David Bayus

 

These intriguingly textural mixed-media works are produced by David Bayus. Like Daniel Sparkes, my last post, the idea involves integrating drawing and painting into photographs to create an uncanny effect.

Daniel Sparkes

Daniel Sparkes makes suprising mixed-media works that combine a street art aesthetic, pop surrealism and photography.

Chloe Piene

 

I love these totally Spartan anatomy drawings by Chloe Piene. The free-floating lines combined with a monk-like austerity produce a really interesting effect.

Sydney Hardin

"In retaliation, my work takes this marketing of female sexual identity to what I perceive as its logical extremes. These are my interpretations - both sinister and humorous - of the eroticized chimeras to which some look for inspiration, and others look for titillation." - Sydney Hardin

First an apology for a lack of updates, dear readers. I had the plague.

Sydney Hardin produces these amazingly entertaining feminist works from her desire to explode what she sees as flimsy, shallow depictions of women in the media. To this end she uses actually flimsy, shallow blow-up-love-dolls. Palin is great, but my personal favourite is 'Inflatable Love Doll Descending a Staircase' (bottom) for a superbly matter-of-fact title.

She has also somehow snapped up the enviable domain giantvagina.com

Todd Freeman

Todd Freeman plays with printmaking's credibility as a reproductive medium, using naturalist text-book prints as his sources. His work ridicules the sometimes outrageous inaccuracies found in early naturalist prints, where the artists were often working from second-hand descriptions or dessicated body-parts rather than actual animals.

I Hate Martine Emdur

 

Seriously, they remind me of those 1000 piece puzzles with the dolphins and the sea-horses. These are just photorealism, people! Not even very well done photorealism! Let me tell you, they look worse than that little picture up there as well, because in real life they're stupidly huge.They all have dorky names like 'Serenity' and 'Sapphire Tide' as well.

I wouldn't care so much, except every show of hers sells out (and I mean for tens of thousands of dollars) and I can be a bit of a jealous prick.

Danie Mellor

I think most Australian arty types have heard of Danie Mellor. A few people I know seem to hate him though, and I've never quite worked out why... the complaints given include: lack of skill (huh?), incomprehensibility, arty-fartiness yada yada.

Cynicism about art addressing Australia's horrific past is rare, and yet one of the few worthy artists working in that field seems to cop a lot of flack. Oh well.