Near Eden My interest in Prague derives from the coincidental timing of the end of the Cold War happening as I was on the verge of becoming an adult. Being a teenager, I was captivated by the idea that this place had been forbidden for all practical purposes, cut off from the West. I was also intrigued by the fact that while it was worn out and mundane after years of Soviet domination, there were signs of new life, with a flood of expat Americans and Europeans flooding to the city. My curiosity also had a lot to do with the realization that much of the culture of Central and Eastern Europe lurks in the history of America, brought here by the waves of immigrants from that part of the world. Read more... Methodical Intentions We need to create systems in order to think, in order to communicate with each other, to live together, and to interfere with nature. Our spoken language, cultural codes, economic and political systems, religions, sexuality, science; it is all derelict poetry. This is all that we have and it leaves us in an incredibly empowering position. As long as we remain humble to the fact that we do not know it all, we can be in a process of constantly recreating these systems, each time including a few more, and each time giving ourselves those moments of beauty found between paralyzing order and total chaos. Read more... Mesmerizing Mortality All of Michal Shamir’s works, whether it’s installations, paintings, collages, or videos, deal with the transformative nature of the materials she uses. In the past, Shamir built objects whose base material were wine gums in different forms. Indeed, it was a courageous act to take these unimaginative sweets into the realm of high art, and cause their mutation that places them in a different context, where banality is turned into horror. The wine gums were assembled into torsos of animals or wounds cut in the wall. Glued together they were partially burnt so that a second metamorphosis occurred which changed their initial character from something sweet, harmless, and benign into a spectacle of decay.





Read more... Alex Fischer “Alex Fischer composes his figures and landscapes by assembling a variety of visual and conceptual sources... Read more... Andrea Carlson In seascapes with moltenous shores I draw objects and texts that reference seemingly disparate sources from museum... Read more... A Delicate Bloom My work walks on the edge between the dream and vigil. I see and depict the world as if we were looking at things and actions for the first time. The pioneer view suggests an intense focus on details that pulls out the beauty of the pattern. Beauty is a dynamic experience that can be coaxed out of the ugly and obscure. Everything I draw is inspired by the world around me—I strongly believe in life drawing. The context of my work applies to relations between a text and an image. Recently I’ve been working on how the way we see things affects the way an image tells a story. I think the process of creation is a black box; the sum of technical skills and the idea doesn’t equal the result. Read more... Caricatures of Satire Wafae Ahalouch el Keriasti works with thematic as well as aesthetic contrasts. Her black-and-white sketches of everyday life, reduced to contoured lines and usually in a large format, present such pairs of opposites as guilt/innocence, power/impotence, or man/woman. In the reduction to contours and liberation from the concrete details of time and space, the fixed images are transformed into scenes from well-known narratives. In contrast, through their interaction with superimposed visual layers, her spatial installations create complete narratives. The combination of murals, two-dimensional sculptural figures, collages, and found objects integrate diverse levels of reality and generate idiosyncratic spatial effects. Read more... Frank Plant Frank Plant is a Barcelona based American sculptor. Read more... Monica Cook Monica Cook paints beautiful and disturbing portraits of women. Read more... Stephen Mallon NEXT STOP ATLANTIC: Can you imagine if you were on the last drop? Read more...