Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

by Joe Gisondi

This post first appeared on HERE

I hope Jennifer Stelco likes me because I’m in awe of her. 

Jen’s sense of self is intoxicating. 

She’s the type of woman many men claim they want to hang out with at a bar because she is down to earth, knows who she is, and doesn’t put up with any bullshit. 

Those men tend to idealize women like Jen and then blame her for their insecurities when she tires of their shit. 

At least this is the sense that I get when I spoke to her for the podcast. 

Jen’s aura relates to one story in particular. She was hired to do a speed painting job: two portraits with the clients there watching. She took the job on short notice and on her flight from Dubai she began to panic about drawing portraits. The man who hired Jen greeted her nervously when she got off the plane. Any nerves Jen may have had were shadowed by the greeting she gave the fearful, sweating man, “Don’t worry, I’m here and I’m very confident.”

This is the best way I can sum up Jen’s artwork, it’s here and it’s very confident.

The first piece that introduced me to Jen’s work was titled Spice Politicians. Jen showcases five political figures: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC, progressive congresswoman), Angela Merkel (German politician and de facto leader of the European Union), Kamala Harris (current US vice-president and first  woman to ever hold the title), Sanna Marin (Prime Minister of Finland and youngest serving world leader) and Jacinda Ardern (Prime Minister of New Zealand and first  woman to ever hold the title and go on maternity leave); posing as a group who she credits for introducing her to feminism, the 90s pop group The Spice Girls. 

Five women in positions of authority beaming with pride and confidence; pride not only in their accomplishments but also in leading a feminist chant version of Wannabe. Angela Merkel still gets the blood pumping at age 66 in a German flag pair of hot pants. But whether or not my heart is racing at the sexualization of Angela Merkel isn’t the point, she doesn’t care what I think of her in that outfit and feels confident enough to be who she is. 

Chest of Drawers portrays how women feel they need to operate, compartmentalizing each aspect of themselves and only showing the necessary based on the situation with which they are presented. It also the constant attention it requires looking at how you are presenting yourself to the world in multiple angles, reflections in different mirrors. To me, and maybe others, this may feel frustrating; however, we look for compartmentalizing and self-reflection in emotionally mature and enlightened beings. Perhaps this is one of Jen’s secrets to her persona: her ability to code-switch and navigate multiple communities without breaking a sweat. 

Or maybe it speaks to the over simplification by males (mine included) of who she is as a woman. The complexity of opening each drawer to discover another layer to reshape any preconceived notion we may have.

In Joan Jett of Arc, Jen portrays Joan Jett playing guitar on the back of a horse as Joan of Arc. The combination of past and present feminist icons speaks to the long and winding road equality has taken to get to about halfway where it needs to be. 

The band on stage adorned with crosses represents a church where they have never been represented properly, but they play on anyway. This band doesn’t need a fog machine; the smoke from where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake will suffice. The crosses worn as a uniform seem to say you can burn one of us and two more will be created in their absence. And if a woman thrusting on stage with a guitar between her legs doesn’t say “I don’t need a dick to be cool” I don’t know what will.  

“I’m Here And I’m Very Confident”

I had Jen fill out a questionnaire that I had planned on using in conjunction with her art. But when we spoke I was completely captivated by her presence and familiarity that they inspired me to write this instead. 

I feel I’ve known Jen most of my life and that if we were closer together on the globe that our families would be good friends. It’s why I told her when we begin to travel again I’m coming to visit her in Dubai with my wife and daughter to stay with her indefinitely (she laughed nervously at this joke). 

I get the sense that I’m not the only one who admires Jen for her personality or her presence. When a woman like Jen walks into a room and says, “I’m here and I’m very confident”, with every essence of her being, how do you not get behind her and follow her wherever she’s going?

I’ll gladly follow her lead. 

***

Jen is currently working with a group of artists on a project entitled “Mothers of Ethereum”. The collection will launch in @stellabelle’s gallery on Cryptovoxels in mid-May. It includes one piece from each contributor as well as a “mother piece”, which will be a collaborative collage made from images from all of the pieces, put together by miss al simpson.

Look for the NFT podcast episode where Jen Stelco elaborates on our new mantra, “I’m here and I’m very confident.”

This post is published for Cryptowriter in association with Voice.

Follow Jennifer Stelco

Twitter – Instagram – SuperRare – Foundation – Known Origin

Follow Me

Twitter – Instagram

Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

Hi, my name is Flavio Carvalho. I’m a Brazilian designer from Sao Paulo, I currently live and work in San Francisco. Throughout my career, I’ve specialized in generating creative strategies and visual concepts with cultural significance and commercial application. In my professional work as an Art Director, I create branding and design strategy. I have a passion for minimal design, modernist aesthetics, and 3D, all of which are themes that come together in my own ideas and visual experiments. My personal work has been featured in international exhibitions, including in the US, Canada, Europe and Brazil. In 2016, I created the IG account @FLVIOCC where I shared some of my explorations in design and animation. 

Tracer Experiments

At the startup where I worked in San Francisco in 2016, the engineering team bought a small CNC machine to cut wood for our physical prototypes. The CNC machine was mesmerizing; I spent a lot of time just studying its movement. The CNC, combined with a trip I took to Tokyo, made me want to start an animation series that I could use as a sandbox to test new visuals. This is how the Tracer Experiments series started.

Tokyo Night Series

For the next stage of the Tracer Experiment series, I wanted to produce an image against a contrast background. Endeavoring to capture the energy of the Shinjuku neighborhood in Japan, I used neon light emitted by the tracer and post-rain asphalt to create the feeling of being in a city at night. 

Spaces and Sports

I began this project in 2020 when there was concern about the future of live sports events due to the pandemic. This anxiety, coupled with the experience of leaving my house to discover SF had turned into a ghost town, inspired the work. It is almost like all the sports materialized by the balls that went out to invade the empty space.

Smiley Devices

I created this series of Smiley animations by combining 3D modeling and procedural animation. Each smiley was developed using different techniques from Cinema 4D Xpresso to particles systems. I really enjoyed building the screen with different properties and materials, such as plastic, acrylic, metals and ceramics.

Soft Bodies

I created the Soft Bodies series as part of my continued exploration in 3D. The intention behind these surrealist basketball animations is to explore the behavior of the balls by applying different forces or simulations, like 3D cloth or inflation. I’ve always been interested in how we can our perception of materials purely based on what they look like.

Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

Martin Salfity (Instagram) is a digital artist born in Salta, Argentina. Using 3D as a main tool, the focus of his work is on the intersection between the unseen and the tangible. On the edges of that blurry line is where he captures and brings to light extraordinary creatures and impossible scenarios. Currently lives and works in London, UK.

Experimental animation that tickles the mind’s fancy is Martin Salfity’s forte with his colorful and hyperrealistic visuals. His work tends to center around the way he can manipulate chromatic palettes and elements of motion in a nuclear sort of dance. Transformative and fluid, the animations have a  mesmerizing effect with all the different ways of metamorphism plays out in each clip. 

Salfity is methodical in the way he chooses his subjects and even utilizing a boundless array of  objects to tinker with. The fruits of his creativity often result in high-resolution imagery that truly flaunts the 3D graphics’ particulars. His work has proved to even explore a more complex and  molecular level, with thousands of small details meticulously strung together to produce a conglomerate that seems to be its own sentient, thriving being.  

Soft blurs of the edges of the frame also enhance the talent found in Salfity’s body of work. There is simply so much to explore and be enchanted by. The polychromatic and fluttering world this artist has dexterously fabricated is thrilling to experience time and time again. Martin Salfity’s 3D animated visuals are bright, fun, and expertly curated for a wide audience to appreciate the art of  motion. 

Salfity expertly renders digital macrocosms in which he manipulates the borders of elusive forms to the whims of his creative will. His process is a skillful one as he embarks on astutely choosing varying consistencies and surfaces to mingle with one another in a symbolic manifestation of  motion. The artist illustrates his visions with various digital tools on a level that is triumphantly singular. Salfity explores the profundity of his artistic range with every work he creates. One can admire the depths of complexity he is willing to dive into with panoramas of digitally rendered reefs flourishing with an assortment of species, all beautiful and unique. This further attests to the endless artful persuasions that Salfity is able to elucidate all along the output of his work. The contexts of which his subjects are nestled in express some kind of thoughtful abstraction and regard for exemplary aesthetics.  

Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

For the past nine years we’ve watched Alejandra Ghersi, better known as Arca, carve a blazing path through the zeitgeist–a shapeshifting celestial body, streaking across the cultural firmament. Every time we laid eyes on her she’d taken on some new form–noise musician, diva, philosopher, fashion plate, party girl, technologist. Every time it seemed like we had a grip on her she slipped right past our expectations, protean and elusive.

That liquid nature has allowed Arca’s talents to thrive in unexpected places. Beyond creating a dense and varied body of musical work, she’s for Björk, Kanye, and FKA twigs; composed for Museum of Modern Art and a retro gaming console; DJed Frank Ocean’s PREP+ party; and performed at a Burberry runway show for Riccardo Tisci. She’s painted her own album art, modeled, co-designed next-generation musical instruments, and built an online community for the horde of self-proclaimed “mutants” who follow her. Seemingly disparate things that in retrospect add up to a single, ever-growing holistic work.

But these are only snapshots, artifacts of the ceaseless movement from one state to the next. Arca’s true artistic medium is transformation itself. It exists in the quantum-like state of infinite potential, further out towards the edge of possibility than most people dare to go. 

Earlier this month Arca debuted her very first NFT titled ‘Rorschach;KiCk’. Created in 2019, it’s an image of the original calligraphy all KiCk typography is sourced from. Each individually hand painted by the artist, Arca painted each symbol in sets of three during a trancelike state, birthing a unique set of font to accompany her multi-album series: KiCk. 

“I don’t want to be tied to one genre,” Arca says. “I don’t want to be labeled as one thing.” Her Grammy-nominated 2020 album KiCK i is a hologram holding all of her musical identities—at least the ones she’s shown us so far—in a state of simultaneous superimposition. Turn it one way and you find Arca the beatmaker, who first grabbed our attention in 2012 with the fractalized club music of her Stretch 1 & 2 EPs. Turn it another way and you encounter a mischievous mind that’s reverse-engineering contemporary pop and re-coding it in her own image. Turn it yet another and you find a Latin chanteuse who first emerged under the name Ghersi–exploring gender on/off stage, through live in-person and online performances. It was through this she came to identify as a nonbinary trans woman. 

As Arca has evolved, she’s dissolved the distinctions between the artist, her art, and the tools she uses to create it. The four-night performance piece, Mutant:Faith, that she debuted at The Shed in 2019, was built around custom-built technology she co-designed that transformed her body into an instrument in ways that have never been tried on stage before—myoelectric sensors that let her play sound with her muscles, a 9-foot-tall dance pole that generated noise through skin contact, and gear that translated her movements into MIDI notes. Since the pandemic has kept away from the stage, she’s continued to experiment with new ways of interfacing with technology, like using software from London-based AI startup Bronze to create 100 different AI-generated remixes of the KiCK i track “Riquiquí.” And now with her latest series of NFT’s:

“The way forward for me in my creative journey began to not only allow for painting but rather require it as a mode of intrapsychic research of the symbols and textures that call out to me. I consider the instances during which I paint as trancelike as my wildest performances on stage. It became clear to me that to find exploration in painting allowed me a sense of play I had all but forgotten in my musicianship, after many more than 10,000 hours in that field. Now my painting work has renewed my love for music, and my textural concerns have found a resonance among both fields I work in. I am very pleased to be able to allow the form of patronage NFTs constitute in the hopes of aiding my further production of more cryptoart. I have many ideas I am currently researching about hopefully new ways to mediate concepts of beauty, identity and the numinous in this field,” explains Arca.

Slur ⚧ is a painting which depicts a playful demonic gaze. Its title, Slur, for me suggests an alchemical transformation of the different slurs I’ve been called throughout my lifetime. The work constitutes a gesture of invoking prejudice as materia prima, a catalyst/fertilizer for my faith in strangers, including those who have at different points had the intention of alienating me with their words. The gesture of this piece is meant as a means of love in the face of fear, hoping to allow for an encounter with numinous love in the face of prejudice and cruelty the context of groupthink-fueled bullying be it in recess playgrounds or on the streets day to day.- Arca

Sometimes, Arca feels like a shard of some potential future jutting into the here and now. But while her work—and she herself—can feel science-fictional, it’s not just theoretical. She seems to emanate change—an extradimensional beacon guiding us into unexplored worlds, splicing snippets of alien DNA into our psychic code. Her musical ideas reverberate through popular music at every level. The experimental instruments she’s helping to design are opening the door to body-based controllers for the mass market. Her Discord group Mutants1000000 has grown into a refuge for “mutants” who share her dream of reshaping the world to fit them better, and who have the potential to effect change in ways that even Arca can’t predict.   

The cover of KiCK i has become the defining image of Arca in this phase of her evolution. She is standing tall and still, the soft curves of her almost-naked body wrapped in the hard metal embrace of a cybernetic exoskeleton. Stilt-like legs give her body a threatening animal posture, and long, curved claws extend downward from her wrists. She’s a war machine at rest, but the expression on her face is serene. She has seen the future, and now she’s inviting us to create it with her.

Text By Miles Raymer

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ARCA: 

Official Arca Website
Twitch / Patreon / Discord
Instagram / Twitter  
Website / Facebook 

Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

Derek Boshier (b.1937) has been described as “one of the godfathers of British Pop Art”. Boshier first came to prominence with his paintings as a student at the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1960s, with fellow students David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, and others in the British Pop Art movement. During his seven-decade career, the artist has worked in a wide variety of media including drawing, printmaking, film, books, three-dimensional objects, installations and photography among them. Boshier’s work has always been linked with popular culture. His graphic work with music groups such as The Clash and with David Bowie brought his work to a wider audience. Boshier’s works are in the collections of Tate, MoMA and museums around the world. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received awards at international film festivals.

With his inaugural NFT, Boshier explores a new media and format, all the while continuing his engagement with popular culture. Derek Boshier created his debut NFT work, Nobody Behind the Wheel, minted on April 16 in partnership with Verisart and SuperRare. Bidding closes around 1pm EDT April 18.

The work was created in collaboration with Shapeshifter7. Boshier created the illustrations for the video which were then animated by Shapeshifter7 who has been creating digital art since 1996. 

We spoke to Derek Boshier and Shapeshifter7 who talked us through their artistic process and the backstory of the work:

“We have worked together on several short films and animations over the past few years. This collaborative series was birthed during the frothy days of early 2021 spurred by the massive worldwide interest in NFT and cryptocurrencies.”

“We were amused by the almost evangelical views that crypto converts have on the ultimate ascendance of decentralized currencies vs. the purported demise of the dollar. We were also tickled by the firmly held beliefs of the old guard vis a vis cryptocurrency.”

“We worked on this series with tongue firmly in cheek to look at both sides of this philosophical great divide. As artists, we do not have a horse in this race. We are merely reporting from the front lines of culture and commerce. We then decided to embark on creating a series of crypto art.” 

“The first release from our crypto series is titled NOBODY BEHIND THE WHEEL. Conceptually this piece represents the view of diehard crypto adherents that currency, commerce and contracts work best when there is no central steering authority. Essentially a driverless car that propels itself forward on a road that is built by the thousands of decentralized nodes that represent the blockchain.” 

“The idea of fiat currencies being represented by a FIAT car was exactly the sort of visual pun that appealed to our punk sense of humor. Derek’s work with David Bowie and The Clash has always played with ideas of revolution, both artistic and cultural. Stay tuned for the next piece of this series.” 

Derek Boshier’s inaugural NFT is certified by Verisart, an award-winning blockchain certification platform. Designed to empower artists to tell the story of their work, the digital certificates include additional images, videos and documents. For collectors, Verisart’s patent-pending Certificates of Authenticity (COA) form an integral part of collecting NFTs. They provide confidence in the identity of the artist and the verified history of the artwork. Through the certificate, the collector of the work will gain exclusive access to the original animation for the Nobody Behind the Wheel video.

About the artists

Derek Boshier 

Derek Boshier (b.1937) is “one of the godfathers of pop art”. During his studies at the RCA in London, he became one of the first artists of the British Pop Art movement. He has engaged with popular culture throughout his career and worked with music groups including David Bowie and the Clash. Boshier’s art spans a wide variety of media. He is represented with work in the Tate Gallery( London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), and museums in Portugal, Israel, Poland, Cuba, Australia, Holland, Hungary, America, and the UK. He is also in private collections. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, Honorary Fellow- Royal College of Art and recipient of film awards at international film festivals in India and the USA. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Shapeshifter7 

Shapeshifter7 has been creating digital art since 1996. He works in photography, collage, film, animation, music, and figurative art. He makes artworks that echo and recompose the architectural spaces he photographs, turning them into immersive zones while exploring the nexus of photographic collage, symbols, and perception. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Bidding on SuperRare for Derek Boshier’s inaugural NFT, NOBODY BEHIND THE WHEEL, closes around 1pm EDT on April 18.