Matthias Heiderich

Matthias Heiderich captures the brighter side of Berlin with his cheery, minimal photography. Heiderich focuses on things like vintage roller coasters, murals, and playgrounds making Berlin look more like a doppelgänger of Santa Monica. The compositions are flat and pretty barren, and taken together, they evoke a drugged-out listlessness. Heiderich is self-taught and uses a wide range of camera types including a medium format twin lens camera, Polaroids, and Holgas.

Brian Dettmer

Brian Dettmer is a contemporary artist known for his alteration of preexisting media — such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes — to create new, transformed works of visual fine art. Dettmer was influenced heavily by working in a sign shop where his work transformed to explore the relationship between text, images, language, and codes, including paintings based on braille, Morse Code, and American Sign Language. He began to make work by pasting newspapers and book pages to canvas and tearing off pieces. In 2000, Dettmer started to experiment by gluing and cutting into books. He selectively removes portions to reveal what's inside, though never inserts or moves the contents.

     

Ian Davis

Ian Davis creates large scale paintings reminiscent of New Yorker magazine covers. His subject is maleness, whose omnipresence, ineffectiveness and herd instinct he conjures up in small identical figures that he deploys with the marshaled repetitions of a Minimalist. The figures can be businessmen, hundreds of whom sit passively in convention halls or stand on banquet tables with their hands raised, as if enacting some inane ritual. Or they can be British redcoats who march across fields of graduated grays, or strip trees of their branches for no apparent reason. Somewhere in the twentieth century men are gathering . . . waiting and watching.

Patrick Leger

North Carolina artist Patrick Leger creates action oriented pop art illustrations under the influence of printmaking and comics. Most of his linework is done with either ink and brush or a felt-tip brush pen. All of the vintage-like coloring is actually done digitally. Color is often placed off-center, overlapping another value to create the not-so-perfect feel of an older art. His current work is editorial. The artist says he's never illustrated a comic, though one may be in the works.

Melanie Bilenker Jewelry

To say Melanie Bilenker's work takes dedication is an understatement. It also takes her literal DNA. The Victorians kept lockets of hair and miniature portraits painted with ground hair and pigment to secure the memory of lost love. Taking this inspiration, Bilenker has embedded her own hair into epoxy resin, recreating photographic images. The result is a floating, quiet, ordinary moment.





It makes me think of this trend happening in Tokyo with curio jewelry, these vintage oddities, mostly small dolls' hands and bronzed objects you'd find in an antique store.