2025-05-08 23:30:37
On large swaths of colorful mesh, Kandy G. Lopez embroiders large-scale portraits of people from historically marginalized communities. “Her works are created out of the necessity to learn something new about her people and culture,” says a statement.
Drawing on her Afro-Caribbean ancestry, the Fort Lauderdale-based artist celebrates the style, culture, and heritage of individuals as a way to build connections and generate dialogue around representation.
Lopez began working with mesh and fiber almost ten years ago, but she began to approach it more seriously as a major tenet of her practice in 2021 while an artist-in-residence at The Hambidge Center in Georgia. “As a painter, my backgrounds were minimal. Sometimes they would have monochromatic cityscapes,” Lopez tells Colossal, “So, leaving the background rare is something I’m familiar with.”
Visibility, presence, and representation are vital to the artist’s work. In each composition, she centers vibrantly dressed, life-size figures so their gazes directly meet the viewer. Through the use of material and metaphor — like layered threads suggesting how BIPOC individuals “disappear and reappear” — she intertwines notions of community, resilience, and narrative. “I love the connections and stories that the individuals tell but also how the stories narrate the material,” she says.
The gridded backgrounds evoke associations with neighborhood street patterns and the overlapping layers of woven warp and weft. “I also love the metaphor in transparency, layers, and vulnerability,” the artist says, sharing that she sometimes still incorporates cityscapes painted onto the mesh.
Lopez is represented by ACA Galleries. See more on her website and Instagram.
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2025-05-08 22:09:10
Imagine standing at a window at dawn as the pale yellow morning light filters through the trees, slowly illuminating flower petals and setting the scene for birdsong. As you move around, the light dapples and changes, and details emerge or disappear around other forms. For Élise Peroi, this sensation provides a starting point for elegant textile sculptures.
Onto graceful wooden frames, the French artist weaves ethereal, layered screens evocative of dreamy portals to nature. “The luminosity of Peroi’s woven paintings is such that we might feel ourselves carried outside to watch the sky brighten, the air soft against our skin,” says Dr. Rebecca Birrell in an essay accompanying Peroi’s solo exhibition, For Thirsting Flowers, at CARVALHO PARK.
The artist taps into the long tradition of European tapestries, which were used for both decoration and to help keep homes and churches insulated. Stitched by hand, the works could reach architectonic proportions and contain highly detailed figurative and narrative scenes. Peroi departs from customary associations with tapestries by removing the pieces from the wall and creating standalone, self-supporting structures.
She also emphasizes a kind of opening-up of the textile itself. The interactions between warp and weft are loose, delicate, and irregular. And each piece’s depth is determined by the wooden framework, details of which often jut outward in gentle yet willful angles.
Peroi’s sculptures appear to subtly morph as one walks around, merging internal and external perspectives. The artist explores relationships between emptiness, form, perception, and the built environment, hinting at recognizable shapes like flowers and foliage set against muted diamond-shaped geometric patterns or open spaces in the weave. And the frames serve both as display devices and looms—the process and finished piece merged into one.
For Thirsting Flowers continues in Brooklyn through May 23. See more on the artist’s website.
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2025-05-08 06:07:51
Depending on the day, you might look to the sky and see a sea of pale blue or a radiant sunset creeping toward the horizon. If you’re in a major metropolitan area, though, you might also be met with the characteristic red-brown haze of smog.
Berlin-based artist Macarena Ruiz-Tagle is behind the vibrant Cyanometer and Sunset postcards we’ve featured on Colossal (and that have sold out in our shop several times). But she also created a third version designed for those not-so-bright days.
The World Health Organization estimates that 99 percent of people on Earth breathe unsafe air, making Ruiz-Tagle’s Air Pollution postcard perhaps the most fitting for our era of climate catastrophe. While a stark contrast to the brilliant blues, yellows, and oranges of the other two, this design is awash in pale pinks and grays to match that of a gloomy, and even soiled, atmosphere. Like the others, the idea is to hold the work up to the sky and mark the corresponding hue before dropping it in the mail.
The interactive card shifts in meaning depending on whether the opening reveals a misty fog or air thick with chemicals, and it’s part of a growing movement to track climate data in a tangible, grassroots manner. “Separating the visual delight of being immersed in a cloud from the intoxicating reality of breathing heavily polluted air, the postcard evokes both the smog that engulfs global cities and the ethereal beauty of fog,” the artist writes. “In its mesmerizing aesthetic ambiguity, the work sustains a space for contemplation within our troubled atmosphere.”
Find all three postcards in the Colossal Shop, and explore more of Ruiz-Tagle’s work on her website.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article An Uncanny Postcard Fit for the Era of Climate Catastrophe appeared first on Colossal.
2025-05-07 22:21:57
A quote widely attributed to Tom Robbins says, “At the typewriter you find out who you are.” Or in the case of one unique machine that’s been missing for decades, the same could be said for finding one, too.
In January, Jennifer Felix and her husband Nelson were sorting through items in Jennifer’s grandfather’s basement in New York. They stumbled upon a typewriter like they’d never seen, with Chinese keys. Nelson posted a few photos in a Facebook group called What’s My Typewriter Worth? “From my internet search it looks to be a Chinese-made MingKwai,” he wrote. “I just can’t find any ever sold here in the States. Is it even worth anything? It weighs a ton!”
Resounding enthusiasm rippled through the comments, as it turned out the machine was indeed a MingKwai — named for being “clear and fast” — the only one of its kind in the world.
Missing for more than half a century, the discovery prompted a multitude of messages from people around the world wanting to purchase the machine or place it into museums. It is now in the collection of Stanford Libraries.
Invented in 1947 by writer, translator, and linguist Lin Yutang, the typewriter was the first compact concept to feature a keyboard that could produce the Chinese language’s 80,000-plus characters. He accomplished this by creating a kind of sort-and-search method.
“Lin broke down Chinese ideographs into more fundamental components of strokes and shapes and arranged the characters in a linear order, like an English dictionary does with alphabetic words,” researcher Yangyang Chen describes in Made in China Journal.
The keyboard consists of 72 options, which can be combined to create one’s desired characters. Chen continues:
By pressing one of the 36 top character component keys and one of the 28 bottom component keys simultaneously, the machine would find up to eight corresponding characters. The user could see the candidates through a special viewing window on the device, which Lin called his “magic eye,” and select the correct one by pushing the respective numerical key.
The Carl E. Krum Company built the only known prototype of the MingKwai, says Stanford Report. Lin was unable to drum up enough commercial interest to produce the expensive machine, so he sold the prototype and rights to Mergenthaler Linotype Company, where Jennifer Felix’s grandfather was employed as a machinist. The typewriter never entered production, and it eventually disappeared—until now.
Stanford plans to use the unique machine for research, exhibits, and academic programs. Regan Murphy-Kao, director of the East Asia Library, says, “I couldn’t be happier to have the opportunity to steward, preserve, and make this extraordinary prototype accessible for scholarship.”
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2025-05-07 05:16:24
Amid the frenzied bustle that is city life, it can be difficult—and even dangerous—to stop and observe what happens above street level. For French photographer Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze, though, looking to the upper floors of residential buildings and commercial towers in Hong Kong has revealed an astonishing ecosystem.
In his new book, Echoing Above, Jacquet-Lagrèze documents the trees, birds, and men who occupy the city’s sky-high dimension. “Hong Kong’s unique density has made the city grow vertically, and I have been inspired by the different aspects that this density brings, from an architectural point of view and also how it has shaped the relationship between men and nature in this city,” he tells Colossal.
With the South China Sea wrapping three sides and a vast territory devoted to public parks, the region has been largely immune to the horizontal sprawl that characterizes many urban areas. Instead, locals have built up and up, their residences soaring high above the ground.
As mentioned in PetaPixel, Jacquet-Lagrèze typically scouts locations on walks around Hong Kong, where he’s lived for nearly a decade. Kowloon—once home to the legendary walled enclave—is his favorite place to shoot as the vibrant architecture, laundry hanging from windows, and signs of wear bear traces of the people who have left their mark on the city. He’s especially drawn to workers who might dangle off a facade or drill holes amid bamboo scaffolding, in part because they require patience and focus to spot.
Jacquet-Lagrèze’s photos juxtapose balconies and window air-conditioning units with natural life, including the opportunistic Chinese Banyan that sprouts from many roofs. Birds typically eat its small figs and drop the seeds across the city, allowing the hardy trees to sprout amid even inhospitable concrete. “They can thrive and reach very large sizes until it becomes dangerous for the building and has to be taken down,” he says, noting that it seems there’s always one being rooted out.
Despite its ubiquity, this cycle of growth and transplanting happens so far overhead that, from street view, it can easily go unnoticed. “I find it beautiful to see how the presence of trees, men, and birds are taking turns above our heads, like an echo in a concrete canyon,” the photographer adds. His images also capture the interplay of light of shadow as entire sides of buildings are blanketed in darkness, reminding us of how little sunlight reaches the ground floor.
Echoing Above and other books are available on Jacquet-Lagrèze’s website, and some of this photo series will be on view this month at Blue Lotus Gallery in Hong Kong. Find much more on Instagram.
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2025-05-07 01:30:00
At seven years old, Isabelle D learned to crochet as a means of supporting her family. Taking lessons from her grandmother, the young artist crafted various items to sell at local markets and set herself on a path she continues to follow today.
From silk, cotton, viscose, and other fibers, Isabelle D crochets innumerable forms evocative of coral, sea sponges, anemones, flowers, molds, spores, and more. Each work comprises a diverse array of sculptural pieces, which nest together in broad landscapes brimming with myriad colors and textures.
The artist’s childhood ingenuity has instilled a commitment to care and resilience that appears both materially and metaphorically in her practice. In her new A Officinalis series, the medicinal, anti-inflammatory properties of the marshmallow plant become a symbol for healing and regeneration. Soft, supple forms in pale pinks and blues are met by fuzzy structures in creamy white yarn, creating a quiet, meditative garden for recovery.
Composed of vibrant reds and purples, the Bruise series takes a converse approach. Color is always critical to Isabelle D’s practice, and these works rely on vibrant, saturated reds, purples, and blues to mimic a damaged body. While the pieces evoke injury, they’re markedly beautiful and a sort of homage to the strength that emerges from trauma.
In the way that crochet requires an even tension to achieve stitches that aren’t too loose or too tight, Isabelle D strives for a similar balance in her practice and rejects the fast pace at which today’s world moves. Instead, she crafts each piece by hand without the help of assistants, immersing herself in the slow, methodical process of inserting the hook and looping it through the yarn.
If you’re in Brussels, stop by Gallery Nosco to see the artist’s solo exhibition, Hanging by a Thread, which runs through May 24.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Isabelle D’s Lush Crocheted Landscapes Intertwine Pain and Pleasure appeared first on Colossal.