Mateusz Urbanowicz
Tokyo Storefront series
Tokyo Storefront series
You can feel so much in a single day—your morning can begin with you at the brink of being, without even the energy needed to get out of bed; and your evening can end with you as a fierce and fiery incarnation of joy, drawing amazed smiles everywhere you go. This depth and breadth of feeling—of being—is fully explored in Joana Neves’ work, which shows that melancholy and might aren’t mutually exclusive.
We’re always trying to process all this information, all these ideas and thoughts and stimuli—it’s too, much; we fail at it constantly. But what if the world presented itself to the eye and brain in ways that were more digestible, more like charts and graphs we read so easily? Ori Toor’s worlds are like that, dense, colorful images feeling like the world’s most beautiful infographics, emotion, form, idea crammed together in shapes that are fun and easy to parse.
Symbols of life and liberty clash with the iconography of death and decay in Kamil Burman’s work—not in a harsh way, but in a way that reflects the balance between creation and destruction that we see in nature.
What we see so often depends on who we are. Our experiences shape our eyes as much as our genetics do. Jo Aguilar plays with this truth, bending image to allow the viewer to decide exactly what it is they see.
Life itself is short, so it is no surprise that what is best in life often seems fleeting. Angie Kang suspends those gentle moments in soft, vibrant color, making mementos that melt the callouses from one’s heart.
There’s a lot about living that we don’t understand. And that lack of knowledge is scary. We try to fill that void with science, but all our equations and hypotheses often aren’t much better than the legends and myths our ancestors cooked up. And so those old stories endure, sometimes in unnerving ways, like when you’re sure you felt something move in the dark. Silvia Vanni makes those frightening things accessible, even cute, in part by connecting them to the universal, reminding us that no matter what you believe, no matter what you experience, you’re doing and feeling things millions of other humans have done and felt.
It doesn’t seem like too much to ask to ask to live a good life. What that means exactly differs from person to person, but living well doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s like in Stephanie Birdsong’s work, where scenes of hestial bliss and the comforts of community are rendered with colorful verve and a hint of the surreal.
We want answers. We want help. Some of us turn to religion; others to the mystic that Merritt Cates so skillfully depicts, where solace and hope can be found in the surreal and unknown, where ancient wisdom is made relevant to modern living, and where—sometimes—that which you seek can be found.
