The street art of Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils’, is so refreshing. He carves, sculpts, drills, scratches and paints his images onto the wall. And he captures emotion in great detail. Check out this awesome video to watch him in action.

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This beautifully delicate 3D printed filigree skull by Joshua Harker is offered on the Kickstarter crowd funding platform. It’s the most funded sculpture project in their history.

A modern riff on ‘string art’ from the 60s and 70s, this artwork features modular panels of aluminum and nylon cord attached to the wall with powerful magnets.

Los Angeles-based Taiwanese artist Sean Chao creates curious and imaginative creatures in a world filled with wonder. Each mixed-media piece combines sculpture and illustration to capture an odd moment frozen in time, and each tells a story of its own, some strangely nostalgic, some delightfully whimsical.

Manhattan-based jewelry designer and artist, Jill Platner, has debuted her new exhibition of large-scale copper, bronze and steel sculptures at her New York store. Though this is the first time Platner has collectively shown her sculptures, they were originally conceptualized years ago when she first began making jewelry, which she has always considered to be wearable art. The display runs until the end of the month.

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This kind of clever visual punnery is clearly what the heel was made for. Bravo!

What art can wash your guilt away? This is the question Rachel Kilback explores in her mixed-media pieces using found animal remains, garbage and other items she finds in the wilds of British Columbia. Vaginas and the human relationship with other animals are constant themes in her ever-changing work.

Les Petites Chaises, or Little Chairs, is Alexandre Moussard’s first exhibition. The 25 year-old French artist studied architecture, and it was during a course that, by simply twisting a wire, he came across the idea for the shape of his first chair design.

Feng Shui, a solo exhibition by Munkao, is filled with lights, kinetic energy, and has him coining a new term — ‘Painstallation’, a blend of painting and installation. Also, as a possible first, Feng Shui is curated by a real Feng Shui Master, based on his authentic knowledge of the ancient science of geomancy.

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Ben Winfield’s wooden characters are reminiscent of vinyl collectibles that many of us know and love. These, however, are made from wood and painted with automobile paint. I’d happily choose one of these over a vinyl toy any day.

This weird creature is BuBo, born in the studio of Meritxell Duran in Barcelona, Spain. Bubo is happy hanging from the shoulder, playing inside with cell phones, keys, wallets and pens, and is made of natural latex in four different colors.

This is Jessica Fortner’s latest installment of her ongoing My Woodland, My Nightmare series titled Deadly Sins: Sloth Meets Greed. Fortner is a sculptural illustrator who lives and works in Toronto. Her site has tons of process work, showing you step by step how she creates her wonderful illustrations.

What do you see in this picture? Pencils? Look again. They’re sculptures. Dalton Getty has been patiently carving sculptures from pencils for 25 years. He creates amazing miniature pieces of art, including linked hearts, keys, and an alphabet project completed over a steady 2.5 year period. Incredible.

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Our friends at Ghostly International are releasing Matthew Dear’s Black City album as a limited edition ‘totem’. A what? A totem – a limited edition metal bar used to access a private music chamber. Cool!

We liked the idea, and checked in with Ghostly creative mind Will Calcutt to find out what the totems are, what they do, and what’s next. The totem is a black, industrial-style metal bar that unlocks stuff on the web, right? ‘The totem is a sculpture cast in bonded aluminum and it has a code that can be used to download/stream the new Matthew Dear album, Black City.’

How did you come up with this idea for Black City?

‘Album artwork is in a tricky spot these days. For a lot of people, album art is just a small thumbnail image or it’s missing altogether from their MP3 collection. And that’s frustrating from a designer’s point of view. We have gone from the glorious 12″ LP cover to a tiny thumbnail in a couple of decades. Not exactly the progress we intended. Gone is all that visual space in which to create a sense of the album for the listener.

We felt we had to try something different. We wanted to break from the idea that the album had to be some sort of media – be it CD, LP, USB key, etc. We wanted to abstract the album into an object, something physical that you can touch. In our rush for convenience with MP3s we’ve left behind an important part of experiencing music – the physical relationship to the album. The totem is a real object for virtual music.

And we wanted to do it beautifully, so working with Boym Partners was a perfect fit. It was a great collaboration, they really understood that the totem had to look and feel like the album sounded. They captured the atmosphere of the album perfectly in a simple but mysterious sculpture. The design evokes the sense of a building without being a building, and it has elements that evoke a key without being a key. It’s really a beautiful object. And to handle a totem, to feel the weight of the material, feel the scratches in the metal – it just feels right.’

How can we get one?

‘The totems are on sale in The Ghostly Store from August 3rd.’

It’s a very cool idea. We love your Ghostly Discovery iPhone app too. How’s Ghostly Discovery working out for your artists?

‘Ghostly Discovery is a project that is directed at the listener – the core idea is that electronic music is often strange, obscure and impenetrable – it’s very difficult for a first-time listener to make their way through the brambles to find something they like. And all the sub-genre labels don’t help either. Someone who has never heard a dub-step track can’t know to ask for a dub-step track.

So the app plays music based on a person’s mood – they get a playlist of 20 songs that all fit in the mood and tone they selected. We just wanted to create a tool that could ease people into listening to new music, and people have responded by generating huge amounts of playlists. For the artists that means more listeners, and more listeners means more fans.’

You guys are changing the game. What’s next?

‘We have some more projects coming up soon that are definitely different than things a traditional record label would do, you’ll have to keep an eye out on ghostly.com for the latest developments.’

What is it about typically tiny things made into giant large scale sculptures that makes it so appealing? Swedish sculptor, Claes Oldenburg does just that by replicating everyday objects into huge, fun, public art installations. At the Tate Modern, a mammoth sized 3-way plug hangs above an exhibition space. And in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Oldenburg’s delectable Spoonbridge and Cherry artwork.

Vancouver-based artist Brian Jungen uses whole manufactured items, not just materials taken from them, to construct sculptural pieces that invert and extend ideas of form and function and transcend their components to comment on pop culture, waste, industrialisation, and spirituality.

Some people might compare Laurel Roth’s work mainly dealing with high-end materials and animal bones to Damien Hirst’s, but she has much more reverence for the craft and skill required to use the crystal, gold leaf, walnut, industrial plastic, and even fake fingernails and eyelashes. Her work is also much more directly about man’s relationship with nature than it is about the pop appropriation of such themes.

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Leah Rosenberg’s work is all about paint as sculpture, many of her 3D pieces consisting of thick layers of acrylic folded together into book-like objects, stacks, or heavily clinging to canvases.

Ryan Johnson’s pieces made from found and repurposed materials are very much rooted in traditional figurative sculpture, but he has abstracted the forms, making his work have a weird gestural quality.

The drawing and writing he does on the casting tape he uses plays on the idea that it’s usually wrapped around broken limbs, but it also allows him to use it to create another thread of communication within his work. His ‘Pedestrian’ series of figures made out of wood and paint is also really stunning – they look like people zapping between dimensions.

These awesome pieces by Sinta Werner and Markus Wuste are like core samples taken from modern life, implying fragmented moments.