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