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Sometimes you discover an artwork that perfectly externalises a very internal and personal struggle. Everything is fine by Toronto based 3D creator Everlstng or ‘Everlasting’, manages to both subtly and powerfully do just that. The work itself feels slightly cryptic. We find a central figure in a bright, pastel tinted room, looking at what could be an empty frame or a non-reflective mirror. The luminous and soothing tones of the setting contrast with the darkening smoke and fiery glow of the blaze that’s slowly consuming the character. Ever tiny detail of the room seems to enhance that surreal contrast, from the handcrafted, baroque wooden frame and side table to the grassy pink carpet. An empty pitcher within hand’s reach of the burning figure underlines a certain hopelessness. If only ‘someone’ would have filled this with water, if only ‘someone’ would have noticed the fire when it was just a spark... But as it stands these subtle hints have gone unnoticed and the looming tragedy is slowly becoming fact. The photo-realism of the piece is stunning, the interplay of colors and light ingeniously crafted. But the message I take from the artwork is perhaps strongest of all. We are surrounded by people who are silently suffering, who say ‘they’re fine’ when their worlds are quietly falling apart, who leave small hints that in hindsight we wish we would have caught sooner. It recalls the wonderful poem ‘A lesson’ from author ‘Lang Leav’: “There's a girl who smiles all the time, to show the world that she is fine. A boy who surrounds himself with friends, wishes that his life would end. For those who say they never knew, the saddest leave the least of clues…" "Everything is fine" (2021) by Everlstng https://www.instagram.com/evr.lstng/

As a lover of both art forms, I always find it a thing of particular beauty when a photographer can blur the lines between their work and physical painting. An artist whose visual poetry blends those seamlessly is Venezuelan born Samantha Cavet. This piece, dubbed The immortality of dreams from her ‘stories’ series, is steeped in mystery and melancholy. It’s protagonist, a faceless, hat-wearing stranger draped in a dark overcoat, recalls Magritte’s bowler hatted principal characters. The mix of the orange-tinted field at his (or her) feet, the dramatic, dark blue cloudscape above and the slightly soft focus/hazy texture really deliver that painterly, almost post-impressionistic feel. The landscape becomes as much a character as the solitary, central figure, picked without a doubt out of some not-too-distant daydream of the artist. Samantha’s process aims to create unusual visual works and the subdued surreal vibe she’s able to capture here certainly makes the work have an impact. The artist states that altering and editing photographs are an important step in her creative process, something that doubtlessly helps her fine-tune this unique photographic color palette. It’s amazing how the advancements in digital post-production have provided photographers with such a wide range of tools, leading to this part of the process sometimes becoming ‘as’ or even ‘more’ important than the snapping of the image itself. The narrative of the scene we witness remains a question, is the figure forever lost in the land of dreams or have we caught him/her at that moment when the barriers between fantasy and reality have grown their thinnest? Perhaps we are doomed to always wake up just before we find the answer. "The immortality of dreams" (2022) by Samantha Cavet https://www.samanthacavet.com/

Will the future of digital worlds see an architecture that’s only limited by the imagination of its creators? From Gaudi’s art nouveau La Sagrada Familia Cathedral to the expressionistic Lotus Temple in India, from the modernity of the museum of the future in Dubai to the surrealism of Frank Gehry’s dancing buildings in Prague, art and architecture have always held a deep and almost inseparable connection. Brooklyn based creative Kirk Finkel, better known as Untitled, xyz, could be called a modern embodiment of the merging of these two forms of human expression. The metaverse architect and digital artist manages to create cleverly unique and out worldly beautiful designs of which this piece, titled Lattice of Amber, is a great example. Volume 3 of his meta module series, this ‘impossible’ structure showcases a sensitive merger of geometrical patterns and colour schemes. Light is often key in Kirk’s work, as here the glowing reflectiveness of the building blocks of this floating ‘city’ make the complete work feel quite uplifting. This luminosity of the surfaces of the arches and central sphere only serve to add into highlighting a whole that both feels very familiar and abstract. The construction also hints feels at a potential to be built upon further, that perhaps it’s not quite finished. The work could be embracing the challenge of any modern city, where old and new must always struggle to fit together and the buildings like its people are forever in motion. We were fortunate to have the artist talk about this work in our collaborative twitter space with the Sandbox, check it out on our twitter page (a link will be added in the replies to this curator’s corner on twitter) to hear his perspective on this very piece. Alongside ‘Emerald City’ and ‘Nowhere Stairs’ you can find it as part of our ‘impossible worlds’ exhibit, which enters its final moments. If you haven’t already, don’t hesitate to come pay it a visit at the NFT institute in the Sandbox Metaverse. "Lattice of Amber" (2022) by Untitled, xyz https://www.untitledxyz.com/

Can digital art offer its creators a gateway to immortality? VR shaman Nate Talbot intriguingly explores the barriers between cyber and physical life with his 3D sculptures. When breathing life into his creations, he works with scans of decaying and living objects which range from fungi to human beings. What’s so fascinating is how Nate considers that process a way to immortalise the living elements he digitises, which raises the question of how art in general helps the living in some form vanquish our ultimate decay. If Goya painted Charles IV of Spain and we now still in some form give life to that person by experiencing that artwork, is that not some form of immortality as well? Besides the conceptually engaging narrative behind the works, pieces like Ascension have a far deeper value. The spiritual layer of the piece can be felt through its visual narrative, where we see a humanoid creature in an almost womb-like state. The ascension referenced in the title feels like an event just around the corner, perhaps the unfolding of some new evolutionary stage we’re secretly witnessing. The setting feels akin to a cloudy limbo, which could refer to that in-between world connecting the virtual and the tangible. The color palette feels slightly oceanic, evidencing how the digital seas are perhaps mirroring their real-life counterparts. Nate’s cybernetic explorations have formed an own brand of bio-art, creating their own unique universe. This was an important factor in the choice for me to reach out to Nate to feature this and two other works in the ‘Impossible Worlds’ MoCDA exhibit, currently running at the NFT institute in the Sandbox Metaverse. Be sure to pay it a visit and meditate with us on the different futures life could have in the digital world. "Ascension" (2021) by Nate Talbot https://www.natetalbot.ca/

How do you truly capture both the frighteningly absurd and oddly familiar irreality of a human dream? Somehow the work of video artist Joe Pease manages to find just the right ingredients to create that hypnotic cocktail. Open the floodgates is both visual poem and clever Lynchian puzzle, creating a slightly nightmarish reality with a wonderful juxtaposition of strangeness. In a piece that’s better experienced than described, we find a surreal standoff taking place, framed by the painted stripes and abandoned shopping carts of a supermarket parking lot. The narrative is for us to discover or perhaps imagine, as we observe the fragmentation of different memorable moments play out in the same frame. We find dancing cars, floating and multiplying men, thirsting for salvation or greedily grabbing for blown away loot of some dark deed gone wrong… The glitchy, VHS-like esthetic only adds to this offbeat symphony of geometrical balanced traffic signs and birds that fly in frame on cue. I can imagine a room filled with Joe’s work, wall to wall and falling into these loopy tableaux vivants, only to ‘wake’ hours later, still enchanted by their dreamy logic. But until that room becomes a reality, experiencing ‘Open the Floodgates’ here is as good start as any for a peek into the artist’s wild imagination. Part of a wonderful line-up for VerticalCrypto’s ‘Proof Of People’ event, my beloved London is lucky to have great artists like Joe Pease help brighten the start of their summer. "Open the floodgates" (2022) by Joe Pease https://www.instagram.com/joepease/

I’ve always been drawn to artists who somehow with their work can create an own reality. These often strange and surreal realms might reflect our own, might even be heavily tied to it, but something about the works make them alien and unique to the mindscape of said artist. 3D expert Benedict is one such creator and this work Inside The Void is one I wanted to share with you this week. Part of a series called ‘Emotionally Caused Disasters’, this piece transports us to a seemingly secret and hidden space where we’re greeted by a being or a landmark made entirely of faces or facets of one person. It almost feels as if a traumatic event in our world has created a twin in this realm, a sort of remnant of a tear-soaked moment so powerful that it created a life of its own. The interplay of colours make it seem like this odd sight is found underwater, but the clearly visible streaked faces make that, at least in earthly waters, an impossibility. Often when people speak of ghosts, they talk about strong emotional events that leave their mark on our world. Perhaps these haunted waters are populated by traces of a sadness so powerful it could not quite be forgotten. What marks the work of Benedict is their minute attention to detail and how the otherworldly of his images still often contains that trace of the familiar. There’s something profound in the thought, that moments of grief and depression are not wasted, but that there’s value in them, perhaps in ways we could have never imaged without the help of artists like Benedict. This artist, alongside an excellent group of master world builders, will be featured in the MoCDA/Sandbox exhibit ‘Impossible Worlds’, which will open in the Sandbox NFT Institute this Friday. "Inside The Void" by Benedict https://www.instagram.com/ibenedictfuc12/

If it’s true what they say, that our bodies are 67 percent made out of water, what mysteries could we discover in the depths of those inner oceans? This question came to me when first experiencing Marcela Bolivar’s enchanting photo painting Written in Waters. Some photographers paint with light, but Marcela takes things a step further and creates a unique blend of the painterly and the picturesque. Her visual poems summon an ethereal atmosphere that invite the viewer into a mystery that we may or may not uncover. The central figure of this piece feels like a man trying to connect with some imagined or real moment of the past. The fleshy frame that surrounds the murky depths of this ‘body of water’ seem to bind it to a moment long gone. The shadowy, reflected figure could be a lost lover or a forgotten friend, someone who was once important but now feels in danger of vanishing into the seas of time. Interesting is how the whole piece has the sense of being slightly submerged, with its out of focus edges and the blends of blue and white that paint the sky. Something I always love about digital art is how artists like Marcela find ways to re-invent different media to suit their stories and how the boundaries between artistic formats thus begin to ripple and blur. Coming from South America but currently living in Germany, Marcela is a creative whose visual sensibility manages to always make it feel like she’s shaping dreams. Not happy slumbers per se and maybe after a while, we do want to wake up, but like any powerful experience, the imagery still stays with us for a long time after it’s ended. "Written in Waters" (2021) by Marcela Bolivar https://www.marcelabolivar.com/

One of the most surprising things I find in 3D sculpture, is how artists often manage to create the most inventive and surreal worlds to express something deeply emotional and personal. A great example of this, is the work of Boston based digital virtuoso Sanidad Design (John Lakov). With this piece, titled Revealed, John seemingly hints at his own journey of (artistic) self-discovery. The central figure shoulders multiple faces, identities perhaps worn and discarded as we often are forced to do in our daily lives. But at the core we find a finished visage in all its fragile glory, naked but unafraid to finally be seen. The intricate details of the textures of John’s piece are spellbinding and his play with light and color give the work an outer worldly allure. It may appear like we’ve stumbled on a relic of some alien deity, the bronze-tinted, ornamental Fleur-de-lis like pattern making this feel even more like a hidden piece of worship, central in a faraway church dedicated to lost gods. But the symbolic piece underlines a very human and personal story, which makes it feel even more heartfelt. Who among us hasn’t searched or isn’t constantly searching who they are or can be, a journey that perhaps never ends, but for those brief moments that we feel at home, somewhen or someplace? What I love about John’s work is that it stimulates my imagination to dream beyond the confines of a standard reality whilst still maintaining ties to very human symbols and materials. His care to also marry the strangeness of his works with the right emotional expressions make the sculptures truly memorable. But don’t take my word for it and discover this and more of his works, perhaps they can even help you find out something about yourself in the process. "Revealed" by Sanidad Design https://worldofv.art/profile/sanidaddesign

In ‘A Farewell To Arms’ Ernest Hemingway wrote that ‘the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places’. Perhaps it is part of the human condition that none of us can escape the act of living quite unscathed and that at various moments in our existence we feel or are made to feel that we have to fix ourselves. This beautiful work by Korean digital artist and sculptor Kyuin Shim perfectly captures that part of our collective psyche to me. Kyuin’s 3D works show us surreal body alterations that can be both surprisingly tender and as in this case, profoundly emotional. The work, titled Thornstuckhog, had an immediate impact on me when I first saw it, one that lasted up until this moment where I can share it with you now. We see an androgynous human figure, who like a symbolic hedgehog, wears a layer of yellow handled screwdrivers pinned into its skin. For me this instantly linked to the idea we have or that gets pushed on us at times that there is something wrong with us, that we are essentially broken and need fixing. It also shows how much these feelings of inadequacy can weigh us down, to the point where we feel, perhaps like the shown character, that we’ve tried everything to fix our brokenness, but are finding that nothing works. There is an industry out there of self-help gurus that may or may not offer us solutions, but that economy (and many others) also need our insecurity and profit from sustaining it. This is of course a personal interpretation of this work and perhaps you see something very different in it, but that’s the beauty of a poetic and conceptual work like this. I always applaud artists who dare tackle the still too often taboo subject of mental health and create something truly beautiful as a result. I urge you to discover some of Kyuin’s other pieces as well, which combine a dreamlike sensibility with 3D experimentation. And yes, perhaps we all have things we would like to or need to ‘fix’, but let us, above all, be careful not to lose the person we really are in the process. "Thornstuckhog" by Kyuin Shim https://www.behance.net/shimkyuin

Sometimes, in life and in art, a seemingly minor gesture can become a major act of defiance. A famous German photograph from 1936 shows one man refusing to participate in giving the nazi salute, instead choosing to cross his arms, underlining how small choices can, at certain times, take an enormous amount of courage. I was reminded of this powerful image when discovering another one with this piece by Barcelona based digital artist Roman Shestakov aka Roshcov. Aptly called The Bravest this piece combines both an ironic humor with the spirit of non-violent resistance. The photo manipulation underlines the beauty of these rebellious acts, where indeed ‘the bravest’ sometimes choose not to stay silent when great injustices are being done. It poses the question on what we all would do when being placed in a similar situation, one that has hit home again for a lot of people around the world these days. The beauty of art is that sometimes it holds a mirror in front of us and makes us question our own moral judgements in life. The piece also shows us something about the beauty of non-verbal communication and how the raised middle finger has become one of the prime expressions against the status quo. What I really enjoy in Roshcov’s work is how he inventively is able to use his photoshop skills to probe deeper into the human condition and playfully explore an often darker side of societal issues. But ‘The Bravest’ I find particularly inspirational, because of the simplicity in which it can convey such a powerful message in both a funny and profound way. I hope this can inspire you to rebel against unjust systems and I leave you with the words of the great writer and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel: ‘Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.’ So don’t stay silent. "The Bravest" (2021) by Roshcov https://roshcov.com/

What if the painted figures of classical masterpieces were given the chance to be part of our modern day lives? This intriguing question gets visualized poignantly by Ukrainian artist Alexey Kondakov. His work, labelled as surrealist documentary photography, combines the lavishly depicted icons of mythologic past with the images of day to day life of mostly his home base of Kyiv. His recent series has highlighted the effects of the brutal war on his home country, but I chose to take one his earlier works to focus on today. The true delight of Alexey’s work for me comes in how he re-purposes the richly painted figures in often absurd, but also surprisingly emotional and poetic situations. His strength as a collage artist is the seamless integration of these masterpieces with their new background, shining a new light on the beauty of the original while repurposing them in often stunning fashion. This piece, Love Hit (In the Nightclub), combines the grimy, piss stained urinals of an underground haunt with the nude cherubs and central figure of ‘Le Printemps’ (The Return Of Spring) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The combination shouldn’t work as well as it actually does, which only highlights Alexey’s achievements in finding that right balance between his real life locations and the featured artwork. The red tones of the lights make it feel like we’re witnessing some forbidden secret, a though shared by the puritans who found the original work too provocative and even physically attacked the painting. Perhaps that’s why the figures now have found a moment of refuge in the last place we would expect them and have fully embraced the salacious undertones their original pursuers saw in them. Or it can remind us that we can find beauty everywhere, even hidden between the discarded beer bottles and traces of midnight vomit. The location could be in Kyiv, I have not found the setting confirmed anywhere, but if it is, one could hope that its angelic visitors helped safeguard the place from harm. "Love Hit (In the Nightclub)" (2020) by Alexey Kondakov http://alksko.com/

A fear we as humans face, is that of decaying bit by bit, both physically and mentally, till nothing of our essence remains and we are ultimately forgotten. In the digital age this has extended to literal bits and bytes of our online personalities and as hard drives stop spinning and cloud servers crash, our backed-up avatars might one day only remain as degrading memories. Visualising this perfectly to me, is this work by talented 3D ‘techspressionist’ Felix Rothschild. Realizations – no. 627 shows us that loss of self, how tragic it might be, can also have beauty to it. In the text accompanying the work, the German artist muses that perhaps we theorise too much about time travel and how it could change our present, when at the same time we forget doing the small things in the present that have the potential to profoundly change our future. Thus we could imagine in the work a faceless, androgynous figure either stuck in an inability to change or an unwillingness to, leading to a certain half-life between one state and the next. I always enjoy works that are open to subjective interpretations, and the beauty of Felix’s creations is both his aesthetic sensibility and his background as a glitch artist, where imperfections and disruptions create their own poetic sensibility. There is a sadness in this piece I was instantly drawn to, we as an audience are offered a glimpse of a figure but see it a moment before disappearing, making us both more curious and frustrated about our inability perhaps as humans to control time at all. Could this be a realisation the artist experienced as well while creating the piece, that while we might dream of changing things both in our past and present lives, the sands of time ultimately must slip through our fingers, unable to even make that minor of an impact on history? I urge you to take in this beautiful piece and discover more of Felix’s work, which explores the uncanny and disorienting sides of visual digital technologies as they interrupt traditional perceptions of self, order and place. "Realizations – no. 627" by Felix Rothschild https://felixwaackoutlookcom.portfoliobox.net/