“Boundless Space” Artist Stories Part 10: A Journey of Discovery Across Continents and Disciplines

Welcome to the tenth in our Boundless Space storytelling series, which introduces just a few of the astonishing artists who contributed work to Boundless Space… The Possibilities of Burning Man, an online charitable auction in support of participating artists and Burning Man Project.

They hail from cities and traditions that span the globe — from Black Rock City to Hyderabad, New Orleans to Barcelona. Each of the artists who generously contributed their work to Boundless Space has a remarkable journey to share, one that ultimately intersects with Burning Man, and now with you. 

It has been, and continues to be a challenging time for artists, and for the nonprofit organizations that support them. Our collaboration with Sotheby’s succeeded at establishing new connections and generating funds for the participating artists and Burning Man Project.

Read on to meet the 19 artists whose work is available for purchase through Boundless Space… The Possibilities of Burning Man until January 6, 2022. 

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Joe Sale

“Human Transformations – Burning Man 2019” by Joe Sale

“There I was at Burning Man, the epicenter of art, culture and personal expression and I couldn’t even muster the courage or ability to take a picture. I was in complete awe. For the first time in my life, I was experiencing culture shock, lost in my mind, in an unfamiliar world and then it happened…I saw the magic and I captured it.”

Human Transformations – Burning Man 2019 was shot on a 40-year-old Hasselblad 500c. “The medium format Hasselblad produces a square negative, hence the 40×40 shape. This piece took more than 70 hours to compose and was printed and finished in Dusseldorf, Germany. This one-of-a-kind piece will never be reproduced.“

 


Erin Douglas

Black Burner Project Collaboration (Two Works) by Erin Douglas

“My entry into Burning Man was not planned. It was by way of a gifted ticket and completely trusting the friends who felt I should be there. I wouldn’t call my first experience a blast. It was difficult, challenging, scary, and overwhelming. It was also magical, unexplainable, and unique.”

Erin Douglas is a travel and lifestyle documentary photographer and founder of Black Burner Project. Her mission: “create a space where Burners of color can be seen as part of the community, create awareness and drive diversity.” 

 

 

 

 


Jennybird Alcantara

“The Seduction” by Jennybird Alacantara

“The basis of what I’m expressing in my work is the complexity, the beauty and the tragedy of life itself. I feel like I am exploring and illustrating the cycle of life but from the soul’s vantage point. My way of speaking with the world is through images and my paintings are the visual language that people who follow, enjoy or collect my work understand.”

The Seduction was a part of the series a solo show in 2018 “Reveries of the Untamed Darlings”. Alcantara says, “To me it’s a play that is taking place for the birds below, and the tension of the piece is deciding if this scene is going to be a rapturous or a savage one.”

 

 

 

 

 


Nilofer Suleman

“Mapmakers Tours and Travels” by Nilofer Suleman

Nilofer Suleman approaches her paintings in the spirit of a storyteller who enjoys nesting one episode inside another, arranging them within framed narratives and larger, circulating cycles of tales. 

Mapmakers Tours and Travels is a step into a cartographical otherworld. Painted in miniature style brushstrokes, it blurs the lines between reality and magic-realism, much like the streets of India and the fantastical landscape of the playa. This piece has been hand painted meticulously in the miniature styles of India, with a single hair brush over three months of devotion.

 

 

 


Alinka Echeverria

“The Road To Tepeyac” by Alinka Echeverria

Alinka Echeverría is a Mexican-British artist and visual anthropologist working in multiple media. She holds a Masters degree in Social Anthropology and Development from the University of Edinburgh. After working on HIV prevention projects in East Africa, she pursued a post graduate degree in Photography from the International Center for Photography in New York. Her research based work brings a contemporary and critical approach to questions of visual representation.

 

 

 


Dawn DeDeaux

“Acid Frog Playin’ Like Puff Daddy” by Dawn DeDeaux

DeDeaux’s work is widely exhibited, with recent exhibitions at MassMoCA and Arthur Roger Gallery. A 50-year career retrospective opened at the New Orleans Museum of Art on October 21, 2021. Titled Dawn Dedeaux: The Space Between Worlds, the exhibition runs through January 23, 2022. Acid Frog Playin’ Like Puff Daddy focuses on the extinction of animals, and soon, perhaps, humankind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


JOJO ABOT

“Ta Kpe Kpe” by JOJO ABOT

“As an interdisciplinary artist of African heritage employing a philosophy of Message Over Medium, I remain spirit led in channeling living technologies that bring us to a state of presence, connectedness and healing. My offerings in music, film, photography, fine art, fashion and more serve as portals to the divine while invoking deep remembrance of ancestral spirit. Ta Kpe Kpe is a manifestation of a meeting of Gods — Mawu, Sogbo, Lisa as per Ewe mythology. The creator, the created, the creation, all at once and all together in constant sacred alchemy.” 

 


Ryan McNamara

“Hummingbirds for Malthus” by Ryan McNamara

Brooklyn-based artist Ryan McNamara works in a multitude of media and methods including performance, installation, photography, and sculpture. Born and raised in Arizona, many of his works have a collaborative or participatory quality, incorporating elements of theater and dance into site- or situation-specific installations and events.

 

 

 

 

 


Mario Moore

“Siriusly” by Mario Moore

Mario Moore employs the Black body in paintings to show power and resilience through the denial of the colonial gaze. He redefines the gaze for the subjects he paints, allowing them to look directly out in an unflinching stare. The historical references within the work draw parallels to the social, economic and racial occurrences of today. 

Siriusly is about the Sirius star within Canis Major and the knowledge that was bestowed to man as referenced by the Dogon Tribe. It is at once about human knowledge and also those things that we don’t know.”

 

 


Lena Viddo

“Moon Age Daydream” by Lena Viddo

“My paintings blend classical themes, pop culture and the natural world into allegorical commentaries in which I explore the ambivalence and discomfort I feel in relation to popular culture and the status quo. My list of concerns is long and I focus on narcissism, self interest, hypocrisy, the tyranny of beauty, the idolatry of money and materialism.“

Moon Age Daydream was created for an exhibition held in the former residence of the late rock star artist, David Bowie in 2019. Viddo was inspired by the poetry and lyrics of Bowie’s song Moon Age Daydream which opens with “I’m an Alligator…”

 


TM Davy

“Horse” by TM Davy

“Art works for me as a meditation on being in relationship with life. Light and love become each other when form is also a feeling … The painting in this auction is of a horse eating grass. Horses have long played inside my practice, but this body of work began after a strange synchronicity. I discovered that my gallery at 195 Chrystie Street was located exactly where my ancestors had once run a livery horse stable after coming to NY in the late 1800s. I followed this fact toward making and meaning, devoting the next few years to the horse as a natural and mythic mirror of our coevolution.”

 

 

 


Cisco Jimenez

“Building a Paradox by Cisco Jimenez

Cisco Jiménez was born in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico. He is a contemporary artist whose work includes drawing, painting, sculpture and installation that focuses on Mexico’s social and political environment. Jiménez was a recipient of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (SNCA) art grant from 2014-2016, which is one of Mexico’s most significant grant programs created by the Mexican Ministry of Culture.


David Yarrow

“Encroachment” by David Yarrow

David Yarrow is now recognised as the world’s best-selling fine art photographer of his genre. In recent years, he has found his true comfort zone in capturing the animal and human world in a fresh and creative way, with philanthropy and conservation central to his passion to document.

This image is deliberately reductive and there is no lofty ambition. But therein lies its strength. It is a paradox that white is such a strong colour, and it is probably at its best in abstract imagery with no depth of focus.”

 

 


Betsabee Romero

“Rodables y rompibles (verde)” by Betsabee Romero

“Rufina Ruiz, ‘ceramist master’ opened her workshop and home with her honest and bright smile, and immediately I wanted to work with her … I showed my work on cars and tires and she showed me her beloved oven and team. I proposed to her to create some special hubcaps in glazed ceramic, produced and finished on a tire with some leaves and flowers from her garden and surroundings.”

“By Introducing this new type of manual, personal, slow and laborious process on this industrial vehicle, we were … breaking boundaries between handcrafts and industrial things crossing through this solid, industrial and speed process of the modern world that has crashed nature and culture on its path.”

 

 

 


Michelle Stuart

“Extinct: Three Roses” by Michelle Stuart

Stuart uses the vast archive of analog and digital photographs that she has taken and collected for almost half a century, activating their aesthetic potential by re-contextualizing them in groups, and often altering them to weave personal stories. These dreamlike recollections of her past not only continue her lifelong artistic engagement with specific locations but affirm the significance of place as a unique source of memory.

 

 


Slim Safont

“Property” by Slim Safont

Barcelona Muralist and painter Nil (Slim) Safont is mainly interested in urban art and interventions in public space. His works are large-format paintings that use the walls of the streets as canvases.

This painting is born from a photograph taken in the streets of the city of Barcelona,” explains Safont. “The image tries to suggest a reflection on the differences and inequalities between social classes, highlighted visually in an image in which the idea of ‘property’ is represented in two very unequal ways in the same scene.”


Scott Benzel

“LSD Cologne” by Scott Benzel

“Benzel combines remnants and ephemera to illustrate how often our most meaningful relationships form through a triangulation of contingency, timing and pure luck. Each work embeds an element of risk, sometimes via a performative creative process, or by framing chance encounters in the context of an exhibition.” —Lee Foley

One of a series of addenda to Benzel’s 2020 exhibition Mindless Pleasures, the work LSD Cologne combines ready-made elements to continue the artist’s investigation into the ways in which consumer objects, principles of composition and display apparatus act upon the human consciousness.

 

 

 


Marc Breslin

“Stele II” by Marc Breslin

Marc Breslin works primarily as a painter. Themes of location and time, their loss and rejuvenation, persist in his work, yielding a variety of subjects that conflate the personal and the public. A vast majority of his paintings highlight the use of positive and negative space. He views his practice as an opportunity to create “shared encounters both art historically and personally.”

 

 

 


Jose Alvarez

“An Unlikely Messenger #3” by Jose Alvarez

“The sources of my inspiration come from a wide range of scientific, cosmological and mathematical theories, including my keen interest in anthropological research and visionary ritual practice … Using diverse media, the concept of inner and outer exploration is key in the development of the different aspects of the work. I’d like the viewer to get lost in each piece, to elevate them through the use of different techniques and materials.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Cover image: “Siriusly” by Mario Moore

About the author: Megan Miller

Megan Miller

Megan is an accomplished communications professional with experience in the private, public and nonprofit sectors. She’s a skilled leader, writer, editor, public speaker, and strategic adviser. Megan is passionate about the art of sharing information in creative and impactful ways, and believes in the power of ideas and authentic self-expression to change the world for the better. Before joining the year-round Burning Man staff in 2012, Megan spent ten years working for environmental protection, HIV/AIDS prevention, political campaigns, and the United States Senate. Born and raised in Juneau, Alaska, Megan earned a Bachelor’s degree in English & Art History from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec and is a 2007 graduate of the Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs. She is also a certified yoga instructor who loves shaking it loose on the dance floor.

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