Art

In His World-Building Series ‘New Prophets,’ Jorge Mañes Rubio Cloaks Basketballs in Beads

Beginning with an iconic yet common spherical form, Jorge Mañes Rubio reimagines basketballs as powerful entities in his series New Prophets. Ornamented with stylized creatures, botanicals, and figures, each sculpture tells its own enigmatic story, drawing on the inextricable link between past and present. “These works, although familiar in visual language, seem to come from a dream-like dimension,” the artist tells Colossal, “as if offering a chance at re-enchanting the world we live in.”

New Prophets began with a fascination with an 8th-century Spanish illuminated manuscript called the Commentary on the Apocalypse that’s decorated in a Mozarabic style, which originated in Spain and represents a blend of Romanesque, Islamic, and Byzantine traditions. Rubio, who is currently based in Amsterdam, is fascinated by cultural exchange throughout history. He says:

My artistic practice operates on a similar way: I’m claiming a space where I can continue to learn from a crucible of the most diverse influences, while at the same time carving my own distinctive path. I want to continue to explore cross-cultural themes and symbols that reflect and honour the extensive circulation of ideas, works, and people that came before us.

World-building is central to Rubio’s practice, and initially, he considered another spherical shape for this series as a literal representation of the world: a globe. “The colonial and imperial connotations of this artifact really discouraged me,” he says, but when by chance he placed a string of beads on a basketball that was kicking around his studio, the idea for New Prophets clicked.

 

Rubio coats the balls with plaster and gesso—ensuring it doesn’t deflate—criss-crosses the form along its distinctive lines, and adds vibrant flowers, stylized text, medieval motifs, and mythical creatures. The orbs play with the idea of an object designed to be bounced and thrown around, instead coating it with delicate patterns and displaying it like a sacred relic.

In his alternative worlds, Rubio is interested in visualizing how past, present, and future can unfold simultaneously. “My hope is that my works invite people to rethink our relationship with the universe and all the beings that live in it —human, nonhuman, material, or spiritual— suggesting alternatives to established systems of representation, power and exploitation,” he says. “I believe this more animistic perspective has the potential to provide a more generous, humbling attitude to make sense of the world we live in.”

Rubio is currently working toward a couple of show in 2025 and continuing New Prophets. Find more on the artist’s website, and stay up to date on Instagram.

 

Art Nature

Informed by Research Aboard Ships, Elsa Guillaume Translates the Wonder of Marine Adventures

Whether capturing the sights of a dive in the remote Mexican village of Xcalak or the internal mechanisms of a sailing ship, Elsa Guillaume’s stylized sketchbooks record her adventures. Glimpses of masts, a kitchen quaking from shaky seas, and a hand gutting a fish create a rich tapestry of life on the move. “Daily drawings (are) a ritual while traveling,” she tells Colossal. “It is a way to practice the gaze, to be attentive to any type of surroundings. I believe it is important to train both eyes and hands simultaneously, and regularly.”

The Brussels-based artist’s frequent travels provide encounters and research opportunities that fuel both her work and devotion to the beauty and wonder of the sea. In fall, she explored the arctic aboard the Polar POD, and she’s currently sailing on a 195-meter container ship called the MARIUS for a residency with Villa Albertine. The vessel launched this month from Nouméa in the South Pacific and will travel the Australian east coast, New Zealand, and the Panama Canal before docking in Savannah, Georgia, in May.

During the six-week journey, Guillaume plans to continue her daily drawings and create a vast repository of ocean life. “It gives space and time to discover and observe an all-new environment to me, the merchant marine,” she says. “How human beings either explore, travel, or exploit the ocean has always been a very strong source of inspiration to me.”

 

When the artist returns to her studio, encounters with new-to-her creatures and the discoveries of her travels often slip into her three-dimensional works, sometimes unintentionally. The process “is very probably an unconscious continuity of what I have noticed, of what I have felt, though I don’t necessarily make an obvious connection between these two practices. I like to think of my sculptures, installations, exhibitions (as) projects from scratch, nourished by many other things,” she shares.

Often in subdued color palettes or monochrome ceramic, her sculptures tend to display hybrid characteristics, like the human limbs and animal heads of “Triton IX.” Others disassemble ocean life, revealing the insides and anatomy of flayed fish.

While on the MARIUS, Guillaume will create larger collaged ink drawings that will be shown along with a new sculpture in October at Galerie La Patinoire Royale in Brussels. That solo show will “create a new narration, around human’s shells, like a lost civilization of the seas. This time at sea, connecting the French island of New-Caledonia to Savannah in the U.S. will infuse in many ways this exhibition project.”

Guillaume has limited internet access during the residency, but follow her on Instagram for occasional updates about her journey.

 

Art

Ronald Jackson’s Masked Portraits of Imaginary Characters Stoke Curiosity About Their Stories

Six years ago, Ronald Jackson had only four months to prepare for a solo exhibition. The short time frame led to a series of large-scale portraits that focused on an imagined central figure, often peering directly back at the viewer, in front of vibrant backgrounds. But he quickly grew uninspired by painting the straightforward head-and-shoulder compositions. “Portraits, which are usually based in concepts of identity, can present a challenge for artists desiring to suggest narratives,” he tells Colossal.

In his bold oil paintings, Jackson illuminates imagination itself. He began to incorporate masks as a way to enrich his own exploration of portraiture while simultaneously kindling a sense of curiosity about the individuals and their histories. Rather than portraying someone specific, each piece asks, “Who do you think this is?”

“The primary inspiration for my art comes from the value that I have in the untold stories of African Americans of the past,” he says, “specifically the more intimate stories keying in on their basic humanity, as opposed to the repeated narratives of societal challenges and struggles.” The mask motif, he realized, was a perfect way to stoke inquisitiveness, not just about identity but of its connection to broader stories, connecting past and present.

For the last two years, Jackson has focused on an imagined figure named Johnnie Mae King. To help tell her story, he has become more interested in community collaboration, enlisting others to help develop the character’s narrative through flash fiction and other types of creative writing. Through this cooperative process, Jackson has developed an online platform, currently being refined before a public launch, where literary artists can engage with visual art through the written word.

In addition to the storytelling platform, Jackson is currently working toward a solo exhibition in 2025. Explore more on his website, and follow updates on Instagram.

 

Design

Just Add Water: Grow Your Own Furniture with These Pop-Up Sponge Designs

A team of industrial designers prototyped a furniture collection that dramatically transforms from flat sheets into fully functional objects, no tools required.

Taking Gaetano Pesce’s spectacular “Up 5” chair as a starting point, Under Pressure Solutions (UPS) is an experimental research project helmed by industrial designers and ÉCAL teachers Camille Blin, Christophe Guberan, Anthony Guex, Chris Kabel, and Julie Richoz. The team recognized the rampant demand for online commerce and subsequent shipping processes that, for furniture, was often cumbersome, expensive, and wasteful given the size and bulk of the products.

As an alternative, they produced a line of stools, chairs, wine racks, and more from cellulose sponge that can be squashed and dried flat, sometimes small enough to fit into a regular envelope. The biodegradable material activates with water and expands ten times its size. Once dry, it hardens into its final form and is more durable than other plastic-based foams. As the furniture bows or dips with use, a spray of water allows the material to spring back to a more robust position.

UPS departs from the particle board and plastics often seen at big box stores. During a two-year research process, the designers tested 56 materials before settling on cellulose sponge made with vegetal fibers, sodium sulphate crystals, softeners, and wood pulp. After various manufacturing and sustainability tests, the team produced 16 unique objects from pendant lights and shelves to chairs and coffee table bases.

The project was recently on view for Milan Design Week, and you can learn more about making process on the UPS site.

 

Art

Tune into Your Own Brain Waves with Steve Parker’s Suspended Constellations of Salvaged Brass

Many therapists advise patients to reconnect with their inner voice, a part of treatment that, as anyone who’s tried it can attest, is easier said than done. But what if you could tune into to your internal ups and downs in the same way you listen to a song?

In his Sonic Meditation for Solo Performer series, Austin-based artist and musician Steve Parker fashions immersive installations of salvaged brass. Suspended in clusters with their bells pointing every direction, the instruments envelop a single viewer, who wears an EEG brain monitor and silently reads a series of meditations. A custom software program translates the ensuing brain waves into a 16-part composition played through the winds. The result is a multi-sensory experience that wraps the viewer in the soft vibration of sound waves and makes their inner monologue audible.

Parker frequently incorporates unique ways to interact with instruments into his practice, including in the sprawling 2020 work titled “Ghost Box,” which produced sound in response to human touch. He recently installed the towering purple “Fanfare” sculpture in a Meridian, Idaho, public park, which similarly invites the public to listen to the sounds of the surrounding environment through small trumpet bells at the base.

For more of Parker’s musical works, visit his site and Instagram.

 

Art

Imagining Worlds After Climate Disaster, Julie Heffernan Melds Chaos and the Sublime

Julie Heffernan likens her paintings to “advent calendars gone haywire.” Working in oil on canvas, the Brooklyn-based artist renders vast dreamworlds with tiny vignettes scattered across wider landscapes. Appearing from a distant or aerial perspective, the pieces envision the possibilities of life after fires, floods, and other climate disasters and potential opportunities for emerging anew.

Grand in scale and scope, the intricate paintings bear titles like “Self Portrait as Emergency Shipwright” and “Self Portrait with Sanctuary,” which nod to the personal details within each work. Various characters recur in the pieces, but where they once appeared alongside fresh fruit as an enduring metaphor for youthfulness, today, they’re surrounded by imagery of decay.”I find myself repeatedly drawn to landscape painting in order to explore my own issues, both planetary and personal,” she says. “I imagine landscapes that bear witness to our rise and fall as a great power but also to the workings of one woman’s mind.”

 

Painting, the artist explains, is a way “to see better” and to place the struggles and difficulties of the world within a context. Despite fires raging in the background, or in the case of “Weather Change,” a massive iceberg rapidly melting in the seas, Heffernan’s works are not fatalistic, instead highlighting the immense beauty of human ingenuity. She adds in a statement:

I wanted imagery that might suggest other ways we could cope and possibly even flourish in a new extreme climate and to give my characters things they must tend. I give them water and tools to stop the burning; the tarred and feathered heads of big polluters; a library of great books to surround themselves with as they contend with the madness of man-made calamities.

Evoking the tradition of Hudson River School artists like Thomas Cole, Heffernan’s paintings focus on landscapes that appear amidst chaos as a sort of paradise. She’s also known to paint over and retouch works even after she’s deemed them complete, each time revising her idyllic vision and inching closer to the sublime.

It’s worth checking out an archive of the artist’s paintings to see how the scenes and characters have evolved. Follow her work on Instagram, along with updates about her graphic novel, Babe in the Woods: Or, the Art of Getting Lost, slated for release in September. And if you’re in San Francisco, mark your calendars for November, when Heffernan will have work on view at Catharine Clark Gallery.