Gina

Justin Van Genderen gets hired to do a lot of advertisements and photo processing for big companies; his work often features paint splashes, light trails, and smoke effects. While most of those works are bright and exuberant, there’s something about his personal works that are darker and much more interesting to me. I’ve seen a lot of shoddily done photo manipulations in my days- lord knows Deviant Art is full of emo girls who spend hours carefully blowing out the contrast and slapping multi-hued butterfly wings on photos just this side of homegrown. Justin’s are anything but, with carefully created landscapes and environments that toe the line on the border of dark and slightly malevolent. Check out a gallery of his fascinating work after the jump.

German street artist Boris Hoppek does some pretty cool art pieces and installations; he paints with a whimsical, fun style.  He also does some really, really weird installations. If you go looking, you’ll find pictures of waves of smiling faces hugging and laughing, or a checkerboard tiled walkway with a piece of poop on every alternating square…lots and lots of poop. He also seems to have a love for a character of his that is loosely based on “black face,” so I think you can understand that when I say that the installation after the jump is NSFW, it’s honestly really not safe for work. His minimal comic art style is often either inspiring or sexual in nature (he’s a master of disparity), but that’s nothing all that new and surprising in the world of street art installations. Hoppek took the shape of the structure he was working on, matched it with the form and grace of female anatomy and a very large photo realistic print, with some surprising results for the passerby. (We promise there’s no poop after the jump.)

Light exposure photography is one of those simple things that never ceases to amaze me- you see thousands of exciting applications of it all over the web, but somehow, each new photo still manages to blow my mind. One of my favorite light painters is David Gilliver; where you normally see a lot of sketched lines or car tail lights, he’s mainly focused on creating geometric elements with perfect orbs and winding ribbons. The scope of his images is immense- large, open locales feature huge trails or precise placement of carefully crafted luminescence. None of these photos are retouched- he runs around in the black of night dressed like a burglar to avoid being caught on film. Check out his brilliant work after the jump.