Rather than act as a mirror, dutifully recreating or reporting back on the world around us, these artists often act as a portal to an entirely new universe. A universe where the artist has crafted unique entities from scratch through many compressed cycles of evolution. Where fascinating beings and impossible environments blend the foreign and the familiar, giving us a sense that there is life here, but perhaps not life as we’ve known it. This show focuses on the artistic process, highlighting how the proliferation of work afforded by digital tools often leads the artist to spend as much time curating as creating. However, it can be hard for the viewer to gather much context when looking at just one or two works by an artist. So as part of my prompt, I also asked the artists to leverage Edward Tufte’s concept of small multiples, which display a set of images in close proximity together in order to facilitate comparisons across the full group of images at a glance. — Artnome - Jason Bailey

Feral File — Field Guide

“Hypothetically Micro” confronts us with a dozen bold ribbon-like entities placed against flat backgrounds of solid color. Familiar on the surface, they become increasingly difficult to place, particularly in terms of scale. Velitchkova’s lyrical specimens are artfully cropped in a way that suggests we may be looking at the tail, wing, fin, or frond of a much larger organism. Yet something about the color palette also recalls the dyes used in microscopy: These forms could just as easily be microorganisms as much larger birdlike or fishlike creatures. Her work shines next to other generative artists for its elegant biomorphic forms and subtle exploration of color. Velitchkova is a magnificent biological architect, painstakingly crafting visual systems while bringing delicate new creatures to life.

Hypothetically Micro #68

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