Three Young Artists To Know If You Want To Sound All Knowledgeable About Art And Junk
Also remember to use the words 'incendiary' and 'irreverent'.
Nike: Month Of Air Max
We’ve teamed up with Nike to bring you Air Max Month. To get involved, register now to secure your spot. Limited places available. Find out more here.
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As part of their Month of Max, Nike have commissioned three Australian artists to bring to life the ethos of each of the shoe’s original creators. At a curated talk at the pop-up Air Max Lab in Surry Hills on Thursday night, the artists explained how the design heritage of the Air Max plays into modern artistic culture.
So why should you care? Because the three working artists they’ve chosen for the project are some of the most genuinely fascinating young artists in the country today. Joyce Ho was one of the motion designers who worked on the beautiful opening sequences of True Detective and The Expanse. Elliot Routledge has installed large installation murals in nearly every major city in the world, and Benja Harney’s art is best described by one audience member as “fucking crazy insane awesome stuff with paper”.
The exhibition will be unveiled in the Surry Hills studio on March 26, so we’ve pulled together some cheat-notes of the artists so you can drop their names the next time you’re at a fancy gallery opening and have no idea what anyone’s talking about.
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Joyce Ho
A motion designer and art director with a soft spot for the silver screen, Joyce has been professionally designing, illustrating, directing and animating for eight years. She has a really beautiful knack for storytelling through motion and bringing complex ideas to life through design. Ho leads a team at the super top-notch motion studio Breeder in Brisbane, which blends art, technology and philosophy to create content for the likes of Syfy (the above opening titles for the TV show The Expanse) HBO and TEDx.
One of those exceptional people who manages to have a creative job but not fall into a puddle when she gets home, Joyce also produces beautiful hand-drawn art in her own time and makes weird video shorts just, ya know, for fun.
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Benja Harney
Harney has been building large and small-scale installations of intricate paper sculptures for almost a decade, both in Australia and internationally. He’s renowned as a pioneer in his field, and while that field may sound fairly specific, Harney’s turned paper art into a respected medium and inspired a slew of imitators.
As a professional creative, artist and educator he’s led his Sydney-based studio, Paperform, to develop a body of work that pushes the possibilities of the paper medium. Pop-up books, paper sculpture, installation, illustration, packaging, fine art, fashion, animation, set design – Harney makes anything and everything possible within this endlessly inventive material.
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Elliott Routledge
Once upon a time, Elliott went by the tag Numskull and was a blight to anti-graffiti initiatives across Australia. Now reformed, he has gone on to install major public murals all over the world and has sold paintings in London, Vienna, New York, Tokyo, Paris, Singapore, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and extensively throughout Australia.
His work exists in a balance between blocky graphics and abstract form. Having spent a lot of time practicing colour theories, his current work has been an exploration of colour relationships and pattern choices.
Elliott’s practice spans across canvas paintings, handmade sculpture and wildly expressive large-scale public murals. He was recently a feature of the Art & About Festival in Sydney, and has also been shown in the Museums Quartier, Vienna as a part of his 2014 Residency.
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Sydney is the very first official city to welcome in Air Max Day around the world, so join us for this epic celebration of all things Air Max, and don’t forget to #WearYourAir