I’m interested in the ways in which many textile artists these days, perhaps as a reaction to industry, focus on the process of creation rather than the utility of the resulting creations. Brooklyn-based Emily Barletta discharges emotional and physical pain through the meditative processes of crochet and embroidery. Though Barletta states that her pieces are unplanned and dictated by the properties of each new set of materials, her work consistently references biological forms — parasites, cellular structures, internal organs, amorphous and sea creatures.

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Brooklyn-based artist Ben Phelan recently had a few pieces at Nudashank Gallery in Baltimore. One of them, the Dream Machine Device, consists of acrylic orbs fitted with strobing LED lights, making for a truly intense, visceral experience.

At the opening of the show during the Transmodern Festival, the piece induced seizures in a reveler who had been partying with various substances, and later in the evening, it caused a resident cat to vomit and convulse. Phelan was rumored to be appalled when he heard the news. He intends his strobe devices to be therapeutic.

Chicago artist Jessica Joslin reassembles the skeletons of various creatures, embellishing them with found and antique fabrics and materials to create biomechanical creatures straight out of a steampunk fantasy.

Chicago-based artist, educator, and Alvin Ailey dancer Nick Cave (not to be confused with the other one) has been wowing people with his amazing Soundsuits for years now. Inspired by African ceremonial costumes, Cave’s pieces fuse sculpture, fashion, and performance.

Experimental artist Katie Paterson recorded the sounds made by three Icelandic glaciers and then pressed the noises onto records made from each glacier’s melted and re-frozen ice. As the Jailbreak blog notes: ‘She finished by playing the three ice records simultaneously for the two hours it took each to melt’.

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I love the bold use of color and dramatic thematic overtones that characterises the work of New York-based illustrator, and Lost At E Minor contributor, Yuko Shimizu. This award-winning piece was for Microsoft’s Ultimate PC project, in which artists were asked to create series of five personal works using their PC instead of their Mac to showcase in Microsoft’s new experimental art site.

Celia Marais’ Field Excursion was originally started as a study for the website for electronic musician Amon Tobin. It consists of “nine portraits of strange creatures made out of pieces of meat and fish, and given the names of existing or imaginary bacterias”.

We caught up with artist Chad Liebenguth recently and asked him what had been keeping him busy of late. ‘I’m just really looking forward to having solo shows or participating in group shows, but there’s nothing on the table yet. Music from Stars of the Lid is a constant inspiration, as are John Frusciante interviews, stumbling on Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living in the MET at 2:33pm — completely unexpected — the afternoon sunlight illuminating the fermented bits floating in the top, drawing the wrinkles around her eye, and the Orange County animal shelter at night, specifically the dog enclosures’.

The ArtNet website has an interesting write-up on experimental art duo, The Black Estate, a ‘collaboration between artists Noah MacDonald and Scott Pagano; the artists do not sign their individual names to the work, they are interested in the collaborative art-making process and the ongoing nature of their particular dialogue. The Black Estate presents a body of hauntingly beautiful and surreal video works’. ‘Darkly evocative illustrated landscapes are created in combination with cutting-edge digital animation to produce a new generation of imagined reality. Concern for the current state of our environment lies at the forefront of these works; field and tree are set in motion and take on mortal characteristics as an eerie reminder of the sacredness of nature’. Their work is currently on show at New York’s Claire Oliver Gallery until March 8th.

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