Karen Azoulay’s 2002 installation Sprinkle Sprinkle is a garden of flowers raining down a colourful torrent of pompoms and painted coffee filters. Azoulay is much taken with confetti and theatre sets, combining the two in within her magically romantic landscape. This Toronto artist acknowledges that her work is feminine, but not political, simply a “byproduct of (her) femininity”. Azoulay’s organic shapes sometimes come together as garlands which, along with the confetti of petals, are often distributed to convey love and blessings in several cultures. Put that umbrella away.

Artist: Karen Azoulay
+ paulpetro.com

Swedish painter Mamma Andersson provides the viewer with a series of both interiors peopled by women quietly busy and exteriors with subjects seemingly out of context. Her scenes of rooms appear to be harmless until one notices the areas filled with a thick black cloudiness, lending an air of mystery to an ordinary scene. Andersson combines techniques within the works, allowing thickly applied paints to rest side by side with the lightest of washes. Andersson often turns the backs of her subjects to us, leaving us with the need to know more about them, and the paintings that must contain them.

Artist: Mamma Andersson
+ stephenfriedman.com

Tomi Lahdesmaki, also known as the Outer One, is an illustrator based in San Francisco. His print work is a multi-media mix of collage, photo montage, fantasy, poetry, mythology and good old rock and roll. Lahdesmaki has done design and illustration for Rockpile magazine as well as various other publications. Although Lahdesmaki’s work is clearly of the moment, there is an air of the old-fashioned about some of his pieces that draw the viewer to worlds far from the nightspots for which he sometimes illustrates. An eclectic, and fascinating, collection.

Artist: Tomi Lahdesmaki
+ theouterone.com

For his Habitat series of sculptural works, Shayne Dark removes the bark from tree branches and paints them primary colours to highlight the contrast between urban and natural settings. The branches are arranged in geometric shapes evocative of beaver lodges. This perhaps imparts a sense of self-preservation, albeit one that goes hand in hand with the need to stand out. His yellow Resurrection is not unlike a sea urchin, daring anyone to penetrate. Again, the bright colour invites, while the aggressive medium repels.

Artist: Shayne Dark
+ shaynedark.com

Illustrator Joshua Gorchov brings to us a group of fellows with the saddest of eyes. His acrylics on wood speak of transition, of loss, of moving on. Although many of his works are commercial, they stand alone to tell their own stories. At first glance the protagonist seems to be one and the same, but a second will explain that these guys may well share some very common conditions. Although the straight lines in these pieces suggest stagnation or immobility, there is always an element of movement to show the existence of choice.

Artist: Joshua Gorchov
+ gorchov.com

YangTan is a hot photographer from Singapore based in NY whose photos ooze cool. Shots from his Scapes series invite the viewer into a state of zen. The sense of calm that pervades his work is helped along by YangTan’s preference for a muted palette of desaturated colour. He may be a relative newcomer to the world of photography, but his background in advertising has provided him with a variety of insights that surround the medium. Now coming at it from behind the lens, YangTan’s clean, sharp style is keeping him very busy.

Artist: YangTan
+ yangtan.com

Futebol, by Brazilian Nelson Leirner, is a sculptural installation that uses hundreds of figurines to create the masses that attend the most international of all sports: the soccer game. The teams are made up of maneki neko ceramics, the lucky cats that can be found in Asian shops around the world and the spectators come from groups as diverse as the Roman cavalry, Indian chiefs and Buddhas. Nice comment on the global expansion of mass culture.

Artist: Nelson Leirner
+ roeblinghall.com

Ted Vasin is a Russian-born San Francisco artist who translates his dreams onto canvas by way of computer software. Vasin’s visions of abstraction are distilled through a system of numbers which he then paints, creating what he calls Mathematical Perfection. The result is a collection of colourful paintings with a sci-fi edge, a very contemporary comic book surrealism. In addition to the visual offering, Vasin often prepares an aural component to accompany each painting – most of his paintings come with a specially composed cd, for a total sensory experience.

Artist: Ted Vasin
+ tedvasin.com

Bad boy Damien Hirst has been accused of jumping the shark with his new show The Elusive Truth, a series of thirty almost hyperrealist paintings. Produced by Hirst and his team over a period of three years, these oil paintings were originally going to be airbrushed, but the results were not at all to his satisfaction. The studio worked from a variety of images culled from newspaper and magazines, trying at first to render the paintings as closely as possible to the photos. Finally, Hirst shifted the emphasis from a photographic look to more detailed study of the paint. His favorite bits to paint, of course, were the goriest.
Spots they’re not.

Artist: Damien Hirst
+ newyorkmetro.com

Whitney Bedford is an American painter drawn to the high seas of shipwrecks and pirates. She sees her subjects as depictions of passion and despair and bases her paintings on old academic pictures of naval battles while capsizing a more conventional perspective. The element of chaos in her storytelling is what gives life to these seascapes – a chaos wrought through the message and the medium, as she says, “Sometimes it is the paint itself that sinks the images.”

Artist: Whitney Bedford
+ galerieartconcept.com

Cadence Giersbach uses the myth and magic of the falls as the focus of her recent series of paintings, Niagara. After digitally manipulating photos of her subject, Giersbach then paints the image, using such colour saturation that it is hard for the viewer to avoid feeling the hallucinatory effect, one that fits well with the commentary on the commercialism of tourism. Giersbach contrasts the natural beauty of Niagara Falls (landscape) with the corruption of all that surrounds them (development). Sort of like honeymoon and marriage?

Artist: Cadence Giersbach
+ roeblinghall.com