Modern Guru
Modern Guru is a translucent ovoid with four huge digital eyes, floating above a ceremonial ring of LEDs. From his mouth flows a ream of absurdist messages, and in a statement about the true nature of lived experience, a new message is delivered when visitors take a photo of Modern Guru – a missive produced only for those who seek to photograph life rather than live the moment. This immersive new media art installation uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through unique interactions with characters along a mystical journey of discovery. Visitors are asked to commit to the path – a tight and winding trail with subtle points of connection along the way – a glowing landscape of oversized, whimsical mountains that chant incantations and blink innocently from digital eyes.
Having communed with the Guru, visitors then weave their way back through this warped and strange world full of illusions and delusions, perceptions and deceptions, all the while bathing in luminescent light; embracing big, gentle forms; and following their own path up the pink tongue staircase to meet the one who oversees the whole fantastic dominion, the Sun God.

The Raft
The Raft depicts at life-sized scale a group of ordinary people casually standing together. Suddenly, they are struck by strong blasts of water that rush in, overtake them, and then, just as unexpectedly, recede. In the aftermath of the deluge, the victims huddle together, seek protection, and help those who have fallen. The viewer experiences this event in an immersive setting, standing in a darkened room and surrounded by the roaring sounds of the water. Meticulously captured in slow-motion, The Raft arouses a visceral experience of human calamity and shared humanity, provoking a consideration of the range of responses to crisis.

A Surge of Power
Within 24 hours Marc Quinn’s statue A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020 has been erected in secret on a Bristol plinth and as quickly removed by the council. Life-sized, cast in black resin, it showed the campaigner Jen Reid standing, one fist raised, in a pose in which a photographer had captured her a few weeks earlier when she had stood on the empty plinth after Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters tore down a bronze monument to the 17th-century slaver Edward Colston.

Applebaum says she’s always been drawn to the world of craft because it felt “more immediate and real” to her. She launched her career with a so-called “crazy crochet phase” that began with her using sewn together thrift-store afghans to create wildly patterned environments — complete with models encased from head to toe in the blankets — and progressed to smaller knitted objects like anchors, cubist quilts, and oversized chain links. While she was certainly interested in symbolism, and in the transition between two dimensions and three, she was mostly following a series of obsessive urges to figure out how to bring her ideas to life, teaching herself to how to knit, weld, and weave rope along the way.

ДЭНИЕЛ ФИРМАН
丹尼尔·菲尔曼
دانيال فيرمان
French-born artist Daniel Firman was born in 1966. He currently works and resides in Paris. His life-sized body cast plaster sculptures are particularly fascinating. In most cases, they are arranged in odd formations–balancing off of each other, crawling backwards or sideways–and on various suspensions–either up in the air or flopping over metal bars.

Andy Warhol at 83 Years Old
Even though he’s long gone, Andy Warhol’s importance in the art community is still felt, as is demonstrated by this Andy Warhol at 83 Years Old sculpture. The hyperrealistic recreation of the trailblazing artist is the work of Edgar Askelovic, and it’s incredible that he managed the feat of making such a convincing life-sized sculpture.