When Xippas gallery showed this work at the 2022 edition of Paris+, Art Basel’s fair in the French capital, there was only one bench and a handful of headphones available. Interest quickly outpaced resources at the fair’s opening, where attendees competed to get a spot before this work. All editions of Mineur Mineur ended up selling to institutions.

This work captured the attention of Jeu de Paume head of public programs Marta Ponsa. “The aesthetic of the images took us to a universe of games and fables,” she said. “The mise en scène had humor and lightness.” She later realized she’d seen Bak’s works already, back in 2012 at Paris’s Museum of Modern Art, but, by then, Bak’s practice had matured: Bak’s 2012 show focused on Romani people that she’d encountered in the Paris Métro, but the artist has since turned her thematic concerns global with works like Mineur Mineur.

Seeking to capture Bak’s evolution, the Jeu de Paume showed eight of Bak’s video works, along with some sculptural accompaniment works, in a solo show this summer. These works ranged in subject, from Bolivian shoeshiners to Moroccan shrimp peelers, to cruise ship workers and their families living in Saint-Nazaire. All these works are bound by one subject: a focus on marginalized communities, especially their labor and the way this restricts their lives.

These works have gained the attention of many across Europe. Last year, Bak was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most prestigious art prize. By that point, she’d already appeared in one edition of Documenta, the famed art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. Signs that her art is on the rise are set to be further evident this June, when Athens’s National Museum of Contemporary Art opens a solo show of her work as part of a series of feminist art exhibitions.

Ever since Bak started making video art in her early 20s, she has always been centered around labor. Her first works in that medium were shot in her family’s hometown, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a French village whose life revolved around the charcoal mines—her grandparents were among the immigrants who were called to work in them. She shot her family and her family’s friends, looking at how the residents were being left behind. Her videos showed how renovations made everyone leave without the possibility of rehousing and shined a light on the lung sicknesses contracted by the miners.

Using video as an artistic medium interested Bak from the beginning—she shot home movies when she was young. But there was no video-specific instruction when she attended the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris’s top art school, and the medium’s not all that sellable in the art market. “But that isn’t my priority,” Bak told me, sitting on a folding chair near the Jeu de Paume’s café. “For me, it’s most simple to tell stories through videos with groups I meet, nothing more.”

This is the challenge Bak’s gallery, Xippas, has faced since it signed her a couple of years out of art school. Part of it is, of course, the relative newness of video as a medium, and collectors’ reticence about it—Bak said she sells more drawings than her videos, and that allows her to “live simply” in a suburb south of Paris. Still, major private collectors, like the Arnault and Pinault families, have bought her work, as well as major European institutions, among them the Centre Pompidou and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. “She has an approach that interests institutions who have a mission to discover new forms of contemporary art expression,” said Xippas director Tristan van der Stegen, who added that Bak also wants to “help people have another look at society—there’s something about it that raises the education and culture in a public institution.”

“I always return to my origins,” Bak said about how her grandparents’ friends’ plights speak to society’s inequalities. Of her subjects, she added, “They are often people who are in weak situations, facing gross inequalities we don’t necessarily know about. The idea is to show them in their own way.”

Bak is not the most gregarious person—van der Stegen called her “shy” in his interview—so it seems ironic that her work requires her to speak extensively with communities that have never before been contacted by her. (Sometimes, she and her subjects do not even speak the same language, so she involves an interpreter to help her.) “Throughout the course of my life,” Bak said, “encounters occur, without my going out to search specifically to meet a group of people.”

Residencies are the reason these encounters occur. She met the cruise ship workers during a residency in Tétouan, Morocco, for instance. “When I’m exhibiting somewhere,” she said, “I like to be interested in the immediate environment—and why not create something in situ when it’s possible?” Before even writing a script, she spends months getting to know people, listening to stories about their lives, “so I don’t screw up their social and cultural context,” she explained.

Unlike some video art made today, Bak’s works do not have a large budget—she edits her videos herself, so the final products’ animated components do not gel like a Hollywood blockbuster. Bak hopes “there’s a feeling of reality, despite the storytelling I deployed, that we can believe absolutely in it, even though it’s just a game of cutting scenes together.”

She uses special effects inspired by arcade games—Mineur Mineur’s child miners wander up and down paths that zigzag across the screen—and adds her own DIYed sets, such as a cardboard diorama of cruise workers’ living quarters. Bak said she uses “cheap” special effects because she isn’t aiming to make her videos appear cinematic. “Everything that is a special effect can be tinkered with, like everything else: How can we tinker with people’s lives, augmenting or pulling them from the original reality?”

Yet the reality of her film’s participants, who are paid, remains. “I don’t come with the promise of social change,” she said. “It changes nothing in the situations of people involved in these new tactics of representation, so it’s an implicit activism.”

Kiswanson was born in Halmstad, Sweden, in 1986, to Palestinian parents. When his father arrived from Jerusalem in 1979, he was one of only a handful of Arabs in the city, and the Swedish administration naturalized their original surname, Al Kiswani, to the chimeric Kiswanson. He grew up not in the posh part of the city where rich Swedes have summer houses, but in the housing projects along with other second-generation immigrants from places including the former Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and Iraq. The Paris-based Kiswanson finds it annoying when people assume he is a refugee because of his Palestinian heritage, because the exiling happened before he was born. He said he is “moving between these realms of cultures, identities, languages and the enormous anxiety I feel when I don’t fit into society’s black and white.”

Kiswanson’s earlier works centered on his family, “to understand who I was, where I was coming from,” he said. “To understand I don’t really come from anywhere.” One example, Grandfather’s Cabinet (2014), is a skeletal reconstruction of his grandfather’s filing cabinet, which his family took with them when they fled Jerusalem. Kiswanson re-created the shape using strips of brass, between which he poured silver melted down from family heirlooms (such as a spoon and a necklace) to seal the strips together. “All of my family history is embedded in the seams,” he said.

Later, he began focusing on the experience of fellow second-generation immigrants, collaborating with preteen youths whose parents had likewise emigrated. In the film The Fall (2020), a boy named Mehdi, who was born in Belgium to Moroccan parents, plays with a pencil until it drops, then tilts his chair back until it too falls to the ground. The whole sequence was shot on a Phantom camera, which can record thousands of frames a second, and is slowed down throughout to keep Mehdi suspended in the state of instability; it cuts out and re-loops just before Mehdi’s head hits the ground, such that he doesn’t have time to be afraid, even though he knew before filming that it would hurt. This in-between state, which Kiswanson called the “floating condition of existing, detached and removed from one’s own heritage, culture, country, family,” is where he likes to work. That is partly why he has more recently moved into abstraction, as it’s not specific to any culture or time.

This is a busy year for the artist. Solo exhibitions opened at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in April. Another will open at Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria in July, as will a group show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris next fall, featuring Kiswanson as a finalist for the Prix Marcel Duchamp. Even as he enjoys his success, he feels it hard-won, after years of waiting for the art world to catch up with the fuzzy way he presents identity in his art.

García-Alix grew up in Franco’s Spain, where creative expression was actively suppressed. He left the comfort of his family and dropped out of law school at 19, right after Franco died, and joined others in a newfound freedom as part of La Movida Madrileña, a youth movement of the 1970s and ’80s whose most famous member was film director Pedro Almodóvar. García-Alix deepened his connections with those considered outcasts, who became his primary subjects.

His photos from this time depict his friends as their unabashed selves. This personal approach is evident in the shots of those in their kink gear: La dominanta (1997) portrays a woman wearing a too-tight latex or pleather dress cinched with a heavily studded belt, cut low to expose her black structured bra, and stopping just short of the top of her gartered stockings; she wears a police-style hat emblazoned with the brand name ZADO. Fists on hips with a cat-o’-nine-tails in her left hand, she stares down the camera with confidence, freely expressing who she is to García-Alix and his lens. In another photo, Elena, la mujer que enseña sus botas (1997), the peroxide-blonde Elena, with slicked-back hair, looks directly at the lens as she lies on a couch draped with fabric. She wears a molded black corset attached to her neck via multiple chains of what look like soda can tabs, and holds her left heel in the air, bringing her left knee near her face, making prominent her bikini-waxed vulva.

In the 1990s, photographs of people in sexually hardcore clothing—or exposing their genitals—had less shock value in the art world in the US than in Spain: Robert Mapplethorpe had already exhibited his bondage and gay sex photos, and Nan Goldin, her drag queen and drug-culture images, in the previous decade. García-Alix’s photos would have beenfitting companions to those works, even if they were never shown alongside them: they too seek to document the groups that had broken with mainstream culture. 

Before 2000, García-Alix had just a handful of solo shows outside his own country; since then, he has often shown abroad with Kamel Mennour in Paris. The artist’s relative isolation, though, is also what makes his work from the ’80s and ’90sinteresting from a sociological viewpoint, as they capture a less familiar scene of cultural change. This is evident in his shots of youth—whether evoking the counterculture, as in the 1988 group portrait of the band Peor Impossible; or lust, as captured in Santiago y Carmen (1988), in which a muscular man in a tank top leans against a wall and stares at a young woman seated on a stool—which happen to mimic trends exhibited in the US and the UK, whose punk culture was exported to Spain. 

García-Alix is still quite unknown in the Anglosphere, even though his pictures from that time (as well as his current work, not on view here) showcase his ability both to evoke feeling and document the times. (He used to shoot for El País, though the major Spanish newspaper “never showed tattooed people,” according to the artist—his personal work remained separate.) Even his artistic origin story has the air of a legend: He says he turned to photography after a bad heroin trip during which he had a worrying vision of his future; later in his career, to protect his friends, he destroyed some of his negatives so they couldn’t be used against them by the police. That his photos convey an intimate sense of an era’s misfits, but aren’t ranked with Mapplethorpe’s and Goldin’s, is a shame.

“I think it’s always been the desire to relocate the gallery,” Cara Pinchbeck, a senior curator at the Art Gallery, told ARTnews.  Now the Yiribana Gallery will be front and center.

At a time when many Australian art institutions didn’t have spaces dedicated to work by contemporary Indigenous artists, the Yiribana Gallery’s establishment in 1994 was a watershed. Even though the museum had already been displaying Indigenous artists’ work since 1973, it was in what was called the “Tribal” or “Primitive Art Gallery.” Naming it “Yiribana,” which means “the way” in Dharug, the Aboriginal language of Sydney, was a clear recognition that Indigenous art was part of modern-day Australia and not just its distant past. Still, it took until the early 2000s for the accession numbers to change from “P” (for primitive) to “IA” (Indigenous Australian), and for works from this collection department to be shown in other parts of the museum.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has been one of the pioneering institutions, collecting art by Aboriginal artists in earnest in the 1950s, but wider interest in Indigenous art within the Australian art world didn’t pick up until the ’70s. Before that, it had been a series of “fits and starts,” Bruce Johnson McLean, the National Gallery of Australia’s assistant director for Indigenous engagement, told ARTnews. Artists like Albert Namatjira, who painted landscapes in traditional European representation, and Nym Banduk, who painted with an Indigenous dot technique on bark, had gained some prominence in the mid-20th century, but “from 1970, we start to talk about the movement because it does collect a lot of communities, a lot of people,” he said. “It becomes this tidal wave that can’t be erased or ignored anymore.”

In 1971, a visiting schoolteacher at Papunya, a rural settlement 150 miles from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, asked his students to paint a mural at the school. Some of the senior tribal men, who worked as groundskeepers, saw and asked if they could do it instead so that the children could learn about where they came from. The men enjoyed it so much they continued painting.

“The desire to paint outstripped the materials available,” Johnson McLean said. They soon took to acrylics over the laborious task of having to collect and process natural ochre. They also started painting on whatever surfaces were available—composition boards, doors, car parts. Inadvertently, they created art that could be transported elsewhere, out of the desert, to be shown and sold.

There were numerous other movements that intersected with the initial art push. “It speaks to a non-uniform experience with engagement with Indigenous people,” Johnson McLean said. “The only uniform thing is the racism.” (Among other groups, Indigenous Australians were not counted as part of the population in all contexts until 1967, and their children were still being forcibly taken for assimilation until the 1970s.)

From the start, Australia’s recognition of its Indigenous art has been a bit haphazard. At the beginning of local institutions’ collecting, works such as weaving and bark painting were considered more as folk art than as fine art. “There was just no way to engage with it or understand it in the spaces that you need to do in a museum,” Johnson McLean said. Similarly, the National Gallery of Australia has tapped two leading curators, Indigenous Australian women Kelli Cole and Hetti Perkins (who led the Art Gallery of NSW’s Indigenous art accession change), to organize a major retrospective opening next year of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, one of the most popular Australian artists.

Even though documents, like the National Gallery’s founding document, the 1966 Lindsay Report, clearly state a focus on Indigenous art to be made, institutions lacked Indigenous people on staff who could contextualize the works’ value and significance. “A lot of the works quite rightly were collected for their aesthetic value,” Johnson McLean said. Cultural competency only started coming in decades later, beginning in the ’90s, when institutions hired Indigenous Australians at a greater rate, and also started dedicating entire galleries to Indigenous art, such as Yiribana.

“It’s always been an interesting thing to send Indigenous Australian art overseas,” Johnson McLean said, “because that’s been the history: It needs to be recognized elsewhere before it is recognized here.” International institutions, ranging from Brazil to Germany were more interested and engaged in Indigenous Australian stories and art than local institutions.

Interest in Indigenous Australian art has had a sustained history in France, extending back as early as the 1970s.  This year, two exhibitions with large focuses on Indigenous art ran in Paris: “Reclaim the Earth” at the Palais de Tokyo, which counted five Aboriginal Australians out of the fourteen artists, and a solo show dedicated to Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori at the Fondation Cartier.

Fondation Cartier curator Juliette Lecorne places the international interest in Indigenous Australian art within the greater trend of investigation of Indigenous art globally, adding that Indigenous cultural knowledge has become especially important in the face of the global climate crisis. “The recognition and acknowledgement of all cultures is more than ever essential, specifically for cultures that have been invisible, instrumentalized or erased for decades,” Lecorne said.

These sentiments are repeated by Gagosian senior director Louise Neri, who develops exhibitions for the mega-gallery, and is also Australian. She cites the start of it from an exhibition done in conjunction with comedian Steve Martin, whom she says is “an impassioned advocate.” (A selection of works from Martin’s collection were recently displayed at the National Arts Club in New York.)

Since that showing of Martin’s holdings in Indigenous Australian art in 2019, Gagosian has been one of the proponents on the secondary market, placing works with both private collectors and institutions. In addition to the “ecological understanding of the conditions of existence and survival,” Neri said Indigenous Australian artists’ works are also attractive because they currently have a lower price point than other secondary market works that the gallery might deal in, though high-quality works are scarce and hard to source.

Renowned Indigenous Australian artist Brook Andrew, who organized the 2020 Sydney Biennale, thinks that some collectors see Indigenous Australian art “as an unstable investment, but there are also a lot of people who really love it.”

Having exhibited his own art in the Europe since 1994, Andrew said he has seen a gradual shift from exoticization to a welcome interrogation of what a label like “Indigenous art” actually means, particularly in Australia, where there are hundreds of independent Indigenous communities. The label itself is one that often puts work by these artists in a box: Though the “primitive” association is being shed, “Indigenous” can box an artist with others without much else in common besides geography.

Andrew likens this moment for Indigenous Australian art as comparable to how the mainstream art world has previously regarded the work of art by artists from other marginalized groups, which in turn creates this “hang up” on a non-Western view of the world. “I think it’s been the rest of the world that’s been dragging its feet,” he said.

Containing 75,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Sydney Modern almost doubles that of the Art Gallery of NSW’s exhibition space. To celebrate its opening, the gallery commissioned large-scale works by nine artists, including three Aboriginal Australians: Lorraine Connelly-Northey, who has recreated her Waradgerie people’s traditional narrbong-galang (woven bags) in reclaimed metal; Karla Dickens, who’s made a 6.5 foot-long mixed-media panel showing hooded figures; and Jonathan Jones, whose work will be revealed next year on a land bridge and will include cool burnings by Aboriginal people every year.

With projects like this and elsewhere across the country, Indigenous Australian’s art is “becoming completely embedded within all conversations about Australian art,” Pinchbeck said. “It now holds a central place.”

Then, one day, she developed a photo with nothing in it. “It just takes one picture when you’re struggling,” Carey says. It was a gradient, going from white on the left to black on the right. The work is essentially a picture of a whiteboard, though it doesn’t necessarily appear that way. “It was all about light,” she said.

Ever since then, Carey has focused on and pushing the limits of what could be done with photographic equipment and materials. This ongoing project continues in her latest body of work, a series of photographs that the artist has called “finitograms.” Debuting at a solo exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Miranda (on view through June 22), the series’ name is a reference to the non finito technique used by Donatello and Michelangelo, who, in certain cases, deliberately didn’t carve the whole of the marble blocks they used.

Carey’s images, however, are completely finished, as they are 8×10 photographic papers with chemical traces on them—from Carey’s students’ experiments to the marks left from their being thrown in the bin. “The idea here is the light and the chemistry without the interference of the human hand,” she says. Over the last 20 years or so, Carey has been collecting and storing them — “time is the camera operator,” she says.

According to Galerie Miranda director Miranda Salt, Carey’s work very much blurs genre lines.

“It’s super fine-art photography with a strong connection to the painting world,” Salt said. In her estimation, French institutions have long been focused on figurative photography, and therefore they lag the U.S. by around five years. This is why they are just catching onto Carey’s work, she posited.

Ellen Carey.

Carey’s most well-known series is grouping of large-format works run as large as an adult human and consist of bright blobs of color and cracked patinas. They were made using 20×24 Polaroid cameras, which weigh 235 pounds and require their own wheeled frames. They are so big that two people are needed to move—and, often, to operate—them.

Carey uses the camera to take a photo, then brings the film into a darkroom with absolutely no light (she used a closet during lockdown). There, she crumples the paper, with its negative attached, by hand, before away to reveal the finished work. She sometimes includes the negative as part of the work too.

This body relates to Carey’s obsession with Surrealism. Decades of playing around in a darkroom gave her the confidence to actively damage the film, breaking a large photography taboo.

Carey has one of seven 20×24 Polaroid cameras in existence (a new one is being built currently) in her Hartford, Connecticut, studio, which was used by photographer Elsa Dorfman until her death two years ago. When the Polaroid company announced it was no longer going to make the film any more, 20×24 Holdings, which helps manage some of these cameras, bought over 500 cases of film. However, as no funder has been found yet, Carey estimates there is only enough film for a few more years. Though Carey is undoubtedly the only one working in this abstract way with this camera, there is a possibility she may also be the last.

While Carey has continued extending the field of abstract photography for the last three decades, creating entirely new genres, she has not gained the same level of recognition as some of her contemporaries. For instance, she was friends with Cindy Sherman back when they were at college at Buffalo, New York, and had a shared exhibition back in 1976 on a Buffalo city bus.

Carey first encountered the 20×24 Polaroid camera in 1983, when she was invited to be part of the Polaroid Artists Support Program—which ended with the great stock market crash of 1987.

A new work from Ellen Carey’s 2022 “finitograms” series.

“The camera made me rethink my modus operandi,” she said, explaining that she knew she wasn’t very good at painting, drawing, or other figurative ways of making art. This can be seen in Carey’s “zerograms,” for which she folds and crumples Fuji Crystal paper (a similar process to the “Crush & Pulls”), then manipulated in a lightless darkroom and exposed into melanges of bright colors.

These patterns were spotted by the creative design team behind the menswear brand Dunhill, which collaborated with her on some pieces of the spring-summer 2022 collection. Dunhill creative director Mark Weston said Carey’s work has the “importance of trusting instinct while embracing the accidentals” that resonated with the design team, describing how the “painterly colors” lent themselves well to being printed on silk satin.

Carey thinks of her practice in a similar way. She said her work is about “introducing randomness and chance,” sometimes with the intervention of the human hand, sometimes without.

Urban is the creator of Reflectacles, which look like regular sunglasses but are designed to protect the wearer’s identity from prying digital eyes. The glasses address a primary problem of anti-surveillance “wearables”—that they often look odd or unattractive (like these T-shirts that render the wearer invisible to artificial intelligence surveillance technologies) and can themselves draw unwanted attention.

Urban began designing eyewear in 2005, handcrafting custom frames out of wood. After a decade he was ready to move on. “It came down to time, mostly,” he says. He was also getting interested in the idea of making glasses that would confuse surveillance cameras.

IR-Pair.

Urban’s initial Kickstarter campaign featured two models of sunglasses. The more basic model, the IR-Pair, has lenses that block infrared radiation, making the wearer’s eyes unreadable to infrared cameras and facial recognition technologies that convert infrared data, or heat signatures, into electronic images. (It’s now available in two shades of tortoiseshell as well as in black.)

The other model, the Phantom, features the same IR lenses but also has a layer of reflective material applied to its frame. These reflect available infrared light back at technologies using infrared for mapping or illumination, distorting the heat signature of the wearer’s face. The Phantom remains innocuous-looking because its frame isn’t obviously reflective. Visible light can’t penetrate its outer infrared-permeable layer to reach the reflective layer underneath, so to human eyes the Phantom looks like an ordinary pair of black-framed sunglasses.

A later—and splashier—model called the Ghost, on the other hand, reflects both visible and infrared light, maintaining the wearer’s privacy in flash photos or videos. Urban now also offers clip-on and wraparound versions of the Phantom, as well as the IR-Shield, a pair of frameless goggles with IR-blocking lenses. This is the model Urban wears himself.

IR-Shield.

Reflectacles come with either light or dark IR lenses. They range from $48 to $188, depending on the model, and prescription lenses can also be ordered.

Though the glasses look like regular eyewear IRL, they don’t on camera. For instance, the owner of Urban’s local bar told Urban that his head became a “halo of light” on the bar’s video feeds and asked that he stop wearing them when inside. Urban complied because he’d rather not get into a fight (he’s already been thrown out several times for other misdeeds). However, when asked whether people would be banned if they went in wearing Reflectacles, the owner couldn’t give a definitive answer.

It’s not clear how anyone would be able to ban Reflectacles—they’re really just sunglasses, after all. The FDA already requires Category 3 sunglass lenses (the standard dark lenses) to block light with wavelengths smaller than 400 nm, which is about the borderline on the spectrum between visible and ultraviolet light. Reflectacles are doing a similar thing, just on the other side of the line, something that hasn’t been regulated. To do so, there would need to be a definitive distinction made between a traditional (and acceptable) sunglass lens and one that prevents biometric data from being collected.

Ghost.

Urban has registered Reflectacles with the FDA, which currently classifies sunglasses and other spectacles as medical devices; this means people don’t have to take them off when requested to do so. Urban notes that wearers tend to remove them at airport security anyway because it’s just easier to follow authority. “It’s sad,” he says, “but that is the reality.”

He doesn’t view Reflectacles as being some sort of radical protest against government or big tech. “We have already signed the rights to our privacy away,” he says.

Thomas is currently working on a world map titled Wild World. This map will be adorned with landforms and animals specific to each region but will not include national borders—for example, he has drawn both North and South Korea’s national birds on a united Korean peninsula. “Borders are abstractions we make real through our infrastructure and policies,” he says. Thomas started the map in July of last year; he is hoping prints can be ready in time for this year’s holiday season.

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Thomas’s materials are simple. He’s drawing the map on a single piece of acid-free Fabriano Accademia 200-gsm paper—he has a roll from which he cuts the amount he needs. He uses Faber-Castell Polychromos colored pencils because they’re lightfast, especially important given the amount of sun his studio gets. Between drawing sessions, he covers the map-in-progress with another sheet of acid-free paper and then a piece of black paper to shield it from ultraviolet rays. Details are enhanced with a 4H Staedtler Lumograph graphite pencil. To keep his drawing tools needle sharp (he uses a magnifying glass when drawing), Thomas cuts away the wood with a steel craft knife before refining the tip with a sandpaper block. Labels are written with a 0.03-millimeter fine-line pen.

Thomas’s attention to detail extends to his research into each region’s fauna. Wild World includes, for example, the scimitar oryx, which went extinct in the Sahara in 2000 but has since been reintroduced into the wild in Chad and Tunisia.

Thomas thinks he has drawn around 460 animals so far, estimating there will be a total of 700 when the map is finished. He’s still got the landmasses of Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica to go, then the whole ocean floor, so it’s not unreasonable to think that there might be even more. He integrates the animals into the maps’ flowing landscapes—they wander through their respective habitats rather than being superimposed on top. “There’s a history of pictorial maps being cartoonish,” Thomas says, “but that’s not what I’m looking for.”

This dedication to realism has led to considerable cartographic nerdery around map projection—how the surface of a three-dimensional globe is flattened to make a two-dimensional map. For his last map, a rendering of North America that he worked on from 2014 to 2019, Thomas used Google Earth’s projection, but he put much more thought into what type of projection to use for Wild World.

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He didn’t want to use a Mercator projection, even though it is the most familiar to viewers—it’s the one that you often see in classrooms—as it becomes increasingly distorted toward the poles, making Greenland, for instance, appear the same size as Africa. Thomas also didn’t want to use an equal area map projection, not only because landmasses are less recognizable in this type of projection but because there wouldn’t be enough room on them for the animals. In the end, he chose the Natural Earth projection, a pseudo-cylindrical projection, centering it 11 degrees east of Greenwich.

Thomas printed the map projection at the scale he wanted, stapled it to the back of his drawing paper, and then, with the aid of a light pad, traced it onto the paper with a blunt HB pencil. Islands were tricky; he describes the archipelagos off Patagonia’s southern coastline as looking like a Jackson Pollock drip painting. Geographic features like these he draws as textures, rather than trying to trace them. As Thomas finishes each section, he goes over the coastlines with pen; each inked coastline is a milestone in his progress. When he finished Malaysia, which was also when he completed the Afro-Eurasia landmass, he called it a “crack a beer and put on a song” kind of moment.

During the five years Thomas spent drawing North America, he also had a day job. Now that print sales of his North America map are enough to sustain him, he’s able to work full time on Wild World. He plans to do a map of Oceania next. “My maps,” he says, “are a love letter to reality.”

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The crab bag comes from Aranaz’s 2019 spring/summer collection, the theme of which was “tiki seashell,” drawing inspiration from items that would be found on a seashore. Co-founder and designer Amina Aranaz Alunan included artificial shells made out of resin in blue, pink, and black hues. There was a lot of fringe, too, drawing upon a Hawaiian influence.

“In a way,” Aranaz Alunan said, “this crab bag was one of our first pieces that was really quirky.” She was thinking about producing it as a clutch, something to be taken to a seaside wedding or an island holiday — just large enough to fit a cellphone, lipstick, and some cash or a credit card. “I did not want to design something that was too overpowering,” she said. Even though many Filipinos haven’t been going out much in the past year, she has seen her customers posting the bag as a piece of décor at home, in addition to being taken out on the intermittent night out. “We aim for [our pieces] to be an escape in your hand,” the designer said.

Aranaz Alunan’s family owns the factory that produces the brand’s accessories. It made, and still makes, accessories for international brands, but Aranaz Alunan wanted to start something of her own — accessories not only made in the Philippines, but also carrying a Filipino label. She was already selling a few pieces at Christmas bazaars to other Filipino society women while she was at college, and started building Aranaz in earnest after finishing a master’s in accessories design at Istituto Marangoni in Italy.

Aranaz’s crab handbag

The quest to make quintessentially Filipino products has meant the brand’s raw materials are sourced from local farmers. Wicker is a favorite as it’s pliable and absorbs color well. Each region’s straw has varying degrees of absorption, so Aranaz bags are often made of materials grown from two or three regions. As the Aranaz factories’ orders are many farmers’ main livelihoods, they “really push to use these materials.” Sometimes, the farmers will call to ask if Aranaz needs their materials — the brand rotates sources — and the designers will look to see if there’s something they can incorporate into their products, participating organically in the local economy.

“It’s quite a long assembly line,” Aranaz Alunan said. She explained that farmers’ delivery dates are more suggestions than concretely reliable — she adds an extra month of buffer when ordering materials. Even with having weavers in-house, this wait for materials means she can’t deliver bags in the 30 or 60 days many international outlets would request. Still, her bags are stocked by tony department stores including Bergdorf Goodman in New York, Lane Crawford in Hong Kong, and Browns, Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Selfridges in London.

Aranaz only produces one season for its international market — the spring/summer — but also makes a holiday collection for the domestic market, near the end of the year, to bring in new inventory. The peculiarity of the Filipino market means that they don’t have to worry about bags not selling through immediately: “We could still sell bags at full price — even styles from two seasons ago — and women would buy them,” Aranaz Alunan said. The global fashion community has lately been talking about the viability of “see now, buy now” models, rather than showing clothes on the runway that would only be available for purchase six months later, but that’s how Aranaz has always functioned.

Reproducing Aranaz’s classic styles is easy because of its vertical integration; they produce hundreds or even thousands of some iterations. For quirkier styles, which make up around 10 to 20 percent of each collection, like the crab bag, Aranaz only makes a few — around 30 for the domestic market, plus however many their international clients ordered. They are also harder to make: For the crab bag reissue, Aranaz needed a new supplier to make the tubular wire frame (which forms the “skeleton” of the bag, around which the wicker is wound) as their initial one didn’t want to produce any more of the frames. Regardless, its appeal is clear — so much so, Kate Spade recently released its own, very similar, wicker crab minaudiere. Imitation is a form of flattery, after all.

It is a flat-out challenge to find a face in Breakdown Work #6, though its form—an oblong piece of Carrara marble mounted on a bronze pole—implies one. A hefty single hole is punched out of the marble, slightly off-center, while a golden hoop earring pierces the lower-left corner. On the right is a wormlike growth, with three trough-like indentations. This protrusion, which looks more stuck on than carved out, could be a nose, or an ear—even though the earring is on the opposite side of the “face.” Breakdown Work #7, carved from deep dirty-green marble that gradates to memory-foam yellow, and set atop a vertical steel beam, recalls the heads of the Moai monoliths on Easter Island, but with holes and scooped-out hollows. As I walked around it, the sculpture’s facial expression seemed to shift from sternness to snarling disappointment to surprise.

The “Breakdown Works” are erected on plinths made of materials including concrete, salvaged wood, and corten steel; the tallest works stand more than seven feet, so the heads loom over the viewer, staring down from above. Many of the sculptures seem weathered by age, in both attitude and form. Breakdown Work #21 looks as if the Classical bust of a wizened elder had been left outside, his identifying features scoured off with time as the small crevices in the stone turned to caverns, and sharp edges to gentle curves. In fact, the marble Gray employs has often been sitting out in the elements—some of the original blocks were found abandoned in a marble yard, covered with ivy—but the heads themselves also seem tired, peering down from on high at the foibles of the viewers below.

The show also includes a pair of sculptures from Gray’s “Young Gods” series (2019–ongoing), comprising freestanding male figures in marble. In contrast to the stiff bearing of the “Breakdown Works,” these pieces have a sense of motion about them—in their stance, but also their surfaces, which are rippled like the waves of an angry sea. The left foot of Striding Youth pushes off its base as daintily as a dressage horse; Sun Worshipper Standing is stationary, but seemingly not for long when viewed from the back, one of his buttocks is markedly raised. The two “Young Gods” seem impatient with the “Breakdown Works” surrounding them, the “Breakdown Works” irritated by the “Young Gods” wanting to get going.

This article appears under the title “Kevin Francis Gray” in the March/April 2021 issue, p. 76.