VerticalCrypto Art’s Curatorial Pick — January 12th, 2022
Welcome to this week’s VerticalCrypto Art Curatorial Pick! 👋
Welcome back to this week’s edition of Curatorial Pick — your go-to for the latest creators, handpicked by VerticalCrypto Art.
This week, we have included four artists working across a variety of mediums and polarizing subjects: Lucas Aguirre, Pierre Gervois, Sasha Stiles, Guandanarian and Andrew Brereton. Encompassing politics, poetry and experiments with technology, this Curatorial Pick is dedicated to the theme of conflict and resolution.
We are really excited by this week’s artists, and hope you enjoy their creations as much as we do. With that said, let’s begin! 🏁
Artist #1 — Lucas Aguirre, ‘Una Inestabilidad Constructiva (II)’ ⏳
Lucas Aguirre is an Argentinian digital and crypto artist specializing in VR/AR technology.
Creating digital artworks that use oil paint within VR worlds, Lucas creates pieces which manipulate 3D brush strokes to depict epic battle scenes. Having works sought by iconic collectors such as Metapurse and previously working as an animator in the early 2000s, he utilizes programmes such as Maya 3D to envisage highly detailed, static human conflict.
Lucas has been minting works on Foundation, SuperRare and Showtime platforms since May, 2021, with ‘Una Inestabilidad Constructiva (II)’ being one of his recent artworks minted on SuperRare.
Presented at Aguirre’s ‘A Constructive Instability’ exhibition at Art Mûr gallery, Montreal, Canada (curated by Samuel-Arsenault-Brassard), this 1/1 is a visual metaphor for the present instability that we live in. Depicting subjects fighting amidst explosive debris, time stands still as Aguirre highlights problems arising from conflict (also giving viewers time to reflect on alternate solutions).
‘Una Inestabilidad Constructiva (II)’ has been chosen for this week’s Curatorial Pick thanks to its effective application of analogue and digital mark-making seen in recent years. Aguirre’s works are vibrant and explosive, yet silent and contemplative, highlighting his impressive ability to capture emotion within the growing community of VR art.
Lucas Aguirre’s work is seriously impressive. Make sure to check out his work via the links below! 👇
Artist #2 — Pierre Gervois, ‘Government Exhibit 606 (The Banality of Evil)’ 👹
Pierre Gervois is a documentary filmmaker, publisher and painter residing in New York City.
Originally from Neuilly-Sur-Seine, Gervois is a ‘silent witness’ who uses language to describe the exercise of power. Utilizing rectangular structures to display direct-reported speech, he produces text-based media to document social narratives that are devoid of emotion and defined points of view.
Pierre has been creating crypto artwork since March, 2021. Citing political journalism as his first passion (such as the election of Ronald Regan), he is fascinated by relationships that exist between journalists and politicians, allowing their discourses to manifest in his oeuvre. Pierre is currently a Cohort II resident of the VerticalCrypto Art Residency programme.
‘Government Exhibit 606 (The Banality of Evil)’ is the latest artwork created by Gervois, available on Rarible.
Personifying Evil as an artifact of political scrutiny, this artwork documents Jeffrey Epstein’s bathroom’s toiletries from his former Palm Beach, FL, house. Emphasizing the ‘banality’ of Epstein’s predatory behavior, Pierre neatly separates toiletries into regular and luxury lists, heightening the vulgarity and callousness behind Epstein’s actions.
‘Government Exhibit 606 (The Banality of Evil)’ has been chosen for this week’s Curatorial Pick thanks to its effective alienation of evidence from context. Presenting Jeffrey Epstein’s toiletries in a piece set on the moon, Gervois retains impartiality in displaying political journalism related to Epstein’s criminal activity.
Pierre’s work is highly regarded within Crypto Art, as he collaborates with numerous artists and writers. Make sure to visit his socials below! 👇
Artist #3 — Sasha Stiles, ‘Fragment 24’ 📜
Sasha Stiles is a first generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and trans-human translator, living outside of New York City.
Working at the ‘intersection between text and technology’, Sasha combines language with the digital advancements of the Novacene: an eco-friendly AI that will one day become Earth’s dominant life-form. Stiles’ artwork combines conceptual art, semiotics, visual poetry, speculative design, translation and computer science.
Sasha has been producing text-based, AI generated artwork since 2017, joining the Crypto Art community shortly thereafter. Her main Crypto project is an ongoing partnership with a humanoid robot named BINA48 (‘Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture’), and her subsequent AI alter-ego: ‘Technelegy’.
‘Fragment 24’ is one of Sasha Stiles’ latest artworks, created on Hicetnunc.
Made in collaboration with ‘Technelegy’, this 1/1 piece is an extract from ‘Completion: Fragments’: ‘a transhuman poem cycle in which prophetic, oracular, provocative and surrealist AI outputs are assembled into a linked series of cybernetic stanzas’. This fragment reads: ‘tomorrow is an idea that is lost by the day’.
‘Fragment 24’ has been chosen for this week’s Curatorial Pick as a result of Sasha’s innovations in crypto poetry — an emerging genre of Crypto Art largely introduced by theVERSEverse. Combining machine learning with beautiful visuals, she continues to progress the future of poetry within a decentralized landscape.
Sasha is a wonderful creator in our Crypto Art community, and we are delighted to have her! See the rest of her works below. 👇
Artist #4 — Guandanarian/Andrew Brereton, ‘Local Ontology Secured Transistor’ 🤖
Guandanarian is a pseudo-anonymous digital and crypto artist from Poland.
Creating 2D pixel-based artwork, he designs playful experiments which are seemingly rooted in late 1980s futurism associated with comics and manga. Guandarian approaches such influences from a 21st-century perspective.
Guandanarian has minted works on Hicetnunc, Foundation and Showtime platforms since April, 2021.
Andrew Brereton is a programmer and scientist from Toronto, Canada.
Concerned with generative processes and machine-based learning, Andrew creates generative 8-bit artworks using ‘Pico-8’: a virtual console that imitates home entertainment systems from the 1980s.
Andrew has also been creating pixel-based artworks on Hicetnunc, fx(hash) and Rarible since April, 2021.
‘Local Ontology Secured Transistor’ is a collaborative piece by Guandanarian and Andrew Brereton, minted on Hicetnunc.
Combining Brereton’s generative layers with hand-drawn elements and composition by Guandanarian, this artwork combines the Lua programming language with Pico-8 to realize a psychedelic, neoretro visual loop. Establishing a futuristic aesthetic, ‘Local Ontology Secured Transistor’ executes a terminal log which describes the behaviour of work designed by the duo.
‘Local Ontology Secured Transistor’ has been chosen for this week’s Curatorial Pick thanks to an ongoing fascination between internet cultures and 1980s depictions of future technologies. Appearing at once cryptic and unintelligible, Guandanarian and Brereton indulge viewers with a visually decadent image that embraces foreign languages of cyborg futures.
Guandanarian and Andrew Brereton are incredibly talented creators within the VerticalCrypto Art community. Show them some love by following their socials below! 👇
Guandanarian: Hicetnunc, Foundation, Showtime, Twitter.
Andrew Brereton: Hicetnunc, fx(hash), OBJKT, Rarible, Twitter.
That’s a Wrap! 🙏
And that concludes this week’s Curatorial Pick! ✨ Thank you once again for joining us — we sincerely hope that you enjoy our ongoing series highlighting some of the best from the VerticalCrypto Art community.
Make sure to tune in next Wednesday for another episode. Until then, stay safe and take care! 👋
