of works- the outcome of which he is unsure of until their completion.
Artist #4- Anindya Anugrah, Kembang Janur
The collage-like creations of Anindya Anugrah (aka _phantasien), a Jakarta-based illustrator, also embrace a colourful palette but explore subject matter with a mysterious, mythical, otherworldly result.
When still working on ‘Kembang Janur’ Anugrah announced on Twitter that she was ‘currently experimenting with an esoteric Javanese theme’, a consideration which led to this kaleidoscopic depiction of Dewi Sri, the Javanese goddess of fertility and prosperity represented as a magical mandrake root, which is known to have been used for fertility and as an aphrodisiac in medieval Europe. Mandrake roots are often depicted as having human-like form and Dewi Sri is here presented mounted on a Janur (woven palm leaves used as decoration in traditional Indonesian wedding ceremonies.)
‘Kembang Janur’, though polychromatic, employs a gentler palette than the other artists we have featured and merges historic and cultural influences from across the globe, whilst simultaneously scaling multiple chapters from history.
References to medieval Europe (her illustrations often recall the handiwork of illuminated manuscripts) merge seamlessly with nods to ancient Java, another traditional illustrative style, despite the totality having been created using modern technology and pulling from contemporary public domain sources.
And that’s all for this edition of Vertical Crypto Art Curatorial Picks. Join us in a fortnight for our next selection of crypto creative innovators and, in the meantime, be sure to keep up with all our latest announcements by turning on notifications
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