TINSEL TOWN HEROES

Ellen Von Unwerth

Ellen Von Unwerth

Ellen Von Unwerth’s thirty-year storied career defined the aesthetic of the 90’s and 2000’s and has made her a staple of fashion photography. Crafting cinematic scenarios for her shoots, Von Unwerth’s flashy, kinky, and humorous photographs invite viewers to come along on a boisterous escapade. By furnishing each of her subjects with a new persona to inhabit, she allows their inhibitions to melt away. The story telling aspect in her creative process has allowed her to create images that are never static and begs the question, “what is really going on here?” The inherent sexuality in her images is never without fun, and the subjects within her works are always powerful - positioned in control of their sex appeal.

2 ETH

0 / 20 pieces

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February 23rd 2023 | 16:00


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TINSEL TOWN HEROES

Ellen Von Unwerth profile photo

Ellen Von Unwerth

Ellen Von Unwerth’s thirty-year storied career defined the aesthetic of the 90’s and 2000’s and has made her a staple of fashion photography. Crafting cinematic scenarios for her shoots, Von Unwerth’s flashy, kinky, and humorous photographs invite viewers to come along on a boisterous escapade. By furnishing each of her subjects with a new persona to inhabit, she allows their inhibitions to melt away. The story telling aspect in her creative process has allowed her to create images that are never static and begs the question, “what is really going on here?” The inherent sexuality in her images is never without fun, and the subjects within her works are always powerful - positioned in control of their sex appeal.

Fugue State Revisited, is an on-going exploration of the future legacies of photography, with a focus on the life span of digital files. After the loss of a hard drive that held 20 years of analog scans, I received only half the files back in recovery. The rest of the files were corrupted, each totally unique in how the machine damages and reinterprets the pixels. This alarming result made me begin to consider ever-shifting digital platforms and file formats, and I realized that much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility. The Getty Research Institute states, “While you are still able to view family photographs printed over 100 years ago, a CD with digital files on it from only 10 years ago might be unreadable because of rapid changes to software and the devices we use to access digital content.” As an analog photographer, rather than let the machine have the last word, I have cyanotyped over my damaged digital scans. I use silhouettes of portraits from my archives as a way to conceal and reveal the corruption. By using historical processes to create a physical object, I guarantee that this image will not be lost in the current clash between the digital file and the materiality of a photographic print. Fugue State Revisited calls attention to the fact that today’s digital files may not retain their original state, or even exist, in the next century. As we are reliant on technology to keep our images intact for future generations, it begs the question, who will maintain our hard drives after we are gone? Will we be able to conserve photographs that speak to family histories? These are important considerations for our visual futures, as we may be leaving behind photographs that will be reimagined by machines.

Two years (and counting) of Covid and quarantine has allowed us to reevaluate the contours of our lives; where and with whom we live, what institutional systems do or don’t work for us, what we keep and what we discard, both materially and psychologically. Shaking off what was, and embracing what will be, is necessary. A call for submissions was held and three artists were chosen to drop their collections. Marcin T. Jozefiak, Julia Kafizova, and Margaret Murphy.

Guadalupe celebrates Mexico’s beloved patron saint, Our Lady of Guadalupe, while exploring the ways she has impacted my life. These images are a reinterpretation of Guadalupe’s symbolism which, for me, transcends their religious origin. Instead, this series is intended to honor the divine feminine energy, sacredness, and healing that Guadalupe's imagery can encapsulate for people of all genders and backgrounds. These photos explore topics such as womanhood, masculinity, and piety and ask, what does it mean to be divine? The project includes portraits of family and friends who share my affinity with Guadalupe, as well as images of apparitions found in various public places. I also created images that reimage Guadalupe in a contemporary context. Each is distinct, but serves one purpose - to connect people.

​From an erupting volcano to a sweeping tornado to the lunar landing, nothing is what it appears to be. Welcome to Matthew Albanese's extraordinary world, where "icy" glaciers are made of sugar, salt, egg whites, food coloring, flour, and light. There is more than what meets the eye in Albanese’s captivating photographs. Albanese meticulously fabricates and then photographs small-scale models of complex panoramic vistas, such as wind-blown willows on stormy rivers and raging forest fires, using humble materials including cotton batting, boiled sugar candy, sand, and feathers. By manipulating the scale, depth of field, balance, and lighting, he alters the appearance of the materials to create dramatic and emotionally evocative landscapes.

The world's best curated Photography

Ellen Von Unwerth’s thirty-year storied career defined the aesthetic of the 90’s and 2000’s and has made her a staple of fashion photography. Crafting cinematic scenarios for her shoots, Von Unwerth’s flashy, kinky, and humorous photographs invite viewers to come along on a boisterous escapade. By furnishing each of her subjects with a new persona to inhabit, she allows their inhibitions to melt away. The story telling aspect in her creative process has allowed her to create images that are never static and begs the question, “what is really going on here?” The inherent sexuality in her images is never without fun, and the subjects within her works are always powerful - positioned in control of their sex appeal.

Fugue State Revisited, is an on-going exploration of the future legacies of photography, with a focus on the life span of digital files. After the loss of a hard drive that held 20 years of analog scans, I received only half the files back in recovery. The rest of the files were corrupted, each totally unique in how the machine damages and reinterprets the pixels. This alarming result made me begin to consider ever-shifting digital platforms and file formats, and I realized that much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility. The Getty Research Institute states, “While you are still able to view family photographs printed over 100 years ago, a CD with digital files on it from only 10 years ago might be unreadable because of rapid changes to software and the devices we use to access digital content.” As an analog photographer, rather than let the machine have the last word, I have cyanotyped over my damaged digital scans. I use silhouettes of portraits from my archives as a way to conceal and reveal the corruption. By using historical processes to create a physical object, I guarantee that this image will not be lost in the current clash between the digital file and the materiality of a photographic print. Fugue State Revisited calls attention to the fact that today’s digital files may not retain their original state, or even exist, in the next century. As we are reliant on technology to keep our images intact for future generations, it begs the question, who will maintain our hard drives after we are gone? Will we be able to conserve photographs that speak to family histories? These are important considerations for our visual futures, as we may be leaving behind photographs that will be reimagined by machines.

Two years (and counting) of Covid and quarantine has allowed us to reevaluate the contours of our lives; where and with whom we live, what institutional systems do or don’t work for us, what we keep and what we discard, both materially and psychologically. Shaking off what was, and embracing what will be, is necessary. A call for submissions was held and three artists were chosen to drop their collections. Marcin T. Jozefiak, Julia Kafizova, and Margaret Murphy.

Guadalupe celebrates Mexico’s beloved patron saint, Our Lady of Guadalupe, while exploring the ways she has impacted my life. These images are a reinterpretation of Guadalupe’s symbolism which, for me, transcends their religious origin. Instead, this series is intended to honor the divine feminine energy, sacredness, and healing that Guadalupe's imagery can encapsulate for people of all genders and backgrounds. These photos explore topics such as womanhood, masculinity, and piety and ask, what does it mean to be divine? The project includes portraits of family and friends who share my affinity with Guadalupe, as well as images of apparitions found in various public places. I also created images that reimage Guadalupe in a contemporary context. Each is distinct, but serves one purpose - to connect people.

​From an erupting volcano to a sweeping tornado to the lunar landing, nothing is what it appears to be. Welcome to Matthew Albanese's extraordinary world, where "icy" glaciers are made of sugar, salt, egg whites, food coloring, flour, and light. There is more than what meets the eye in Albanese’s captivating photographs. Albanese meticulously fabricates and then photographs small-scale models of complex panoramic vistas, such as wind-blown willows on stormy rivers and raging forest fires, using humble materials including cotton batting, boiled sugar candy, sand, and feathers. By manipulating the scale, depth of field, balance, and lighting, he alters the appearance of the materials to create dramatic and emotionally evocative landscapes.

Two years (and counting) of Covid and quarantine has allowed us to reevaluate the contours of our lives; where and with whom we live, what institutional systems do or don’t work for us, what we keep and what we discard, both materially and psychologically. Shaking off what was, and embracing what will be, is necessary. A call for submissions was held and three artists were chosen to drop their collections. Marcin T. Jozefiak, Julia Kafizova, and Margaret Murphy.

Guadalupe celebrates Mexico’s beloved patron saint, Our Lady of Guadalupe, while exploring the ways she has impacted my life. These images are a reinterpretation of Guadalupe’s symbolism which, for me, transcends their religious origin. Instead, this series is intended to honor the divine feminine energy, sacredness, and healing that Guadalupe's imagery can encapsulate for people of all genders and backgrounds. These photos explore topics such as womanhood, masculinity, and piety and ask, what does it mean to be divine? The project includes portraits of family and friends who share my affinity with Guadalupe, as well as images of apparitions found in various public places. I also created images that reimage Guadalupe in a contemporary context. Each is distinct, but serves one purpose - to connect people.

​From an erupting volcano to a sweeping tornado to the lunar landing, nothing is what it appears to be. Welcome to Matthew Albanese's extraordinary world, where "icy" glaciers are made of sugar, salt, egg whites, food coloring, flour, and light. There is more than what meets the eye in Albanese’s captivating photographs. Albanese meticulously fabricates and then photographs small-scale models of complex panoramic vistas, such as wind-blown willows on stormy rivers and raging forest fires, using humble materials including cotton batting, boiled sugar candy, sand, and feathers. By manipulating the scale, depth of field, balance, and lighting, he alters the appearance of the materials to create dramatic and emotionally evocative landscapes.


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In a world where we take hundreds of photos to document our lives and curate our memories, Singaporean artists and adolescent friends Shavonne Wong and Lenne Chai are examining if memories, just like images, can be easily manipulated to fit our desired version of the truth. For this project, Shavonne Wong, an award-winning photographer turned 3D virtual model creator, has collaborated with Lenne Chai, an acclaimed US-based Singaporean fashion photographer to create a series of images depicting an imaginary young girl's transition from girlhood to adolescence, sculpted digitally. This 3D model is an amalgamation of their younger selves, and is inspired by their upbringing in Singapore. Their virtual teenage character hangs out in her bedroom, makes soap bubbles with a friend, takes naps by the sea shore… There is a dream-like quality in the works that underpins an uncanniness to these digitally-crafted realistic pieces. Echoing a larger trend that questions authenticity in the way we represent and document ourselves, this work takes it a step further to consider the subjectivity of memory. If memories, just like images, can be just as easily manipulated to fit our desired version of truth, then what is real and not?

Each artwork from SLABS also comes with a corresponding airdrop, titled DISCS. DISCS are circular compositions based on SLABS, moving away from the rectangular format to create a more sculptural experience, where each artwork appears like a hovering spherical object. Finally, there are 50 SLABS in total: 45 of them are composed and 5 of them are all-overs, making them more unique.

Reflecting on issues of discrimination in face recognition technology and the lack of representation of non western artworks in GAN generated art, Linda Dounia brings the first large scale AI drop by an African woman. Working off her own works with acrylic painting, Dounia, who has originally caught the attention of the crypto art world as an illustrator, makes a bold move into generative art. Spannungsbogen is a series of AI generated animations which are outputs of a GAN trained with 2,000 abstract acrylic vignettes hand painted by the artist. These outputs are then arranged following an indexing system that considers form, colour, and texture. The work is inspired by the Fremen of Frank Herbert’s Dune, and the relationship of this group of people with the mighty sandworms. In Herbert’s words, spannungsbogen is ‘the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing’. It’s an ode to the invisible creatures in the cracks and crevasses of the world, patiently lying in wait for their turn to freely exist. Spannungsbogen is a conversation between artist and machine, a dialectical search for meaning between a thinking mind and a feeling one, and an ode to the quietly brewing resistances within us and throughout the universe.

The 20 unique animations from Marjan Moghaddam’s new collection #GlitchGods are a counterpoint to her project #GlitchGoddesses. With humor, precision, and striking technical skills, the OG female crypto artist reflects on facets of modern male identity. As a metaphor for the contemporary body that morphs and iterates changing ideas, identities and moods, Marjan Moghaddam carefully shapes post-humanist bodies that resist static sculptural forms. Her recognizable figurative style is rooted in her use of 3dCG. She mixes 3d modeling, 2d painting, pose-to-pose 3d animation, procedural animation, motion graphics, simulation, dynamics, and compositing SFX. Additional glitches further articulate the sculptural volumes.


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