Rollin Leonard

Few days ago has taken place the closing of Trunks, Stems, & Heads a solo show by Rollin Leonard at Transfer Gallery where he presented some new great pieces. The photographic work of Rollin is highly focused on human bodies which frequently is his own body and portraits the source to be manipulated and distorted. This time Rollin has also used several models to continue the mesmerising animated and static work in which for some pieces he has translated pixels into cells of plexiglas by installing and distorting the bodies cell by cell, this also reflects how manual is his  experimental work process, it doesn't matter if it's physical or digital Rollin animates and works everything manually creating somehow conscious glitches. See more;

"Trunks, Stems, & Heads is a new body of work from Rollin Leonard. The focus of his first solo exhibition is the human form – organs, limbs and torsos are strewn about, arranged into impossible creatures, disfigured through collision and installed as highly aestheticized, meticulously polished piles of digitally mutilated forms. The work is shiny and fleshy, and offers a new take on portraiture that captures the shifting perception of the physical self in our contemporary digital moment.

Human faces, bodies, and familiar objects are frequent subjects for the artist – he is interested in our innate ability to recognize the objects despite scrambling or distorting the image. A face, a subject with high visual elasticity, is especially resistant to being obscured or lost in pattern. Just as you see faces in wood grain, clouds, and shadows, your mind easily knits human form together even when fragmented.

The artist’s photographic practice serves as the basis for the work. After capturing his subjects at precise angles, Leonard manipulates their bodies into highly composed and calculated compositions of looped moving image, digital collage and plexiglass installation pieces." - Transfer Gallery

Yes / No, 2013

animated loop, photographic video application

360° / 18 Lilia, 2013

36 second Yes / No, 2013, animated loop, photographic video

Cell Body (Panty), (Stocking) and (Joe) 2013 

730 1 by 1, 702 1 by 1 and 838 1 by 1 inch pieces respectively 

c-print face-mounted to 1/2 inch cell-cast Plexiglas

 

Installation view at Transfer Gallery_

Crash Kiss (Guthrie & Ellis), 2013

Crash Kiss (Jorge & Giselle), 2013

Arm Ball (Rollin), 2013

Arm Ball (Lilia), 2013

Cell Face (Rollin), 2013

41 2 by 2 inch pieces, c-print face-mounted to 1/2 inch cell-cast Plexiglas

Belly Chain on a Donut- Shaped Universe, 2013

tile texture for the Donuts_

Rollin Leonard at Fa-g.org

Screenshot from "Pig Pile", video.

Last wednesday the online gallery Fach and Asendorf founded by Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach, featured a new show called "Rearrangements" by Rollin Leonard. I really like the different basic tools and ways Rollin used to create all the pieces at the exhibition. See more; 

Rollin Leonard tells us more about his pieces and their process;
"Pictures of my friends are rearranged by moving pixels around. Groups of pixels are shuffled, made to fill a container, dispersed, and smushed. 

The methods for making these animations were fairly crude, using the basic selection tools in Photoshop (some were simple enough that I could have used MS Paint) and simply defined heuristics. For the 'Pig Pile' video I moved the bodies down little-by-little until they hit the floor or were impeded by another stationary pixel. I did this until there was no space between pixels on the vertical axis. The basic rule was: move the pixels down until they run into something.

Like 'Pig Pile,' most of the images are self-decoding except possibly for 'Faro Shuffle, Bethany.' A Faro shuffle, also called perfect shuffle, is a technical feat that card magicians try to master. What I imagined was seeing the side of the deck with an image printed on it -- rows of pixels as the edges of cards. When the deck is arranged in the default position out of the box it would show the complete image of Bethany. As you shuffle the image would scramble but eventually, since the shuffle is perfect, it returns to the original arrangement. This was something I wanted to see that my mind's eye was having trouble picturing.

The outliers might be the 'Disappear' gif animations. The technique used to create them was a more complicated, automated process -- peeling away one layer of pixels at a time and scattering them along crisscrossing paths."

All images and GIFs courtesy Fach and Asendorf Gallery, see the full exhibition here.

Splat, Franky

Screenshot from "Bicycle Crash", video.

 

Disappear, Gillian & Shannon

Free Falling by Ezri Tarazi

What an amazing performing process shows this project called Free Falling, made by designer Ezri Tarazi. It is done by transforming a trapezoidal box made from a perforated metal sheets into a chair by the fall of a mannequin filled with concrete.The mannequin is pressed into the prism’s surface to create a subtly different shape each time. See more;

via | dezeen

Dutch Wife by Jesse Kanda

Dutch Wife is the latest great project by Jesse Kanda. An experimental animated short film, directed, animated and sountracked by Kanda. Inspired by all the greens which are floating these days in the canals of London. See more;

Jesse has used Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects, and Ableton Live for making the film. See a  nice explanation about the project at Creative Applications.

Michael Alan

"Dissecting, amplifying, sampling and distorting, Michael Alan explores spaces that walk along the edge of figure and the abstract. These pictures are interpretations of the human body within the world, which is simply an abstraction of our minds. The body is abstract, emotions are abstract. Alan uses his surface as an emotional reader to document these intangible realities." See more;

"Through various layers, media, and techniques, Alan approaches the work as a celebration of the attainable and unexplainable. Each work is disembodied, dislocated, space and anatomy are questioned. Body parts and their “order” are re-imagined, and working through layers, water-color, line work, faces, shapes and an army of images, Alan renders perceptible volume in 2-dimensional pieces. Rather than making definitive statements, his pictures rest on the edge of a question and its answer: enigmas."

watercolor, ink, paint, oil on wood panel

watercolor, ink, paint, oil on wood panel

watercolor, ink, pencil on paper

watercolor, ink, paint, on paper

ink on paper

ink on paper

ink on paper