“I never like to shoot what’s shown to me – I only use that as a guideline” remarks photographer and advertising graphic designer Tejal Patni about his style of work. Patni’s high fashion editorials expose a dark surreal reality reminiscent of Tim Burton’s taste for gothic allure. Utilizing teams of stylists, set designers, makeup artists and photo retouchers Tejal’s photography blurs the lines of conventional photographer remixing fantasy and high fashion in a way that make’s one stop and question “ Hey, how’d he do that?” Splash, a fashion retailer from Dubai took notice, commissioning the young indian photographer to create the images to accompany the limited edition 2011 calendar for their international website. To help him articulate his gothic fairytales, Patni partnered with New York photographer Kirstan Hermans, who specializes in theatre costumes. The result in a nearly monochromatic future with some seriously dark undertones; a spectacular vision of a post-apocalyptic theatricality.

Drawing on Brazil’s Portuguese heritage, the holiday “Three Kings Day” is held annually on the sixth of January. Signifying the end of Christmas festivities, it is celebrated to commemorate the day when the three wise men are said to have delivered their gifts to the baby Jesus. The holiday includes a religious feast colorfully known as “the Mass of the Rooster,” as well as customary dance, jester and vocal performances that warmly embrace Brazil’s diverse culture and community. Native to the country, photographer Gui Christ was inspirited by the tradition and took advantage of the opportunity to shoot local individuals enjoying the festivities. Giant Jester masks and nativity scenes, each picture is a personal vignette, a window into Brazil’s rich cultural and religious customs. Gui Christ’s photographs exhibited at the Sugar Factory Amsterdam last fall, however his work is infused with a timeless quality; capturing the moment and the history of Brazil’s unique legacy.

Painter and Designer Jim Darling has a fresh take on the view from an airplane window. His six paintings, display the classic airplane window complete with pull down shade, rendered in a classic trompe d’oeil technique of the old masters. However within the window are wonderfully abstracted scenes capture the essence of patchy farmlands, nighttime aerials of lit cities and skylines. Darling’s graphic design background includes work with MTV, Coor’s light and Cambell’s Chicken noodle soup, each picture strongly rooted in his ability to draw. His illustrative mastery and graphic have pulled together in these fun oil on wood panels. The airplane series is part of a larger collection exhibited at Open Space in Beacon NY. Other paintings in the collection are themed with aircraft flight, and include a few humorous yet artful caricatures of passengers. Jim Darling definitely has created a spirited way of looking at the world.

The late Fritz Goro inventor of macro photography saw his goal as “making visible the world that lies between the microscope and the naked eye.” Turning to photography after the Nazi’s forced him out of Germany, Fritz Goro started a career with LIFE Magazine, shooting scientific photoessays and was the magazine’s scientific and medical specialist for twenty-seven years. Fritz Goro photographed many scientific breakthroughs and discoveries including the creation of penicillin as well as the separation of the isotopes of uranium and plutonium that made the atomic bomb. Chairman of the board of Scientific American, then science editor at Life Mr. Gerard Piel said of Goro, ”it was his artistry and ingenuity that made photographs of abstractions, of the big ideas from the genetic code to plate tectonics.” Fritz Goro’s legacy lives on in the beautiful geometric black and white images of America’s biggest scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.

Vivid watercolors seep into the page and emerge with life. Page by page a menagerie of wild creatures reveal themselves: a baby fawn, a pig, a parrot and many more, each one rendered in the same colorful wet wash technique. Rop Van Mierlo’s book, Wilde Dieren (Wild Animals), showcase this illustrator, graphic designer and animator’s talent in all fields. Each critter is embodied with the sensation of watercolors soaking into the paper. Displayed with immediacy, the animals spring to life from their minimal white background. Van Mierlo attended the Design Academy in Eindhoven studying “Man and Communication,” as well as the Willem de Kooning Academy, where he studied Graphic Design. His modern education has taught him to “ask questions and not give answers” and has yielded impressive work. The red McCaw’s wings look blotchy and soaked and the tiger seems to drip his strips, each creature taking on a new kind of life. This 34 page book is a unique living experience, every beast as absorbing as the next.

Rop Van Mierlo

In an age in which Photoshop dominates the photography landscape, it is a relief to have David Benjamin Sherry to bring some of the magic back to analog photography. Sherry’s vividly colored autobiographic photos chronicle a range of personal topics and an even broader and bolder range of sexual fantasies. “If I am romantic of the past for one thing, it would have to be the handwork, feel, emotional content, labor-intensive and traditional printing of photography.” says Sherry. Certainly there is a care and devotion to his process which serves to strengthen the magic of his picture making.
      Sherry received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in and his MFA from Yale and has established himself in New York’s downtown art scene along side the likes of Benjamin Cho, Ryan McGinley, and David LaChapelle, whom he interned for as a teen. Making darkroom pictures in a digital age, Sherry certainly seems to be channeling his Woodstock roots with his blend of fantasy and fashion. Work from his trip around Pacific Northwest radiates with a trippiness similar to aura fields. His work appears strikingly genuine, lacking in irony and contrariness that has become commonplace in contemporary art. Instead, Sherry sticks to the truth, hoping that people will sense in the images the strength of their creator. Indeed, David Benjamin Sherry’s work speaks for itself.

Seseña Nuevo is a deserted mini-city built some 40km from Madrid, in the middle of a barren landscape. Also known as “Francisco Hernando Residential” after its constructor, this phantasmagorical site hosts 13,508 flats. The site was built without any regard for urban planning or basic amenities, such as water and public transportation. Seseña Nuevo began rising from the ground in the year 2000, during the construction boom that took place in Spain. Perhaps it was Francisco’s hope that the angry voices of the buyers of his flats would be enough to force the authorities to accept the new landscape and bring all the basic public services to this new city. However, this was not the case: it turns out that in 2009 only 3,000 houses had been sold to some unlucky speculators. Approximately 2,000 of the apartments have been transferred to the property of banks as credit payment. The lack of legal guarantors and the fierce reaction of local authorities have frustrated Francisco’s intentions and made Seseña Nuevo the symbol of speculation in Spain. For those driving down highway A4, towards Toledo, this useless mass of concrete will loom in the horizon for years to come.

Artist, curator, entrepreneur, and observer of Japanese society, Takashi Murakami is, without hesitation, one of the most respected contemporary artists today. His solo show will be on display at Gagosian Gallery in Rome from until January 15, 2011. The exhibit consists two epic paintings: ”Dragon in Clouds – Red Mutation” and “Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue.” The paintings are each comprised nine panels and measure an awe inspiring eighteen meters long. These enormous red and blue monochromatic paintings are a step in a new direction from Murakami’s usual techno inspired, color saturated work. Rendered in the artist’s distinct style “Superflat,” Murakami employs classical Japanese painting techniques to depict anime and pop culture. For the purpose of this exhibition, Murakami’s draws inspiration from inventive 18th century Japanese artist, Soga Shōhaku. Shōhaku‘s cloud and dragon paintings, called “Unryūzu” were hung in Japanese Buddhist temples, embedding a sense of strength in the culture of the Japanese people. Murakami’s giant re imaginings of these rich iconic images of dragons underscore the same sense of strength only this time in mammoth proportions.

Elod Beregszaszi is a London based artist who specializes in paper art and engineering. His creative enterprise, “Popupology”, has brought him internet popularity, and his work has been seen in store windows, galleries, and hotels in the London area. Beregszaszi’s work with this delicate medium has lead to some spectacular creations of folded and cut designs. ”I guess I am trying to look for a language of folding; so with this series I want to cover as many cut & fold variations as i can to maybe find out some of the underlying visual (3D) and pattern (2D) principles.”

Lane Coder, a photographer living in Brooklyn, has been working professionally in the commercial world for more than seven years. Over the last 5 years Lane’s work has won much acclaim and has been included in Art + Commerce’s “Festival of Emerging Photographers” competition and gallery show (2003), W magazine’s “Behind the Lens” Competition and gallery show (2004), PDN magazine’s “30 to Watch” competition and publication (2007), The International Photography Awards competition and book (2006), Surface magazine’s “Avant Guardian” competition and publication (2007) and his work in Playground, an art and fashion book was accepted into the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s permanent collection. Exhibiting a broad range of work, from portraits, landscapes and fashion spreads to a music video, there appears to be a modern, ethereal quality to his work, a common thread that unifies his pictures. His aerial series, inspired by his late father started with experiments with shooting out of a plane window in college. His carefully composed pieces, conscious of color and texture reveal a more painterly, fine art quality in his photographs.