Nick Cave "Wild God" Identity by OneTenEleven

May 02, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Branding, Design, Graphic Design, Lettering, Motioncollector, United Kingdom, Agencies

Wild God is the eighteenth studio album by the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, released on 30 August 2024 on PIAS.

Nick Cave’s marketing team approached OneTenEleven (lead by Antony Kitson you may remember from our Digital Decade events) in late 2023

Forming Wild God

When Nick shared his vision for Wild God, it was clear the name carried a deep, almost spiritual weight — dark yet full of hope. We embraced that feeling by keeping the design bold and minimal, like a sacred sculpture. The cover isn’t just graphic — it’s real, made from hand-placed, heat-molded white plastic letters, giving the title physical presence.

The Wild God Tour

For The Wild God Tour, the team developed a bold visual identity featuring variations of the title design across posters, banners, and billboards. An infinite colour-phasing animation served as the tour's intro, with large-scale screens integrated into each venue. Digital assets were delivered in multiple resolutions, and in collaboration between “Thunderwing & Nick Cave” and OneTenEleven, animated lyric visuals — personally curated by Nick Cave — were created to accompany live performances, reflecting his input on motion and colour direction.

Vinyl & CD Packaging

3D pack shots created for the Wild God campaign. Created from Thunderwing’s artwork, 3D modelling in Cinema4D, textures & lighting with Redshift.

Lyrics Videos

Created for the Wild God Album Campaign throughout 2024/25.

studio.oneteneleven.com

SPACES by Grant Yun

April 30, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Portfolios, South Korea, NFT Art

Grant Riven Yun is a Korean-American digital artist known on the NFT scene for his minimalist “Neo-Precisionist” style, capturing quiet moments in American suburbia and landscapes. Balancing life as a medical student, breakdancer and NFT OG, Yun blends nostalgia and precision in digital scenes inspired by artists like Hopper and Sheeler. His work has been exhibited internationally and featured in collaborations with Moma, Sotheby’s auctions, and NFT platforms, providing a fresh perspective on the beauty of the everyday.

“SPACES, Grant Yun’s latest body of work, thoughtfully investigates the profound transformations in our built environments driven by technological innovation, automation, and shifting labor paradigms. Created over several years, Yun’s vector-based illustrations reflect critically upon how exponential advances in artificial intelligence, remote work, digitization, and data infrastructure have reshaped the relationships between humanity, productivity, and physical space.”

SPACES is a series of 20 artworks. Each is a 1/1 NFT edition with an accompanying 3 + 2 AP print, with print edition 1 available to the NFT holder at cost. They are available via 24hr auctions (Ξ0.1 reserves) on fellowship.xyz, starting at 1pm ET on Apr 30th.

Learn more

Ballpoint pen art by Castro Adefisayo

April 29, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Illustration, Nigeria, NFT Art, Portfolios

Castro Adefisayo is a talented artist based in Nigeria, celebrated for his incredible ability to craft stunning portraits using only a ballpoint pen. His artwork showcases the diverse beauty of humanity, capturing the essence of individuals across various genders, ethnicities, ages, and socio-cultural backgrounds.

Through meticulous attention to detail and a unique technique, Castro brings his subjects to life on the canvas, inviting viewers to appreciate the intricate stories and emotions that define each person he portrays. His work highlights the aesthetic charm of human figures and conveys a powerful message about the universal dignity and worth of every individual.

Follow up artist

Curly Bahar

April 22, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Iran, NFT Art, Portfolios

Curly B or Bahar is a young artist from Teheran finishing her Masters in Arts. Her confident, angular brush strokes give the painting a raw, expressive energy. There's a sense of fragmentation, but it's intentional—almost like emotional cubism.

She may just started (assuming the artist career) pouring oil on canvas but the use of light feels dramatic, theatrical even it directs your focus almost subconsciously.

One also need spend some time watching her inks getting stronger in a sketchbook pages she shared on OBJKT as NFTs. Really impressive strokes catching the characters.

Follow up artist

City Pop by Hiroshi Nagai

April 17, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Illustration, Lifestyle, Japan, Portfolios

Hiroshi Nagai (b. 1947) is a Japanese artist known for his vibrant, nostalgic illustrations that capture the dreamy essence of summer. Inspired by the 1970s and ’80s pop culture, his work often features palm trees, swimming pools, and sleek architecture under bright blue skies.

His signature style became iconic during the rise of Japan’s City Pop music scene, especially through album covers like Eiichi Ohtaki’s A Long Vacation. Blending clean lines, bold colours, and a calm, minimalist aesthetic, Nagai creates timeless scenes that feel both familiar and surreal.

@hiroshipenguinjoe

𝗛𝗲𝘆𝟰𝗿𝗼 solo exhibition 𝗙𝗔𝗦𝗖𝗜𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 2024.8/17 at Excube Japan

Heyshiro - Painting in Whispers of Light

April 13, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Japan, Portfolios

Heyshiro’s approach to acrylic is unlike anyone else’s. Instead of bold, heavy strokes, he builds up his paintings slowly—thin, watery washes layered over faint sketches of colour. The effect isn’t just an image; it’s an atmosphere, a depth that feels almost luminous like the light is coming from within the canvas itself.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Heyshiro (@hey4ro)

His recent portraits are quiet but powerful. They start fragile, almost tentative, before sharpening into clarity. The surface doesn’t feel painted so much as breathed onto—soft, delicate, like fog on glass. Then, at the very end, he anchors it all with faint pencil lines, just enough to pull that dreamlike quality back into reality.

Heyshiro doesn’t just paint figures. He finds them, layer by layer, through light and shadow, working at a pace that feels more like meditation than art-making.

@hey4ro

Transhumanism by Joanna Grochowska

April 07, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Photography, Portfolios

What future do we want?

What must we do to get there?*

"TRANSHUMANISM" is an exhibition and a conceptual book by Joanna Grochowska affirming the transhumanist philosophy, worldview, and movement. Building on her earlier project Opening the Future (Munich, 2021), Grochowska explores the merging of human and technology, embracing concepts of human enhancement, morphological freedom, and the aesthetics of the posthuman condition.

Through distorted, purposefully incongruous, and slightly unsettling imagery, Grochowska confronts viewers with evolving notions of beauty, pleasure, and identity. The works are more than speculative visions of a dystopian AI future—they challenge the ethical boundaries of what it means to be human in an era of unnatural, edited, and superior life forms.

Latest “Transhumanism” solo show took place at the Galerie Verbeeck - Van Dyck in Antwerp.

The TRANSHUMANISM exhibition continues and extends the discourse initiated by Jeffrey Deitch’s 1992 Post Human series, drawing upon the ideas of thinkers like Elon Musk and Raymond Kurzweil. It addresses shifting paradigms of gender, body, and self in the face of accelerating technological evolution—ultimately seeking a new aesthetic language for the future human form.

Discover Joanna Grochowska’s book, “TRANSHUMANISM,” a compelling monograph featuring insights from Raymond Kurzweil and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner.

joannagrochowska.com

Anastasiya Mykhaylova and The Poetics of Loss

March 26, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025

Grief, sorrow, loss—all of that is one of the hardest topics to reflect on, not in a straightforward way. Of course, it is impossible to forget the Pieta motif, which literally demonstrates all the pain that a mother can have when losing a child. However, this does not mean that no different strategies exist in this area.

Anastasiya Mykhaylova is a photo and video artist based in London. Originally from Ukraine, her background is closely connected with the classical art system, but the moment she took a camera in her hands, she understood that new media had much more to offer her in terms of creative possibilities.

Her oeuvre is a form of self-reflective archaeology where the artist studies heritage themes and personal and collective memories. Her work engages with emotion's metaphysical and anthropomorphic aspects, offering a more abstract interpretation of identity and presence. All of this led her to one of the most poetical and metaphysical at the same time photo series – I See You Everywhere I Go, which is a love letter filled with grief because of the loss of her grandfather.

The outline Mykhaylova gives to her project says: After the passing of my grandfather, our house carried remnants of his soul. His presence lingered in the peaceful creaks of the floorboards and the lights that flickered above the table where he used to work. With this experience, I got to know grief as a magical presence that looms in the quiet spaces between moments, both haunting and tender in its embrace. Furthermore, it is obvious that she implies some of the Magical Realism aesthetics and a bit of De Chiricoesque visual elements that create a strong pattern of absence.

The fact that the artist chose not just one setting but a multitude of locations, demonstrates her ability to work and develop the topic she studies in different environments. The photographs of the house, are not mundane snapshots of where her grandfather has lived, in fact they go beyond the familiar. These are locations that build a story of a person who became an ephemeral object, a glimpse in one’s mind. If the artist continues to work in this area, she will definitely remain in contemporary art history as a female photographer who mastered the poetics of loss.

anamiha.com

Amy Hui Li

March 17, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, China, United Kingdom, Portfolios

Born in the vibrant city of Guangzhou, China, Amy Hui Li pursued her passion for Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London, a prestigious institution known for its creative approach to the arts. She then further honed her skills by completing a Masters in Painting from the renowned Royal College of Art. Since then, Li has exhibited her captivating works extensively across major art hubs, including London, New York, and Taiwan.

Notably, her participation in two significant group shows, Unit: London Calling in 2023 and Worlds Beyond in 2024, has garnered attention and acclaim. Recently Li is set to present an exciting solo exhibition at the Unit London gallery, where she will showcase her innovative hybrid fabric artworks that skillfully interweave elements of sculpture, painting, and installation, inviting viewers into her unique artistic vision.

Represented by Unit London

Kama Reis Art

March 16, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Portfolios, Spain

Kama Reis is a contemporary artist whose work captures the essence of nostalgia and individual discovery. Using coloured pencils as her medium of choice, she masters the art of the medium in order to convey the pure freedom of childlike imagination as she investigates richer issues of individualism, culture, and existence itself. Her work considers the duality of human existence—its fleeting insignificance and yet the lasting mark each person leaves on the world.

Raised in a small village in Upper Silesia in Poland, Kama's own life journey took her from Kraków to Italy and now Barcelona in Spain where she continues to evolve as an artist. In her work, Kama invites viewers to engage with individual and collective identity and to craft a narrative spanning past and present with a rich and reflective hand.

@kama_reis

The Blooming Soul

March 12, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Events, United Kingdom

The Blooming Soul: An Artistic Act Through the Lens of Botanical Metaphors

From March 12 to 17, 2025, the Eight Squared Gallery in Folkestone hosted the art exhibition "The Blooming Soul: A Celebration of Spring and Nature’s Awakening." This exhibition brought together eight outstanding international artists, each creating their works in various mediums ranging from abstract and figurative art to interactive installations.

The group of artists—Igor Khlopotov, Irina Slepko (Gauk), Iryna Yauseyenka, Mariia Babina, Natalia Titova, Svetlana Sycheva, Victoria Dini, and Yulia Rotkina—explored the interpenetration of artistic methods of understanding reality and various botanical concepts, techniques, methods, and established expressions. This interplay between the artist's symbolic field and the semiotic field of the gardener (botanist, florist, forester, naturalist, etc.) is a key conceptual finding of the exhibition, seemingly aimed at overcoming the fundamental boundaries between spheres of human activity and perception in pursuit of a hypothetical sense of wholeness, interconnectedness, and inseparability.

This exhibition is not merely a statement within the frameworks of unreflected eco-positivism that accompanies us from supermarket to trash bin; it is a bold and successful assertion by young outstanding artists striving for a deeper level of reflection that complements social anxiety with rhetorical intuitions, activist slogans with a metaphysical superstructure, and humanity's longing for nature with a bitter existential poetic humility.

The wide palette of artistic means and techniques, vivid images, and sumptuous colours—depicting themes of germination, the birth of life, the sprouting of seeds, swelling buds, sticky leaves, budding, and vegetative reproduction—poses a complex challenge of creating a non-trivial lexicon of new, previously non-existent symbolic connections that precede future neural ones. This allows us, for example, to transcend superficial sexuality in the imagery of the pistil and stamen and perceive in them a mystical or even religious yearning.
Each of the eight participants in the exhibition developed their paradoxical artistic strategy, revealing and enriching the aforementioned theme. In this article, we would like to focus in more detail on the works of two participants.

Within the exhibition 'The Blooming Soul,' the digital collage works of artist Natalia Titova stand out distinctly. Unlike the other participants, she uses direct visual botanical metaphors less prominently; however, it is this visual elusiveness that renders her works resonant, piercing, and aesthetically sharpened to the maximum. The artist simultaneously constructs and deconstructs, manifests and mythologises, and creates and destroys. Her collage series titled "Tove" serves as a captivating visualisation of the modern artist's thought process as they grapple with themes of life, nature, memory, cultural interactions, and the dissolution of perception boundaries regarding various substances. For instance, in her works, a wired earphone may represent both a sperm cell and a rope for tying, as well as the contour of an unidentified object. A golf club can be interpreted as a grass-cutting scythe, a contour of a fractal universe, and a blade severing a character's legs from the solid ground beneath them.

The subtly botanical metaphorical nature of her works levels all objects of memory against one another, literally endowing each object with the properties of the plant world. A cloud can become the earth from which identical bodies or body parts grow, while air can transform into the ground from which clouds arise. The objects simultaneously serve as items from the real world (coloured) and artefacts of memory, documents of the past (black and white). A dress becomes the sea, an earphone turns into the moon, and suddenly, the late British queen and a naïve monocle appear. Nevertheless, at the top of Natalia Titova's collages, flowers are always positioned, adding a hint of sorrowful hierarchy to her dynamic pluralistic rhizomatic artistic world— "Flowers above all."
The most striking aspect of these digital works is the sensation of lightness and imaginative freedom, albeit this lightness is produced by an inquisitive and critically self-reflective artist. Upon closer inspection, one can recognise the immense labour and meticulous development invested in these works, which imbue the collage compositions with the potential to resemble a Hindu abode of demigods (loka).

"On The Road" by Yulia Rotkina is an intricately organised piece of artwork. Upon encountering it, we may succumb to the charm of traditional mediums (canvas, oil), the cosy minimalism of the composition, and the soothing thickness of the brushstrokes; however, this should not obscure from us a whole range of the artist’s identities, which are masterfully concealed in the painting (like seeds in the ground) and reveal themselves, harbouring immense perceptual possibilities. It is this balance of the hidden and the manifest that structures or organises the complex attraction of engaging with the painting's message.

Firstly, one of the artist's identities is that of a critic of binary oppositions. All paired phenomena in this work undergo a process of critical reflection. It is particularly peculiar that the composition reads as a triptych: earth, sky, and the figure of a person. When we attempt to analyse the various elements of the painting in pairs, we find that there are no explicit pairs present. The artist transcends binary thinking through the active use of non-obvious trinaries. In the pair "human and nature," she adds another layer of nature. In the pair "blue and green," she introduces an ambivalent object that can be both blue and green, depending on the perspective.

Another identity of the artist is that of a synaesthetic experimenter. The minimalism of expressive means in Rotkina's work is complemented by a maximalism of perceptual approaches. For instance, the deliberate relief indicates a dynamic and emotional dimension, while the use of a limited palette of complex cool colours sets the tone for the blurring of boundaries and an asserted homogeneity of things. The third identity of the artist is that of a post-storyteller who has abandoned key elements of storytelling but preserved the essence of her narrative message through the vast possibilities of direct silence. Where she remains silent, kaleidoscopes of our viewer interpretation emerge. This work inspires and amazes with its complexity of conceptual development and unparalleled technical execution.

Eight Squared Folkestone

Ariadna Arnes finds beauty in strangeness

March 11, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, AI Art, NFT Art, Photography, Portfolios, Spain

Trained photographer Ariadna Arnes skillfully harnesses the power of AI technology to discover and reveal a unique beauty in the strangeness that often surrounds us. She perfectly uses AI as a third eye or a third arm to create outstanding pieces of art.

@ariadnaarnes_ai

Minimal Precisionism by Russell Green

March 10, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Lifestyle, NFT Art, Portfolios, USA

If you’ve dreamed of perfect illustrations for Jack London’s novels, we've found them in 2025. Talented Russell Green calls his style “Minimal Precisionism”. Combine the lost look of one-storied America with a gentle midnight colour palette, and you've captured a perfect sense of nostalgia for places you've never been but always desired to see.

@russellgreenart

Eclipse by Reine Paradis

March 09, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, France, Events, Photography, Portfolios

KÖNIG TELEGRAPHENAMT is pleased to present ECLIPSE, a solo show with new works by French artist Reine Paradis.

Born in 1989 and a graduate of the Gobelins School of Visual Communication in Paris, Reine Paradis has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2012 – a city of cinema, stories, fantasies, and eternal self-reinvention. It provides the perfect environment for the creation of her works which include photography, painting, film, and sculpture.

Solo show “Eclipse” at “KÖNIG TELEGRAPHENAMT”, Monbijoustraße 13, Berlin: 13 Feb – 15 Mar 2025

Paradis’ process includes several steps, the first of which is the imagination of a scenario. From that vision, she creates a small, collaged maquette on paper. This maquette is used as a blueprint when she scouts for the perfect location to photograph a scene – the scouting process alone can take years. Once a location is found, Paradis designs and creates costumes, props, and her origami-influenced sculptures, which will all be part of the scene. With the help of a partner who shoots the images, Paradis stages herself as the main figure in the work, adding a performative dimension that is essential to her process – “living” the scene allows her to fully transmit her original vision. Unflinching in the face of extreme situations and shielded by a blond wig, she embodies another character as an extension of herself, through which she can experience an alternative life, if only momentarily.

Editing the photos is a meticulous process completed by Paradis herself, in a game of perspective and depth she projects her world onto ours, changing each individual tone of the image to fit within her minimalist color palette. One usually thinks of photography as a tool to capture reality. We should start from the opposite assumption in the scenes of Reine Paradis. The resulting self-portraits bear witness of her imagination while transporting the viewer into a perfect frame of her world.

In the same rigorous spirit as her photographic works, Paradis creates paintings that are deeply rooted in memories and places while exploring the simplicity of the language of her surreal universe. Additionally, she transforms some of the origami props from her images into neon-translucent uranium glass sculptures—another dimension to Paradis’ multimedia approach.

Through the use of these different mediums, Paradis is able to create a world that exists in reality and imagination simultaneously. The use of reflective and transparent materials in her works obscures, reflects, and absorbs light while creating an aurora-like barrier –one that can hide but also illuminate. ECLIPSE, her newest series of works, is an audacious dive into Paradis’ mind, inviting viewers to witness her inexhaustible quest to transcend boundaries.

The award-winning feature film QUEEN OF PARADIS (Amazon Prime, 2020) follows Paradis on a journey across the United States to complete her previous series MIDNIGHT. The film captures her process from beginning to end in a dramatic adventure that peels the curtain back on how Paradis creates her surreal images. A second feature film, PARADISLAND, which follows the making of the current series ECLIPSE, is set for release in the fall/winter of 2025 for a worldwide theatrical and streaming audience.

@reineparadis

The Human as a Metaphor for the Photographer

March 05, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Portfolios, Photography, Russia, United Kingdom

The Human as a Metaphor for the Photographer

Contemporary photography undoubtedly inspires with its boundlessness. We believe in photography's limitless potential because it seems capable of permeating the world around us as part of our daily lives, as gallery luxury, and as a means for artistic self-discovery. It is this self-discovery through photography that I believe is the most subtle, fragile, promising, and enchanting aspect of the entire global artistic process of photography's evolution as a contemporary art form. This is a significant genre and conceptual branch that requires the photographer to demonstrate selflessness, a considerable degree of self-criticism, an absence of the desire to exoticise others, and immense personal empathetic energy capable of connecting people and infecting viewers with new meanings. In today’s article, I would like to discuss three contemporary photographers who compellingly explore the essence of humanity and are unique bearers of a personal philosophy of photography, creating new definitions of what it means to be human in the modern era.

The Human as a Sum and Reflection of All Natural Phenomena

Kseniia Chumakova, a photographer residing in Serbia, bases her artistic method on making non-obvious connections visible. These can be connections between nature and humanity, between humans and evolution, between humans and specific species, and between humans and non-human agents. The photographer seems occupied with naming those connections that exist somewhere between intuition and the wisdom of everyday life. According to her artistic aesthetic, a person (the model) is proportionate to the entire sum of the surrounding world. A human being is a relative and bearer of information about the entire knowable universe. However, this concept also reveals a striking duality in the human condition. On one hand, humans, according to Chumakova, are aware that they are made up of the same elements that surround them; on the other hand, the presence of this awareness in the non-human material world raises questions of curiosity, if not fear. Chumakova's photographs are filled with an enchanting yet minimalist energy, resembling a puzzle or riddle; her characters are ambivalent toward both the human world and the non-human world. This creates a remarkable effect, where the artwork simultaneously serves as a statement and a critique of that statement—a rare meta-narrative quality, particularly in contemporary photography.

@ksenija_chumakova

The Human as a Super-NPC

In Oksana Bochina's photographic style, the human is inextricably linked to the urban environment. This urban setting is both a habitat and a backdrop, a battlefield, a stage, a showcase, and everything listed above simultaneously. Bochina, who lives and works in Montenegro, perceives the human being as an element of a more complex system; however, this human does not reduce to the system or their function within it. Bochina's human is simultaneously a guest, an outsider, and a native inhabitant of the circumstances presented by the photographer. Her anthropological exploration is a captivating and vital optimistic quest for ever-new contradictory and mutually exclusive human identities. The camera, gazing from above, seems to pluck an individual from the urban flow and, together with the photographer, initiates an interactive game of multiplying meanings and identities around the captured person. This fascinating aesthetic, which is not merely a banal conceptualist attraction, allows the viewer to train their awareness of their usual perception of urban landscapes. It presents a slightly naive yet superhuman message from an artist wishing to share their benevolent vision as a method with those around them. The photographer employs dizzying photographic perspectives, vibrant dynamic colours, and a nuanced gaze from the observer's standpoint while not becoming a judge of her characters. Her works are rich in detail, inviting prolonged contemplation; although her characters may be presented as NPCs in video games, they transcend this status, offering hope that we (ordinary people) too are more than just images of ourselves.

@oksana_bochina

The Human is a Puzzle That Cannot Be Solved

The artistic concept of photographer Irina Slepko Gauk is the most radical, bold, and innovative. Through her photographs, she explores the impossibility of understanding the human being. The human is a constant impossibility of approach and awareness. This position is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic; the photographer seems to postulate a form of dark realism, where one of the axioms is that the human is an absolute unknown. Her models are majestic, often shrouded in shadows, dressed in black, and enveloped in dimness. They embody the traces of real people who mourn their own kind, unable to express that a person cannot be reduced to their traces, including photographs. This is a very significant statement for the photographer, altering the disproportions of the importance of reality and its representation in photography. There is no contempt for photography here, but a bitter realisation that a captured moment is an incredibly fragile and weightless thing, incapable of deciphering the mysteries of the total “multi-layer-edness” and poly-textured nature of humanity, like an informational bomb existing in the flow of time. To amplify the effect of her photographs, the artist adds elements of conditionality and absurdity, such as a whole lemon resting on the model's head or certain traits of the subcultural photo-aesthetics of the early 21st century. The photographs of Irina Slepko Gauk are provocatively rich in meaning and technically flawless; they seem to be created to endlessly raise questions about humanity, photographic art, and the impossibility of true understanding without losing oneself.

@ira.gauk

Pixel Ptushka

February 24, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Digital Art, Illustration, Russia, Portfolios

Pixel Ptushka is a talented pixel artist and manga creator. While I cannot appreciate her manga skills as I am completely out of that zone (but you shall), her pixel art is a pure pleasure for the eyes. The cities series is my favourite and I wish to see more of her pixel art soon.

@pixelptushka

Leah Gardner

January 19, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Lifestyle, Portfolios

In March 2020, Chicago-based Leah Gardner picked up a paintbrush as a distraction during the global pandemic. What started as an experiment soon blossomed into a passion for oil painting. After months of trial and error, Leah developed her skills and started selling her work.

By next year, Leah went full-time into painting. Locally, her work is displayed in area businesses, shown in Chicago art fairs, and hangs in private collections, all reflections of her unique and emotive style.

In her free time, Leah likes taking walks with her dog, doing some planting, and reading fiction novels. Her story testifies that art can indeed thrive during tumultuous times.

Follow up artist

Erased Reality: Exploring the Boundaries of Memory

January 10, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Portfolios, Photography

The “Erased Reality” photo project is a visual meditation on memory and perception. In this series, Sasha Mingia reimagines the human concept of reality by erasing familiar details and leaving only fragments that serve as a bridge between the visible and the remembered.

“Reality is a ghost. It’s like having a dream in which very familiar places and events from the past are dreamed deserted. You remember all the participants in the event, but you don’t see them anymore. What really happened to you changes to an alternative version, where there is neither you nor witnesses”

Mingia’s work explores the boundaries between what we see and how we interpret it. Photographs taken in the 2010s transform scenes of the past into enigmatic spaces, where the disappearance of elements becomes a metaphor for forgetting, loss, and transformation.

The story captured in these images unfolds in abandoned territories in the early 2010s — in Abkhazia and a defunct 1990s Moscow amusement park on the cusp of reconstruction.
Inspired by Sasha’s reflections on the role of memory in creating images and interpretation as a bearer of truth, the project “Erased Reality” was assembled in 2022 from her archive of 2010s-era photographs. Each image invites viewers to ask themselves: how much of reality remains when its contours are erased?
Sasha Mingia’s project is not only a visual experience but also an invitation to a dialogue about how the phenomenon of gaslighting shapes our memory and perception of the past.

View PDF

The series is available on Sasha’s website and features other projects showcasing her unique artistic vision.

About the artist

Sasha Mingia lives and works in Paris (born 1984 in Moscow). She began her career as an artist in 2020 after a long career in design. Sasha holds a BA in Graphic Design from the British Higher School of Design (2009) and an MA in Museology from the RSUH (2007). Sasha’s interdisciplinary practice blends clay, painting, and sewing techniques, spanning sculpture, photography, and digital art. Her work explores the connection between personal and social stigmas and transformations based on the convergence of the psychic and the spoken. Her work has been featured in various publications, including ‘Sasha Mingia’ in Original Magazine, London (2024), ‘Our Talent’s Portfolio’,
project × (2024), and ‘100 Artworks curated by Rebecca Wilson’ (2023).

@sasha.mingia