‘At 17, I lost every possession I had accumulated in my short life span. Ever since, I have been a collector’, says Oakland-based illustrator and installation artist, Lauren Napolitano, who works with found materials – wood scraps, old bottles, paper torn from old books, tattered lace and dried flowers.

Self-taught, Napolitano uses her thin, fragile, art-deco-inspired linework to coat forgotten relics of the everyday with new meanings and new life. Her traveling project with street artist Shrine, called Reckless In Love Shack, has been set up at Symbiosis and Lightning In A Bottle.

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Spencer Keeton Cunningham is a talented guy. I’m not sure if it’s his illustrations, murals or photography I like the best. Playing with the overly romanticized notion of North American Indian culture as a series of icons, sketches or markers, Cunningham is able to speak to the viewer through short, graphic strokes that hit hard.

He’s interested in presenting his own take on the demonization of tribal people in American culture and this poignant, painful subject matter makes his work difficult to forget. Being a quarter Colville from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Cunningham is able to make assertions with his work that relates to his unique position and perspective in this world.

As he says: ‘how does one deal with personal identity and a constant battle of being a part of two clashing ancestries’. I think the answer may be by drawing these amazing images.

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Next time you open a can of coke and throw away the pop tops, spare a thought for Bryan Cunningham who collects hundreds of them to make these amazing pieces on canvas that are held on and stretched using them. You can see an inspiration drawn from his hometown of New Orleans as he uses his skills in painting, silk screening and wood crafting to create unique mixed media assemblages.

Paintings inspired by ‘sensational advertising, those ads in the back pages of comic books promising X-ray vision and he-man strength; sideshow banners depicting nature’s grotesque mistakes; and the mail order hoodoo spells and powders guaranteed to rid you of your enemies.’ Like to collect some for him?

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Tom Haney produces animatronic figurines that gesticulate on their own; the creation, of which, requires an unique assortment of skills like sculpting, carpentry, and mechanical prowess. Although some see his work as a reaction to today’s throwaway society, he sees it as a way to reconnect with the past. ‘I cherish traditions, not trends. I love the old ways of doing things, old tools and traditional techniques.’ He says working with one’s hands still has value and while there is a rich tradition of these mechanisms, it is soon becoming a lost art in the wake of the digital age. I hear that.

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Living in the home country of IKEA, it is always nice to see something original, hand crafted, and AWESOME. Adam Wallacavage’s chandeliers are just that. Creating the chandelier from epoxy clay, spray paint and ‘secret sauce to give it that classy glassy look,’ Wallacavage creates extravagant ornamental sculptures crafted in a myriad of colours and designs that are often inspired by octopus (ironically, though he has an obsession with the ocean, he is allergic to seafood). He started by designing for his own Philadelphia home, which looks like its from the pages of a Jules Verne novel.

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For a guy whose fame came from doodles on the back of business cards, Hugh MacLeod’s latest showing is a logical extension. The cartoonist of ‘Gaping Void’ fame was recently recruited to lend his unique characters to bestselling author Brian Solis’ newest book, WTF, or What’s the Future of Business. It is a refreshing approach to the otherwise stale business book industry, an approach we will hopefully be seeing more of.

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Look closely, this is not spray paint. Mexican artist, Laura Ortiz Vega, takes things made of stone and paint, things aggressive and chaotic, and transforms them into something delicate and beautiful using the traditional techniques of the Huichol people – ‘Painting‘ the surface of her panel with colourful threads glued with a natural bees wax called cera de Campeche.

Much of the graffiti she captures can be found around her native surroundings of Mexico City, where Vega sees her role as a documentary artist, preserving the street art of her native city. Vega pays homage to this traditional art form while subverting it at the same time, transforming it into something new and fascinating. Paint becomes thread, an old technique gets new life, and something momentary gets woven into permanence.

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‘We believe this story is too important to go untold!’ Rubble Kings is a feature length documentary by Shan Nicholson about the New York city street gangs of the late ‘60s & ‘70s and their influence on hip-hop. From 1968 to 1975, gangs ruled New York City. Beyond the idealistic hopes of the civil rights movement lay an unfocused rage. Neither law enforcement nor social agency could end the escalating bloodshed.

Peace came only through the most unlikely events that would change the world for generations to come by giving birth to hip-hop. Rubble Kings is a film about courage, hope and survival against all odds, even in the harshest of circumstances. The message is especially relevant today, a time when gang related deaths are at an all time high among inner city youths. The film’s most important goal is to touch and inspire today’s at-risk youth. Independent and self-funded, Rubble Kings needs your help so if you find that you would love to see this film completed, you can back it here

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Jason D’Aquino refers to himself as a miniaturist and no one can doubt that when you see the size of his detailed graphite drawings of icons of pop culture, common objects, and his own creations that are only a inch or so in size which he creates with high powered magnifiers. He chooses to work on found surfaces such as strike-on-front matchbooks, 18th century animal-skin vellum, and antique ledger pages. His search for these found ‘canvases’ has led him to strange corners of the world and to some unique treasures. He recently unearthed a hand-quilled, illustrated whaling manuscript from St. Petersburg Russia, which made its way to Christies Auction House in New York City.

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At first view, it looks like a normal marble sculpture. However, Long-Bin Chen uses books, newspapers, magazines, and other material that have been discarded as the medium for creating his sculptures. This act of recycling paper-based material informs Chen’s work and the figures he creates are of an odd and extraordinary beauty. Buddha faces, Aztec and Chinese warriors, the human figure, land maps, and entire rooms are magically created out of discards from our ‘paper society’. One of the most interesting sights during Art Basel Week.

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While trying to find a bar one night in Miami, we stumbled across one of the most amazing sights: ‘Asif’s Gun’s', a pop up gun store created by Asif Farooq. Exhibiting more than 300 guns he handcrafted from found cardboard, painstakingly reproducing the size, shape and individual components, from snub-nosed revolvers to M16 assault rifles.

The installation was to serve as both a sweeping survey of contemporary weapons by the Miami-born artist and a romantic testament envisioned through the eyes of a pre-disposed artist raised in a gun-friendly environment and delivered to the senses of a gun-obsessed America. I bought one of his works, as did Shepherd Fairy, and I think Farooq is about to make a real name for himself within the art community. He donates to Stop Handgun Violence.

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Christian Faur’s crayon art exemplifies a unique and exciting new technique. Instead of utilizing traditional medium Faur turns to a material from our childhood: the crayon. He uses individually hand cast wax crayons to explore the complexity of the pixel in digital photography. Using each crayon like a pixel, he arranges thousands upon thousands of colorful handmade crayons into beautiful and elaborate works of art that allude to aspects of Pointillism and digital photography.

As our digital photographic and display technologies continue to advance, the pixel will eventually become so small that it will evade our awareness of its existence entirely. Faur’s work celebrates this moment of transition by deliberately raising these elemental points to our consciousness and allowing us one more good look at these colorful “rods and cones” before they disappear right in front of our eyes.

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Just when you thought every material had been used to create an amazing piece of art, here is Korean artist Seung Mo Park who cuts layer upon layer of wire mesh to create a portrait. He starts with a photograph then superimposes it over layers of wire with a projector, and then starts snipping away. I saw them at Scope in Miami and they are incredible, and certainly one of the top pieces of what I saw during the Basel week.

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One day Sophia Collier was walking across a bridge and wished she could just reach down into the water and pick up a piece of that shining surface and keep it forever. She wondered how to recreate it, and from her day job in finance, she knew it was possible to develop software to model vast, turbulent, nonlinear data sets like money ‘and also, maybe, water in motion.’

She found idled expert machinists to teach her precision milling, learned animation from Pixar and experimented with materials and developed a color palette in acrylic block. She developed methods and equipment to make every piece herself in my own studio rather than hire fabricators and the end result is amazing. I saw them for real in Miami and know of two people reduced to tears when viewing them. ‘Now, when I look at my finished work, I see peace. Powerful emotion and turbulence have found a resting place.’ – Sophia Collier

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I recently had the pleasure of meeting Daniel Melim and seeing his amazing acrylic paintings on a transparent acrylic membrane. The intense blue contrasting against rich vibrant colours becomes clear when realizing that it is actually a painting, of a painting. Melim first paints on fabrics and places them in ‘contact with nature: hills and irregular volumes of stamped cloths that seem to dance in the wind under a blue sky that resembles the Summer clear sky’.

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As a child, Michael Johansson was fascinated building models. Of his own work as a sculptural artist, he says: ‘Everyday objects from mid-20th century housewives are taken apart, sorted, and repacked in an equally outdated boydream esthetics. These two worlds are merged together and the objects are frozen in their new shape – while the function is displayed, the functionality is taken away’. He also applies the same treatment to bikes, boats and gardening appliances.

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I was really attracted to Rose Eken’s sculptures at Art Copenhagen Art Fair. Eken (re)constructs scenarios borrowed from rock music and culture. But rather than creating faithful copies, her works play with scale and proportions to distort reality with tiny cardboard models or glazed ceramic. They are clearly handmade, a combination of meticulous craftsmanship with a amateurish DIY style. But that is their beauty: portraying the rebellious rock culture so zealously and with such atypical materials.

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Want to get your portrait in the National Portrait Gallery London, The Louvre, and the NY Met? All you have to do is Like this page and your profile picture will be included. The first 500 went real fast and can be seen here in these shots. Go on, be part of bringing the 21st century portraiture into the gallery space.

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Go on, look closer. Chuck Close? No, closer. We see many different artists construct iconic faces out of different materials, but Australian Guy Whitby hasn’t restricted himself to one material. He has tried out many. My favorites are his time consuming pieces from keys from computers, calculators, type writers and phones.

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I’d seen this guy’s illustrations before and then I found out he was going to do one of me, so was pretty made up. His style is so cool and he has worked for many great mags and brands already.

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