frrresh visual arts magazine
Nยบ34
Greetings! We hope You are starting the new year fresh :) Just to let you all know- we have a couple of new year’s resolutions: we’re going to feature more artists and even have special themed issues! However, we’re not going to change the most important thing- Frrresh magazine is going to stay free, available online for everyone and will be featuring great known and unknown visual artists from around the world! Lastly, we are sending best new year’s wishes your way! Have a good one!
artists featured in issue 34 are: Apak studio Philippe de Kemmeter Nina Rendulić Elsa Mora 1010 Maryanna Hoggatt J. Shea
Apak
studio
Apak is Aaron & Ayumi Piland. We are a husband & wife couple living on the outskirts of Portland Oregon. We create artwork together as a way exploring the beauty, mystery, and magic of life as well as expressing our love for each other. We create rich and colorful gouache/acrylic paintings featuring the utopian lives and adventures of curious little beings exploring lush fantastic environments surrounded by friendly little animals. Our goal is to bring something beautiful and meaningful into the world in hopes of inspiring us all to live simply, peacefully, and harmoniously. www.apakstudio.tumblr.com www.apakstudio.com/apak
Philippe de Kemmeter
Hello! I am a freelance illustrator from Belgium. My illustrations are published in belgian, french and american magazines. From Indian ink to Photoshop, I use various tools to create my artworks. I like to fill lots of sketchbooks and likes to draws portraits. I won awards for prints several years ago. I am also an author and illustrator for children books. Some of them have been translated in spanish, danish, japanese, korean and arabic.
www.behance.net/philippedekemmeter www.philippedekemmeter.blogspot.com www.phildekem.blogspot.com
Nina
Rendulić
I am not really a photographer, I’m a linguist. For living, I play with words – especially those who can tell how one represents oneself in everyday conversation, such as “and then this guy told me… and I’m like… and then I said to myself… ”. The concept of self-representation is a topic I find greatly inspiring and I tend to pursue it throughout my photography. My photography? Analog, mostly. Pushing the boundaries, sometimes (accidental multiple exposures, overly saturated colors). Personal, always (but not impersonating: I’m more comfortable with empty spaces than human faces). Representing, meaningful, to me. Starting point, for a creative narrative interpretation, for others. Trivia 1: I’m from Zagreb & I live and work in France, 120 km south of Paris. But also between: two languages, two countries, two cultures. A chasm that is sometimes difficult to overcome. Trivia 2: I like cats and fireworks.
www.je-m
me-dis.com
Elsa Mora Hello! My name is Elsa Mora and my nickname is Elsita. When I was born, the planets were aligned in perfect harmony for me to fail. I was one of eight children that came into this world for no special reason. Neglected from the start, I was a victim of those bad things you hear about in the news. All I had to do was follow my “destiny” and I would have become the fragile person that I was born to be. All I had to do was be one more lost sheep in my barrio, do what everyone else was doing and react to the terrible things that happened to me in the same way everyone else did. The mystery is that I did the opposite. Was I was slightly smarter than my peers? Probably not. Many of my screwed up neighbors and friends were smart, even though some ended up in jail, or even dead. Was it that I was touched by some special light? Not at all. Those stories about “special lights” are made to trick us into believing that good things happen only if something outside of us does the magic.
Then what happened? How did I end up being a better version of what I was supposed to be? The answer is: Lots of imagination and creativity. I was able to imagine a better destiny. I made it happen, day after day, inside my head. I wrote that imagined world down in diaries, I drew it, I painted it, I modeled it in clay and plasticine, I sang it out loud in the bathroom, I day dreamed about it. That imaginary reality became my project, my experiment, my secret love, the only thing that I could count on because it was all up to me. Everything else failed me but not my imagination. I became so connected to my fantastic world, that I lost my way back into that other ugly world where I was born. I forgot how to get back there. And when I became an adult (and before I was even aware of it) I had moved full-time into that better world, a place that became real before my eyes. One choice at a time, one day at a time, one idea at a time I found my way into a better reality. One morning I opened my eyes and said: I MADE IT! I still say that inside my head once in a while when I wake up. And after that bumpy ride, here I am, excited to share my passion for art and creativity with you. I believe that life, as well as art, have the potential to become whatever we want it to be.
artisaway.com
1010
Tell us a little about yourself, where are you based and what kind of art do you make? Originally I am from Poland. My Parents moved to Hamburg/Germany when I was around 8years old. I am based here since. I paint walls and make papercuts. For the last years I ve been mostly focussing on a abstract concept. Your work brings new layers of depth to a flat surface, can you tell us a little more about how you achieve this effect? Do you have a name for these “portals�? In this case painting a shadow does the trick. I call them holes, abyss, passage or portals. names that leave enough space for interpretation and projection for the viewer. Where did the name 1010 come from? The name was given to me by a Hamburg based photographer when I first started making pasteups around 10 years ago. I was working with minimal characters made out of old newspapers that I pasted around the city. I wasn´t really working with a name or a tag in that time. the only thing I did was marking the characters with a 1 or a 0, just to make a connection between their behaviour, the letters and words that were used in the newspaper and binary code. TXMX, thats how the photographer calls himself on the web, found a lot of the characters in the street, took pictures of them and tagged them with 1010 on flickr. I kind of liked the idea just using numbers as a name and kept it. ***This is a part of the interview taken from www.hashimotocontemporary.com
instagram.com/1010zzz
facebook.com/1010art
Maryanna Hoggatt In 1981 I was born on a naval base in the Philippine islands. For well over a decade my family hopscotched back to the US where we finally settled in Arizona. In 2007 I managed to escape the desert before I was baked alive and chased down my art school dreams in rainy Portland, Oregon. Later I decided art school wasn’t my ticket and entered a period I like to call The Great Lull. In 2013 I procured a tiny vial of magic potion from a creepy old witch lurking in a dark cobblestone alleyway. The cost of my soul was an exceptional bargain. After imbibing the glowing confetti colored syrup I removed the bar towel from my back pocket and quit my bartending job, running all the way home to immediately start painting. Enriched by a steady diet of youtube videos and intense research I taught myself to sculpt and made a small army of bipedal animals wearing clothes. Initially I had sought the career of an Artist because I thought it would be a great excuse to rise around noon each day, but instead I became something of a Morning Person and am now enslaved by the army I myself created. When I’m not burying myself in paint and clay, I’m hanging out with my other creative half, Jake Hollomon, and our absurdly talkative cat Theodore. Making art will always be my number one, but other activities I enjoy include attending the occasional social event with other humans, thinking about running and then sometimes actually running, watching a ludicrous amount of movies and television, cooking a decent meal, nature walks, living vicariously through my friends when I’m too busy to leave the house, and forever dreaming of all the things I want to do and hoping I have the time to do it.
ello.co/leetlewolf maryannahoggatt.com
J. Shea Born in Boston, MA and based in Porltand, OR Shea creates mixed media sculptures out of small discarded gadgets and lost cultural icons. These assembled parts are fused together with hand sculpted figures and animal forms carved out of clay and wood modeling mediums. Imbuing them with a sense of adaptability, transience and animism as they are pulled out of context, repurposed and recontextualized.
jshea9.com
Editors: Rafael MilÄ?ić and pekmezmed Contact: mail@frrresh.org frrresh.org facebook.com/frrresh.mag instagram.com/frrresh_magazine
Photos and text: courtesy of each author unless stated otherwise