[Simon Johan explores] the human predilection toward fantasy and emotional fulfillment… through the depictions of animals who mirror human conventions. A pair of dreamy foxes in a park during a snowstorm appears to be crying; a llama with a poodle haircut exhibits flamboyance. He creates mythical landscapes that hover in a space between fantasy and reality, emotion and reason, desire and fear, artifice and nature. Pastel colors, misty settings and fuzzy animals create beauty and wonder, but bloody noses, artificial hair and strangely knowing expressions suggest a darker reality.

Nature is full of wonder. Just venture out into the woods and look around you: observe the bears and listen to the birds. We live in a world full of life - life that we increasingly keep taking for granted.

Please visit Simen Johan’s website for more information about his work. Introductory text sourced from Nothing Magazine.

I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do, they are always in full colour. The environment is always fully formed - each detail, each intricacy laid out with utmost clarity. Unbound by the physical constraints of reality, it is exuberant and phantasmagoric. I never want to leave…

Scott Everingham creates environments that are at once tangible and indeterminate, acting as modes of escape to fictional or alternative realities. In these spaces, oil paint makes up the structure and life of architecture and human presence, and its materiality is used as a tool to characterize familiar signs and forms. His approach to the development of a painting is impulsive and instinctual, with each mark informing the next - producing work that is both deliberate and spontaneous. Everingham’s ambiguous, unfamiliar settings – with broken structures and visceral anatomy made from the language of paint – may suggest an insecure state of being, but may also bear moments of utopian renewal.

For more information on Toronto-based Everingham’s work, please visit his website. Additional text sourced from Jennifer Kostuik Gallery.

Employing theatrical makeup, elaborate costumes, props and digital manipulation, [Yasumasa] Morimura fastidiously refashions himself as heroines from the canon of painting… [like Frida Kahlo]. Yet, the artifice - and ultimately the failure - of his transformations are always conspicuous. By imitating though never quite becoming [her], Morimura unravels notions of male and female, east and west, past and present, original and adaptation.

Text written by Nicolas Bissaker for Sleek Magazine.

Today, the weather might be extreme (by mild Portland standards) but the tough conditions in these photos give some rare and valuable comparative scale to the world’s pressing economic and existential problems. It’s all the more poignant as the context comes through the extremely hazardous lens of extreme crab fishing. Sure, times are going get tougher in 2009 but if these fishermen are any indication, the human spirit is up to the challenge, surviving… simply out of habit.

Playful postmodern performance photography can show up anywhere, as is amply evidenced by commercial fisherman Corey Arnold’s color shots of hijinks on the high seas of the forbidding roiling Bering Straits. The romantic myths of the Great White North assiduously cultivated by such fabulists as Jack London get a big-time tweak when we contemplate scenes in which Arnold lies blissfully in the hold of his boat cuddling a bleeding dead fish that looks like it is about to kiss him on the lips; or when we see a shipmate from behind on the deck swinging an iron bar gamely at a piñata that he contrived as a birthday gift for himself, as monstrous waves swell around him, threatening to swamp the celebration. Even when nature fills the picture, Arnold goes overboard; in a stunningly beautiful image of chaotic motion, a dense flock of gulls flies and splashes every which way in compelling anarchy.

Images by Corey Arnold. He also maintains a blog of his life as a commercial fisherman. Introductory text by Jeff Jahn; additional text by Michael Weinstein.

It is mid March. I stepped into the garden. Flower buds appearing, green grass replacing the soggy ground. Growth is everywhere. Colour is everywhere. It will soon be Spring.

Paintings by British Columbian artist Todd Clark.

I was always fascinated with shadows. I liked how it followed me around, playing peekaboo with each turn I make. Sometimes tall and lean, other times short and stout - my personal funhouse mirror. I also liked to think that he was my twin brother, that he was the one leaving the footprints that trailed me. He always told me, ‘by following them back, you will never lose your way.’ I called him Hansel.

Images by Ian Baguskas.

My name is Terry Fox. I am 21 years old, and I am an amputee. I lost my right leg two-and-a-half years ago due to cancer. The night before my amputation, my former basketball coach brought me a magazine with an article on an amputee who ran in the New York Marathon. It was then I decided to meet this new challenge head on and not only overcome my disability, but conquer it in such a way that I could never look back and say it disabled me.

But I soon realized that that would only be half my quest, for as I went through the 16 months of the physically and emotionally draining ordeal of chemotherapy, I was rudely awakened by the feelings that surrounded and coursed through the cancer clinic. There were faces with the brave smiles, and the ones who had given up smiling. There were feelings of hopeful denial, and the feelings of despair. My quest would not be a selfish one. I could not leave knowing these faces and feelings would still exist, even though I would be set free from mine. Somewhere the hurting must stop… and I was determined to take myself to the limit for this cause.

From the beginning the going was extremely difficult, and I was facing chronic ailments foreign to runners with two legs in addition to the common physical strains felt by all dedicated athletes.

But these problems are now behind me, as I have either out-persisted or learned to deal with them. I feel strong not only physically, but more important, emotionally. Soon I will be adding one full mile a week, and coupled with weight training I have been doing, by next April I will be ready to achieve something that for me was once only a distant dream reserved for the world of miracles – to run across Canada to raise money for the fight against cancer. The running I can do, even if I have to crawl every last mile.

The people in cancer clinics all over the world need people who believe in miracles. I am not a dreamer, and I am not saying that this will initiate any kind of definitive answer or cure to cancer. But I believe in miracles. I have to.

Terry Fox, October 1979

 
Terry Fox hoped to raise one dollar for each of Canada’s 24 million people, a goal he met despite being forced to end his run after 143 days and 5,300 kilometers when his cancer spread to his lungs. He died nine months after being forced to end his marathon.

It is the opening ceremony of the 2010 Paralympics in Vancouver. Apart from Terry Fox himself, few exemplify the immense courage the human spirit is able to summon in the face of adversity. Every spark can become a flame. And every flame can become a bonfire. Terry, Your hopes and dreams live on in every Canadian. You have to know that.

Painting from film stills extracted from sources of popular culture, McReynolds explores how an image can be broken down through multiple layers of appropriation, from film to video to digital media to paint. Depicting group activities such as party scenes, sun bathing and show-boat performances, McReynolds magnifies the contrast between the immediacy of spectacle and the slow reveal of an event’s details. His imagery lingers in the in-between depicting moments in transition. Relishing this space between cause and effect, McReynolds bestows the mundane activities of a self-congratulating American culture with a sense of seduction, violence, intrigue and suspense.

“[My work] comes from the desire to find a balance between something that is staged and intuitive, original and reproduced, familiar and unexpected, digital and analog, comic and tragic… I’m drawn to moments that exist between genesis and resolve. Something so fleeting and anonymous it’s impossible to see without the aid of technology.”

For more information on McReynolds’ work, please visit his website.

In the fall of 2009 I left for Pakistan to start a project around acid and kerosene oil burn victims. I worked with a non-governmental foundation called Depilex Smile Again Foundation which helps burned women with reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation and therapy. There are currently over 400 women waiting for reconstructive surgery after acid attacks in Lahore, Pakistan.

Through the foundation I met one woman - Saira - who stood out in particular. Saira was attacked with acid by her husband after refusing to move in with him. After multiple operations, her face still wears horrific scars and will mark the way people see her for the rest of her life. My aim with this project is to follow these women … while they rebuild their faces through surgery [and] the courage, acceptance and self-esteem to continue go on living with a disfigured face.

Until today there has not been one single case that has brought any of the attackers to justice.

It is International Women’s Day today. While it is a day to celebrate the ‘economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future,’ we must not forget the inequality that women still face in certain parts of the world: rape victims who stand to face death at the hands of their very own male siblings should they come forth to file a report, spousal abuse victims who suffer in silence because their husbands have a better social standing by virtue of being male… Though, I wonder, how barbaric can one be, regardless of gender, to subject another life to such heinous acts, as these women suffer? How did we come to this?

For more information on Demavlys’ work, please visit her website.

I have never been to Iceland, but I always imagined that it laid untainted by the hand of man. I know it is wishful thinking. Gentrification comes with at the expense of nature. We set up camp and greedily lay claim to more land with every passing day. Thomsen’s photographs of the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project in the Icelandic highlands exposes the effects of our unending quest for development - the scars left by our various machinery. Depicted in a rather documentary manner, albeit infinitely majestic, Thomsen leaves you to come to your own conclusion. But just how barbaric are we to subdue wilderness to the extent that we have? When will it stop? Will it ever?

Please visit Pétur Thomsen’s website to view more of his work.