2025-11-15 03:17:00
After six momentous leaps from a small aircraft, skydiver Gabriel C. Brown completed his mission. Brown is friends with astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy and now, also one of his collaborators. Together, the pair created a stunning image that shows the adventurous subject falling in front of the sun.
McCarthy is known for his incredible patience and planning, which has led him to capture an array of striking photos and composites detailing cosmic phenomena. This most recent piece, titled “The Fall of Icarus,” details the roiling, fiery surface of the sun with his friend’s upside-down silhouette. The pair undertook this project this past weekend in Arizona.
Like much of his work, this image is a composite that stitches together a collection of high-resolution captures. McCarthy and Brown had to coordinate the jump and subsequent shots to reveal the latter’s free fall, footage of which they share on Instagram.
“The Fall of Icarus” is available as a limited-edition print in McCarthy’s shop, where you can find more of his work. (via PetaPixel)
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2025-11-15 00:49:00
Li Songsong (previously) has long centered his practice around translating archival imagery, whether it be a portrait printed in a newspaper or still from a film. The Chinese artist is broadly interested in the ways that memories morph over time and how, when we’re reflecting on a moment well in the past, our clarity over the particulars can be hazy.
His new body of work, History Painting, takes a similar technical approach, although rather than interpret a specific scene, Li ventures into the abstract. Wide, impasto layers of oil paint cloak the large-scale canvas, creating a cacophony of color and texture that seems to swell upward while simultaneously pulling downward. As a filmed studio visit shows, the artist works from top down, adding one thick mark atop another in a sort of grid.
Pace Gallery, which represents Li, shares that History Painting reflects more on his relationship to the medium than any specific visual source, although, given his past work, it’s difficult not to try to find definition within the composition. The clustered ridges of paint, for example, might evoke bodies huddled together in mass, their backs to the viewer as they move toward an unknown destination. For Li, these brushstrokes, while abstract, do retain a sense of action and autonomy, and he describes them as “agentive and idiosyncratic” even as they’re covered again and again.
History Painting is on view through December 20 in New York.
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2025-11-14 22:45:12
Known for addressing issues of censorship and inequality, Iranian artist Arghavan Khosravi (previously) has long utilized her bold, fragmented works to confront large-scale problems relevant around the world. Her alluring color palettes and delicate motifs catch the eye and are paired with distinct symbols of tension: a chain lock, cords binding body parts, and roiling flames.
While her concerns are global, Khosravi has always considered her practice somewhat of a balm that helps her cope with trying times. And so the inward turn of her latest body of work perhaps ventures farther into this territory as she allows herself to delve deep into a personal and collective subconscious.
The past year has engendered a period of introspection, which the artist translates into a collection of smaller, altar-esque pieces. She refers to them as “intimate constructions where interior space carries its own symbolism. It’s been a way to move inward for a moment, allowing ideas to surface without a predetermined destination.”
Both the subconscious and symbolic have long figured prominently in her work, and recent pieces are similar. Many layer seemingly disparate components into surreal scenes, with recurring imagery of long, flowing hair, bright orbs of light, birds, and patterns from historic Persian architecture and design. Whereas earlier works frequently incorporated windows, doorways, and other portal-like structures, Khosravi’s newer pieces peer outward from inside, inviting the viewer into a new realm.
The artist is in the early stages of preparing for an upcoming solo show at Uffner & Liu in New York next year. Until then, follow her practice on Instagram.
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2025-11-13 23:58:05
Joy Machine is excited to present General Strike, an exhibition of 70+ matchboxes, opening on November 21 in Chicago.
What does solidarity mean for the artist? Or, what can art do in a time of crisis? The concept of a general strike is appealing to many advocates and activists because, in the face of oppression or inequality, it’s one of the few options available to the general public. General strikes are sometimes thought of as the “people’s veto,” and for the un-unionized among us, are less about joining our colleagues on the picket lines and more a call for solidarity. They ask us to pinpoint our strengths and identify how our skills can best be of use.
Writing about the need and dream of solidarity, activist and novelist Sarah Schulman describes recognition, risk, and creativity as the essential tools in harnessing “the people power necessary to reach the tipping point that transforms lives and, in the most extreme conditions of brutality, actually saves lives.” For artists, these three tenets–recognition, risk, and creativity–are often already the building blocks of a practice. Discerning eyes and trenchant observations, personal sacrifices and provocative positions, combined with a wealth of imagination, are evident in both the studio and the streets. Artists are in many ways world-builders, helping to illuminate what’s previously gone unnoticed or otherwise been thought impossible.
In General Strike, we witness more than 70 approaches to a singular object: a large, wooden matchbox. Containing purple-tipped matchsticks, these vessels of potential display a wide array of mediums and methodologies offered by artists across North America. While some revel in whimsy, beauty, and the pleasures of life, others direct us toward bold, decisive action. All, in their own ways, speak to an innate impulse to transform something simple into another thing entirely.
Like any crisis, whether tangible or of conscience, what’s required is a variety of responses, the best of which fan the flames of courage and ultimately insist on our shared humanity. The particularities of such approaches–and those stoking their creation–are what make this fight worthwhile, especially when we’re all striking together.
A portion of the proceeds from all work sold in General Strike will be donated to the ACLU. RSVP to the opening reception.
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2025-11-13 19:08:00
Combining painted panels with delicate planes of kiln-fired glass, Kate Clements explores the nature of fragility. Glass is “a material defined by its capacity to hold tension,” she tells Colossal. “It can break, shatter, or shift at any moment. That awareness of impermanence has long been an undertone throughout my work: a nervous hum beneath the surface.”
Clements works with a granular substance called frit, which she composes into forms like leaves, insects, and birds directly onto a kiln shelf. When fired, these colorful drawings fuse into wafer-thin panels, which she then applies to painted panels or suspends in installations. Often incorporating patterns evocative of wallpaper and motifs that suggest architectural structures or niches, she plays with relationships between rigidity and fluidity and the artificial and the organic.
“The material has become almost an extension of my hand and my body through mark-making and scale,” Clements says, sharing that the process is quite meditative. “It’s about precision and intuition coexisting—knowing how to shape the material and when to let the glass move on its own terms in the kiln.”
The versatility of the medium, balanced with its inherent changeability, continues to fascinate Clements—especially the tension between control and risk. Like any material fired in a kiln, it has the potential to react in surprising ways or transform differently than expected. And once assembled into large-scale works through a process the artist likens to collage, the thin panels appear very delicate, like sugar sculptures, as if they could crumble or break with the slightest touch.
“Earlier pieces leaned into that unease,” Clements says. “I was drawn to the way glass can induce anxiety—the uneasy power of beauty that could, at any instant, turn on its head. That instability felt like a mirror of the world around us: alluring, dangerous, and unpredictable all at once.” More recent works build upon this sensitivity while emphasizing the ethereal qualities of the translucent medium, suspending delicate panels from the ceiling to create more solid, architectural forms.
Clements’ sculpture titled “Acanthus,” reminiscent of a gleaming triumphal arch, is on view at the Nelson Atkins Museum in the group exhibition Personal Best through August 9, 2026. New work is also in NOCTURNES, a solo show in the art gallery of Kansas City Community College, which continues through November 14. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
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2025-11-13 02:57:25
The poetic idea that “doors are the architecture of intimacy” grounds a new installation by Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, a.k.a. Vhils (previously). Against the stunning desert backdrop of the Pyramids of Giza, “Doors of Cairo” is a site-specific work featuring a layered collection of Vhils’ distinctive etched portraits. Faces peer out from the weathered structures, some of which nest in the sand while others tower above on scaffolding.
Contrasting the ancient tombs with an installation that will dot the landscape for just a month, Vhils explores the ways we mark the world and how our imprints endure over time. “The pyramids were built for kings and gods, meant to last forever. My installation is made from wood and memory, and it will soon disappear,” he says. “Yet both belong to the same human impulse, to build, to remember, to leave a trace.”
“Doors of Cairo” is part of the fifth Forever Is Now project, an ongoing exhibition curated by Art D’Égypte with the support of UNESCO. Vhils is the first Portuguese artist invited to participate in the project, and he tethers his homeland to the historic site. All 65 repurposed doors were sourced from demolition sites and renovation projects between the two countries, and each bears traces of former use, whether chipped paint, scuffed surfaces, or faint fingerprints that linger in a well-worn spot.
The fragmented portraits don’t depict anyone specific but rather function as stand-ins for people past and present. “A single face can represent one person, but it can also stand for a community, a generation, or a shared emotional landscape,” the artist says. “It speaks to how people and places are inseparable, how memory becomes embedded in matter, and how identity is built from many invisible layers.”
After six months of carving in his studio—and creating a smaller, sculptural iteration that will live beyond the outdoor installation—Vhils spent three days working on site, shaping and reshaping the composition. “It evolved intuitively, door by door, guided by their scale, texture, and rhythm,” he shares. “This project is a dialogue between the everyday and the eternal, between the wooden doors of ordinary lives and the stone pyramids that have outlasted civilisations. It is a reminder that even what is temporary can carry the weight of time.”
“Doors of Cairo” is on view through December 7. Find more from the artist on Instagram.
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