Nigerian-Swedish artist and photographer Mikael Chukwuma Owunna (b.1990) is an award-winning queer artist. His work focuses on the hidden soul of communities worldwide. Their identities as uprooted people with modern views are opposite to their traditional behavior.

The series of work through which Mikael has been able to express this visual message is Limit(less), an ongoing project to document the expanding conceptions of African-ness and queerness. Mikael talks about LGBTQ African immigrant and asylum seeker experiences across the West and is a first to have ever done so.

Owunna is born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. With a degree in Biomedical Engineering and History (Duke University, ‘12), Mikael is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship (Taiwan – 2012).

His projects: I am Atayal!, Limit(less), and Infinite Essence – have collectively exhibited across Asia, Europe, and North America. He is featured in media ranging from the New York Times, PBS, NPR, Al-Jazeera Plus, BuzzFeed, and Teen Vogue to the official outlet of Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture.

Mikael Owunna was selected for the 2018 New York Times Portfolio Review, Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 200, the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Awards, and Review Santa Fe for his series Limit(less) and Infinite Essence.

INFINITE ESSENCE

The series Infinite Essence is “… my response to pervasive media images of black people dead and dying” as he states on his website. “Being gunned down by police officers, drowning and washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean, starving and suffering in award-winning photography. The trope of the black body as a site of death is everywhere”.

For this body of work, Mikael decides to hand-paint the model’s body with fluorescent paint. Thanks to his engineering background he augmented a standard flash with an ultraviolet bandpass filter, to only pass ultraviolet light. “Using this method, in total darkness, I click down on the shutter – “snap” – and for a fraction of a second, their bodies illuminate as the universe. We view the beauty of the soul and our deeper cosmic connections communicated through them.”

The title Infinite Essence comes from a quote by Chinua Achebe Discussing – the traditional Igbo spiritualità (Odinani) and the concept of “chi”. Achebe found more questions than answers.

As for her, also Mikael started this series with more questions than answers. But with each click of his camera, he tried to decipher a bit more of the big puzzle concerning the blessing of life in the black body.

#InfiniteEssence

To see more of Mikael’s works, go to his website here.

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Adele Cerbasi was born in 1977 in Naples, Italy. As a younger girl, she attended a traditional education in classical studies, and later she accomplished a diploma in Architecture. Despite this, Adele has always been drawing whilst attending different paths. As far as she remembers, she has always felt the need to draw and paint as an unaware passion, so much that nowadays all her childhood friends tell her they’ve always been sure of her creative fate, while Adele explains she was the last one to know this. Art happened in Adele’s life as an epiphany, something that has eventually always been there without been revealed. She bravely decided to start a new path and left her actual job in architecture four years ago, to commit all of her time to art. She began with watercolors for its functionality and applied to a painting class at Arteficio, an art school in Naples. Throughout the years she developed her style to become more recognizable but still, Adele declares to feel into a neverending creative cycle, for which she will never stop learning and acquiring new methods and techniques.

ABOUT HER WORK

But what is it that moved Adele to change her work and objectives, is something she told us with a genuinely passionate voice. Adele Cerbasi is an enthusiast with a joyful yet investigative personality, and this pushed her to build a fulltime passion, using art to explore more about life and human beings. In her paintings, Adele aims to tell stories. The peculiar detail she uses is not to start with an already definitive one, as she instead wants to surprise herself by what the painting will lead her to. In other words, to Adele painting is a journey, a tool to discover new perspectives while traveling, building a path she will create through every single stroke.

For instance, her painting MISTERIOSE DESTINAZIONI reveals a doubt, something unknown that waits to get disclosed as the final piece of a jigsaw. While the main character looks still, he also appears in the middle of a choice he is about to take. The frame will leave us suspended: “Where is he going? Is he running away from something?” In this painting, Adele leaves the viewer with the job to complete the story according to its own one. Adele strongly believes in the opportunity to interact with her audience, to deepen what she can infuse to the viewer, and take the cue directly from them. The core meaning of her art is to explore the considerations that moved her initially, to find out through the painting what she was looking for.

Colors are predominant to showoff a particular emotion. Her style is illustrative, and her stroke is dynamic and bold, to express the feelings on the canvas as more transparent as possible.

Adele is also a sports enthusiast and teaches athletics. Her specialty are 200 meters, which she practice to feel more centered, energetic and ready to paint.

To know more about her work, go here.

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He, therefore, tries to extrapolate from familiar visions those habits that brings an everyday feeling to be unique. However, by doing this one shuts down all the other possibilities, as the routine habits stop us from having adventures and checking out the wonders out there.

“My work is trying to destroy, tear up, and reconstruct this habitual vision so that our vision can be expended to other images.
I have strong faith in my work that my personal behavior may lead us “strangeness within habitual vision off from the track.”, Kim says when describing his work.

Kim Byungkwan will then exploit it in the synthetic definition of “Strangeness within habitual vision off from the track.”

To view more about his fine art and digital artwork, go here.

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Alice O’Connell, a British actress who learned to knit on set over 12 years ago, is now based in Amsterdam. We’re interested in her story for many reasons, one above all is that Alice launched Wool&Water, ‘An unexpected knitwear label for modern curious dreamers’ (as she herself defines it), as part of an unexpected life project, hence a consequence of spending so much time waiting on set. “I have cast on and off some of my proudest pieces while in corsets, flares or faux blood stained t-shirts!” she says. So let’s dig a bit into her carrier as an actress. Alice was a busy TV character in the UK, as her acting credits include Ballot Monkeys, Jonathan Creek, Silent Witness, The Rotter’s Club, Doctor Who, The Verdict, City of Vice, Outnumbered, Casualty, Doctors, Behind Closed Doors, Rough Crossings, Rose and Maloney, The Bill to name a few. It’s not surprising she learned knitting while waiting over all of these film sets! She soon found herself knitting for private clients together with teaching and taking commissions for various British Knitwear Designers and labels, so after 10 years she decided to study Knitwear Design in Brighton and once finished, to relocate from London to Amsterdam and finally open Wool&Water in 2013.

“My many knitting adventures created a passion for natural fibers, the knitted textile and combining the traditional craft with a modern aesthetic.” Says Alice about her passion.

Scrolling through the online store, you will immediately have the feeling of having bumped into something surprising. Although at first glance it will appear as a collection of cute bows and ties, if you’ll deepen the quality it’ll get clear that we’re in front of some innovative yet classic, and stylish product.

A Wool&Water piece will give a hint of brilliance and humor to who wears it, both human or animal. It surely gives an original touch, generating sparks of vintage and classic look together with a contemporary urban mood. Every piece is gender neutral and adaptable for both special or everyday occasions, this is just up to you.

Now let’s focus on Alice’s selected fabrics: from only natural fibers, they will last a lifetime! They are made out of natural wool and cotton, and each one is produced on a hand-powered domestic knitting machine (circa 1979), hand seamed and carefully finished by the same Alice, whom will produce only 25 pieces of every design, so that each item will be a limited edition with its specific edition tag. How unique is that?

Alice is also teaching knitting lessons in Amsterdam, so to arrange your first one, go here!

She then still acts, so some pieces will be knit and completed while in rehearsal rooms, film and TV sets or trailers. How nice!

What are you waiting for? Shop at Wool&Water now!

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We could translate this as a passion Chad has in picking historical and famous art pieces and reconsider its beauty.

He explores the inner sense of what we conventionally consider as beautiful, to look at our sense of self and community from another point of view.

As a student, Chad Wys shifted his time between literature and art history. He then went for studies in Visual Culture at the Illinois State, to deepen the critique of images and the philosophy of art with an interdisciplinary eye toward the ways we use signs and symbols to interpret ideas, as for words and images to communicate.

His approach to visual art is indeed experimental and challenging, as for his approach to the concepts he chooses.

Juxtaposing materials, examining theories and overlapping both theoretical and technical visual layers is what characterizes his language and core passions.

“Craft and critique—as verbs and nouns—are themselves my tools as well as my subjects,” he says.

His aim as a creative minded person is to twist comforts into curiosity and to focus on the process of reception, to not give anything for granted.

Sometimes his artworks are fun and meaningful, or introvert and abstract, yet he always strives to seek new approaches to old challenges.

To view more of Chad Wys’s works, go here.

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