This is 5 Questions. Each week, we send five questions to an artist featured in Under the Radar, our weekly email highlighting the best art on the ArtSlant network. This week we seek answers from Eugene Macki.   What are you trying to communicate with your work? I am trying to project the thing(s) that excites me. For example, I am very interested in materials, what it means to exist, and the length of space between multiple points. My entire oeuvre begins with the desire to learn. I am not trying to teach the audience anything. I am simply having a conversation with... [more]

ArtSlant is an open Arts community with over 200,000 free, user-generated artist profiles. The support of our community is an essential part of our mission — from our magazine to our residency and prize. Every week our editors select the best artist profiles from under the radar. Follow your favorite artists to see new work and exhibitions by adding them to your watchlist. Moth Dust – New York City, Berlin,... [more]

On this particular Saturday in May, it’s unusually quiet in the Tenderloin as I walk from BART up Larkin Street. The San Francisco neighborhood is known for its seedy characteristics, its history of vice, homelessness, happy ending massage parlors, strip clubs, dive bars, single occupancy hotels, and social service centers. Today it feels like a level of caring has taken place, with some new businesses now occupying previously vacant storefronts—the rawness is still there, it just doesn’t feel as bedraggled and dangerous. Maybe it’s the heat—a blazing 65... [more]

Milos Rajkovic aka Sholim is a Belgrade-based gif artist and “digital surrealist” who creates wonderfully mind-bending visual puzzles. Behind Rajkovic’s visual wit is a subversive sense of humor that he puts to work tackling diverse socio-political topics like corporate culture, religion, and our dependence on technology. His meticulously constructed tableaux are often created from manipulated vintage found footage giving them an uncanny quality that defies time and space. Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of Milos Rajkovic.     Christian... [more]

When Manifesta, the roving biennial of European contemporary art, based its 10th iteration in Saint Petersburg, Russia, it sparked a wildfire of protests. This was 2014, and opposition to the relationship between the biennial and the cultural core of Russia was robust and complicated. Protesters objected to an administrative body responsible for repressive laws, enacted by Putin, that criminalized the LGBT community, the suppression of activists and dissenters, the annexation of Crimea, and so on. Maria Kulikovska was among the artists who withdrew from the biennial, and would later stage a... [more]

This is 5 Questions. Each week, we send five questions to an artist featured in Under the Radar, our weekly email highlighting the best art on the ArtSlant network. This week we seek answers from Denise Treizman.   What are you trying to communicate with your work? Using materials that we encounter in our everyday life, I am trying to make the viewer shift his perspective, even if for a short moment in time. I am hoping I can open a door that encourages the audience to see things in a different way and appreciate the beauty embedded in simple gestures and... [more]

ArtSlant is an open Arts community with over 200,000 free, user-generated artist profiles. The support of our community is an essential part of our mission — from our magazine to our residency and prize. Every week our editors select the best artist profiles from under the radar. Follow your favorite artists to see new work and exhibitions by adding them to your watchlist. Romily Alice Walden – London /... [more]

Distinct from the droves of international biennales and triennials birthed in recent decades, the Skulptur Projekte Münster (Sculpture Projects Münster) sets itself apart as an unparalleled cultural moment once every 10 years that places strong emphasis on site-specificity and encourages long-term artistic study. The decennial’s first edition in 1977, curated by Klaus Bussmann and Kasper König, sparked controversy by radically implanting works of renowned sculptors in Münster’s conservative public space. Then as today, the projects stood in stark contrast to... [more]

This is 5 Questions. Each week, we send five questions to an artist featured in Under the Radar, our weekly email highlighting the best art on the ArtSlant network. This week we seek answers from David Hannon.   What are you trying to communicate with your work? I am exploring the role of fantasy in queerness and perversions of the body. The interiors I create are a disorienting place that reveals the horror of the everyday. In my most recent performance, Mantle, I made an immersive installation and embedded myself in a flat and then interacted with the... [more]

Eli Sudbrack isn’t your typical art world denizen. One half of the collective assume vivid astro focus (or AVAF for short), the Brazilian-born Sudbrack currently splits his time between New York and his adopted hometown of São Paulo, where he crafts work at the intersection of pop culture, queer, and net aesthetics, all with an anti-establishment sensibility. Art world punk rockers, assume vivid astro focus have collaborated with the likes of Lady Gaga and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, while at the same time producing sight-specific installations all over the... [more]

Originally from Greece and based in London, Eva Papamargariti reflects and analyzes the rapidly transforming relationships between “material and immaterial” matter in our new digital world. Papamargariti’s work contains complex visual (and often audio) collages in which impossible organic forms constantly evolve, mutate, and entwine. No matter how utterly alien her work can seem, it retains consistent feelings of a deep human familiarity—which only adds to its uncanny sensibilities. Lurking behind the work’s gratifying bright colors and psychedelic surrealism... [more]

The affliction of horror is an experience both embodied and detached. White washes over your face, the blood rushes from your cheeks toward more essential functions. Capillaries constrict, drawing what they can spare. Your body hollows. Fear is rooted in uncertainty, but its sensation is a bodily affliction as much as a mental one. Entire markets have been built on its replication, assimilation, and distribution. To feel horror is unbearable, but to experience its aesthetized and familiar representation is to only think it is unbearable. While the qualities of this “aesthetic... [more]

ArtSlant is an open Arts community with over 200,000 free, user-generated artist profiles. The support of our community is an essential part of our mission — from our magazine to our residency and prize. Every week our editors select the best artist profiles from under the radar. Follow your favorite artists to see new work and exhibitions by adding them to your watchlist. Shweta Sharma –... [more]

This is 5 Questions. Each week, we send five questions to an artist featured in Under the Radar, our weekly email highlighting the best art on the ArtSlant network. This week we seek answers from Liz Robb.   What are you trying to communicate with your work? Currently I’m creating a new collection of work inspired by the colors, textures, history, and life in desert landscapes. It relates the desert’s dryness, distinct palette, openness, transparency, and unknowability, using techniques of reflection, obscuring, and suspension of movement. Attempts to... [more]

Heather Rasmussen’s Body Variations began with her recreating three iconic pieces by surrealists Hans Breder, Rene Magritte, and Ujj Zsuzsi. In these “recitations,” Rasmussen arranged her own body among objects and possessions familiar to these surrealists to create studies in the form of three Polaroids. The “choreography” of these three studies opened up new modes of working for Rasmussen, who is also a dancer. In the process of remaking these artworks, Rasmussen was able to imagine the new series of photographs and sculptures that make up her current... [more]

As the European Union signals its distancing from a seven-decade transatlantic alliance, as the United States joins Nicaragua and Syria as the only other nations to demure from the Paris Climate Agreement, as a realignment of global hegemonies occurs before our eyes, there is no better time to reflect on the narrative of globalization. The 14th Factory, a warehouse-sized installation currently open in Los Angeles, is the culmination of a life’s work for Simon Birch. A Brit, transplanted to Hong Kong for the majority of his adult life, Birch has lived a life precipitated by the global... [more]

There is no artist more synonymous with the poignancy, wistfulness and desolation of art made within the crucible of the HIV/AIDS crisis than Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996). Within the maelstrom of that government-sponsored holocaust, his experience of it, and its effects on his communities, he created work of such melancholic grandeur and romantic sorrow, that decades later—even among the relentless torrents of the art world’s digital age—his legacy remains a touchstone of unsurpassed, reflective power. Or, it doesn’t. In the two-page press release for... [more]

What does it mean for a woman to pick up a camera and point it at herself, or at another woman? Is there something unique to be found behind the lens, in the gaze of the female photographer? Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze is an ambitious new book that sets out, if not to resolve this question, then to open it up, to unfold it through the exercise of prolonged looking. Over a year and a half, arts journalist Charlotte Jansen (who is, full disclosure, a former editor of this publication) interviewed 40 female artists from 17 countries who are making... [more]