Maison Deckart
AI-generated artworks created by virtual artists
inspired by real-world events.
Featured Artists
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María Elena Roldán
Pronouns: she/her Born 1970-08-02 in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Medellín, María Elena Roldán is a 55-year-old painter, illustrator and mask-maker whose work stitches British Pop ...
Ariella Maren Cassio
Ariella Maren Cassio (they/them) is a site-specific artist whose work interrogates inequality and class through a restrained, neutral-gray visual language. Confident and deliberately projecting author...
Rian Morgan Price
Rian Morgan Price (they/them) is a queer visual artist and educator raised in a tight-knit agricultural farming community in the Welsh valleys. Born into a household of smallholders, Rian learned earl...
Aiyana Calderón
Aiyana Calderón (they/them) is a painter and archivist whose practice compresses histories into opaque, monumentally solid surfaces. Born into a family of circus and traveling performers with a layere...
Jin Novak
Jin Novak (born 1984-11-02) is a sculptor and mixed-media conservator whose work bridges the material discipline of conservation with a formally rigorous studio practice. They use they/them pronouns. ...
Lerato Nkosi
Lerato Nkosi is a Cape Town–based visual artist whose work sits at the intersection of Pop appropriation, internet vernacular, and postcolonial theory. They graduated with a BFA from the Michaelis Sch...
Marta Solano
Marta Solano (she/her) is a sculptor and public artist in her mid-40s whose work translates the sinew of cities into retro-inflected metal forms. Born and raised in a blue-collar neighborhood outside ...
Somchai Ito
Somchai Ito (Pronouns: they/them) is a socially engaged visual artist whose work excavates the uneven seams of globalization and memory. Born in a small Southeast Asian town and later living for many ...
Recent Artworks
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Sutures of the Coast (Evacuation, Adriatic Fires)
In *Sutures of the Coast (Evacuation, Adriatic Fires)* the artist translates a fast-moving summer disaster into the language of stone and repair. The limestone panel holds deep blackened grooves of flame and the pale, salt-streaked traces of sea spray; carved figures—tourists, residents, volunteers—are reduced to a guarded line moving toward small boats under a horizontal horizon. Bronze pins and stitched linen thread trace visible repairs across fractured surfaces, making the act of mending part of the image itself. Found ephemera—a hotel key card, an evacuation tag, a frayed rope—sit like relics embedded in the relief, their surfaces bleached and scarred. Marina Costa Ribeiro frames the work as a study of communal endurance and the costs of ecological crisis. The piece points to **1,200 evacuated**, to volunteer brigades and to stretched firefighting networks, while also naming the broader forces—**very extreme wildfire conditions**, prolonged heat and drought—that shape these sudden displacements. The sutures are both practical and moral: visible repairs that insist on memory, care and refusal to smooth over what broke. Rendered in a palette borrowed from the artist’s terrace garden—muted greens, ochres and ash—the relief asks how societies stitch themselves back together after flame, and what reparative investments might look like in a warming Europe whose summer losses now tally in the billions (**€15 billion**, experts warn).
Inspired by: Hundreds evacuated from Croatian and Greek resorts as wildfires stretch across Europe
Tide‑Stitch: Communal Shroud for Tombura‑Yambio
by Anika Santos
*Tide‑Stitch: Communal Shroud for Tombura‑Yambio* was co‑created in dialogue with community elders and civic leaders in response to newly articulated guidelines that reframe mourning as *communal care* rather than private spectacle. The work is an index of restraint: its economy of materials—mended scraps, hair‑threaded repairs, clay bowls and river stones—deliberately rejects ostentation while centering the forms that hold memory: the shroud, the shared fire, the gathering circle. Salt blooms along the hem mark the place where individual grief crystallizes into collective witness; the Interrupted Stitch Line, a hair‑threaded motif, traces the labor of those who stand with the bereaved. Installed as both object and route, the shroud encloses a modest circular ground of compacted earth meant for shared standing and spoken memory. An accompanying locative audio layer (built with consenting contributors and archival partners) offers short recollections and communal prayers recorded by local voices, emphasizing how ritual can be preserved without burdening household economies. The piece asks visitors to consider what mourning demands of a community and what a community can choose to withhold: not a denial of ceremony, but a practice of mutual bearing, repair and material thrift that honors spirit and sustains life.
Inspired by: Catholic Bishop Joins South Sudan Leaders in Effort to Preserve Azande Funeral Rites, Curb Excessive Spending
Spectacles of Care
by Amala Nair
*Spectacles of Care* assembles the contested language of assistive technology into a tactile manifesto. At its center, an oversized pair of metal glasses — lenses mapped with stamped circuit-like motifs and hammered textures — reads simultaneously as medical device, navigational instrument and shared ornament. Around it, salvaged boat plates and hospital-linen surfaces welded into relief recall the artist’s backwater labor history: devices are not abstractions but tools shaped by bodies, workplaces and collective struggle. Incised ledger lines and near-illegible script run like minutes from union meetings; punched braille-dots form a path you are invited to follow across the surface. This work pushes back against narratives that frame smart glasses as merely sensational or intrusive by insisting on **their practical, embodied benefits**. Touchable and modular by design, the relief was developed with blind and low-vision collaborators and staged to be read haptically as well as visually. The piece foregrounds accessibility as political care — a technology that can extend autonomy, remap public space, and be reused in everyday life — while acknowledging the labor and infrastructures that make such devices legible, legal and livable.
Inspired by: Smart glasses controversy sidelines the benefits for disabled people | Letter
Furnace Ledger: Summer Accounts
*Furnace Ledger: Summer Accounts* assembles the summer's economic fallout into a ledger you can almost smell — scorched paper, hot metal, and the mineral crust of a world warming into view. The central panel is a quasi-accounting page: clipped headlines and statistical fragments from the Reuters piece sit beside hand-ruined numerals, their ink purposefully rubbed away to expose earlier, erased ledgers. Metallic airbrush finishes and furnace patina make economic metrics feel like physical burdens — the weight of cut hours, throttled grids, and shuttered production rendered as layers of surface and loss. The composition refuses a single focal point; images sit off-center, deliberately imbalanced, echoing the uneven distribution of heat and fiscal responsibility across Europe. Factory interiors and stalled transport photographs are disrupted by collaged farmland maps and singed social-safety documents, asserting the **intersection of climate, economy, and inequality**. Mineral crusts and rusted steel are not ornament: they are geological footnotes that have become budget line items. Viewers are invited to trace seams and rubbed margins — to witness what institutions erase when they translate heat into costs, and to reckon with what it means when climate becomes an immediate ledger entry rather than a distant projection.
Inspired by: How the hard reality of climate change hit Europe's economy this summer
Ledger of Scarcity: Atmospheres of Survival
by Somchai Ito
*Ledger of Scarcity: Atmospheres of Survival* is a relief-printed triptych that stages the mechanics of famine as both material record and atmospheric event. I printed directly from the *Nong Saeng Flood Ledger* using reclaimed temple pigments on scraped lacquer panels at the Ame-Kioku Press; the surface is intentionally scarred — scraped away and reworked — to echo the erosion of harvests and the abrasion of memory. Maps of Central America and southern Africa are incised into the layers, their contour-lines intersecting stamped WFP-style ledger numbers and etched rainfall graphs to make visible the arithmetic behind the headline: millions newly at risk. Small insets of dried soil and braided grain are collaged into the panels as tactile testimonies to loss and resilience. The installation is sonically timed to real-time El Niño indices: a low-frequency sonification of rising Niño values paces a soundtrack composed of drought wind recordings, microburst impulses from the Emiko Tanaka collection, and distant temple bells — a ritual counterpoint that locates global geopolitics inside atmospheric mood. Oral fragments collected with community archivists thread through the soundscape, each voice pressing the unequal truth that those who emit least bear most of the impact. Formally restrained and ritual-aware, the work insists on two linked urgencies: to read the data as human ledger and to scale up prevention and support before thresholds lock in. It is at once archive, altar, and call to action — a layered witness to climate variability, conflict, and the fragile economies that make twenty-first-century famines possible.
Inspired by: El Niño could push 50m people into acute hunger before the end of next year
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Palimpsest Mask (for an Old Master)
by Jin Novak
*Palimpsest Mask (for an Old Master)* stages conservation as a visible event rather than a hidden correction. A laminated, AI‑generated mask—its surface printed with algorithmic retouch gestures and faint, simulated craquelure—hovers within a welded aluminum scaffold whose branching geometry recalls both blood‑vessel maps and fractured architectural ruins. The armature’s iridescent patina catches light like varnish under inspection, while projected underdrawings and pentimenti slip in and out of view, invoking the museum technologies (multispectral imaging, 3D scans) that reveal overlapping times within a single painted surface. Small trays hold pale, plant‑based cleaning gels—eco‑formulations rendered as soft, beadlike masses—positioned as active tools and sculptural elements. The work is an argument in material form. Visitors can lift the laminated mask from its fittings to expose the embedded strata beneath, making the act of reintegration and its reversibility explicit: additions are legible, removable, and fully documented. In this way the piece traces Jin Novak’s belief in processual care—conservation as ongoing dialogue rather than frozen fidelity—drawing on modernist restraint, literati landscape sensibility, and a politics of repair shaped by lived experience. *Palimpsest Mask* asks which layers we choose to reveal, which to hold in tension, and how new technologies—AI masks, green chemistries, rigorous documentation—reconfigure the ethics and aesthetics of restoration for future viewers.
Inspired by: Old masters, new methods: The tech transforming art restoration
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Patriotic Lattice (School of the Nation)
*Patriotic Lattice (School of the Nation)* stages a classroom controversy as a public ritual. The central dais recalls both a pulpit and a podium — the woodwork teacher becomes an emblem of contested authority while banners of medieval and 19th‑century iconography loom like monuments proposed for curricula. Opposite him, counsellors, students and caretakers form a provisional chorus, their patchwork banners and torn leaflets naming the social supports threatened by policy. A spider-web lattice threads through the scene, a compositional scaffolding that holds the crowd together even as it traps notices of care. The work insists you read celebration as confrontation: what looks like a procession is a battleground over who belongs in the national story. Executed as a large-scale platinum contact print diptych, the piece fuses Bruegel‑inspired crowd grammar with Aztec sculptural motifs and archival textures. I made it from community oral fragments collected in the Aurora Platinum Atelier and layered with archival contact prints to produce dense tonal fields that feel both photographic and relic-like. The aggressive mark-making and architectural framing aim to make visible the structural stakes of curriculum fights — **schools as a battleground**, proposals for a **'patriotic cultural policy'**, and the ways pedagogical change can **marginalize** vulnerable students. Viewers are invited to stand within the lattice and listen: to the rhetoric on the dais, to the whispered refusals on the margins, and to consider what public education should protect and whom it should allow to be seen.
Inspired by: Schools become battleground as Germany’s far‑right AfD eyes regional election
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Lilium Ledger (after Paderborn)
by Asha Mwangi
*Lilium Ledger (after Paderborn)* reconstructs and re-animates a fragile, dislodged moment of medieval everydayness: a small, waxed notebook once abandoned in a latrine. The piece centers a found-object logic—wooden tablets, waxed script incisions, and an embossed lily cover—then elevates those humble materials with my restrained vocabulary of gilding, layered papers, and tactile assemblage. The repeated lily motif is left intact as a visual refrain, while burnished gold and a cooled mangrove patina register both the object's original ornament and the contemporary processes of recovery and conservation. The result is a quiet tension between dignity and degradation, a recovered intimacy that insists on the dignity of mundane writing practices. Visitors are invited to move slowly around the work and to lift a translucent flap that reveals a rub of the incised text—an interactive cue drawn from my background in game-designed durational experiences. The visible conservator’s tags and sewn twine gesture toward the collaborative laboratory of archaeologists and heritage agencies that make such recoveries possible; in this way the piece is also an encomium to **institutional collaboration** and the care-work that salvages fragile narratives. Guided by an interest in duration and the economy of gesture, *Lilium Ledger* holds the viewer in a suspended attention: a small object whose traces unfold histories of use, loss, and guarded recovery.
Inspired by: Rare medieval notebook found in Paderborn latrine
Haloed Archive: Gathering Stars
by Amaya Soler
*Haloed Archive: Gathering Stars* is a site-responsive companion to Shinique Smith’s *Breathing Room*—a sculptural choreography that reconceives breath as both material and archive. Suspended electroformed discs, gilded and intentionally haloed with patination techniques drawn from my recent work with Nariño tumbaga and the Museo del Oro, catch light like small constellations. Translucent indigo pennants—a nod to cloth as carrier of memory—drift between them while a spatial soundscape layers amplified exhalations, recorded flute motifs, and whispered textual fragments. A generative algorithm listens to the room: collective breath patterns modulate slow projections of gold motes and linework across the façade, making each performance a unique, evolving ledger of presence. Presented in three movements that mirror the museum’s stairs and archways, the piece invites movement as a form of listening. As audiences ascend and linger, their exhalations modulate the sculptural light and sound, and the surfaces themselves become sites of speculative transformation—patina and light acting as markers of time and care. Working with local metalworkers and conservators, these objects are treated as communal artifacts: recorded, catalogued, and held as a contemporary archive of shared breath and repair. Enter quietly, breathe deliberately, and notice how small gestures—an exhale, a step, a pause—become **collective acts of attention and repair**.
Inspired by: Breathing Room: Gathering Stars
Ledger of Light — Barbican
by Marta Solano
*Ledger of Light — Barbican* reimagines a planning dispute as a tactile urban map. Cast in small-batch aluminum and finished with weathered patina, the triptych layers the Barbican’s stepped terraces and elevated walkways against a geometric slab that reads like the proposed office tower. The work is designed to do two things at once: *to stand like a civic poster*—retro blocks of color and bold silhouettes—and *to act as an instrument*, its perforated fins and scored golden‑ratio axes producing precise shadows that travel across the panels as the sun moves. Names and ledger marks stamped into the bench and lower plates memorialize the residents whose daily light and sightlines the new development would affect. I began this piece in conversation with local residents, measuring façades, tracing proportions in my leather-bound journals, and testing small pours with Rami in the foundry. The project folds industrial motifs—scaffolding, rivets, pattern plates—into a public object meant for assembly, gathering, and argument. It is at once a protest placard and a place to sit: the bench invites people to occupy the shadow it makes, to compare their own height of light against the tower’s, and to read the engraved ledger of voices. Ultimately the work asks: who gets to sketch the skyline? *Ledger of Light* refuses a single answer; it is a tool for conversation, a measured reminder that heritage, livability, and capital each leave marks on the city’s skin.
Inspired by: Residents of the Barbican in London Are Battling Redevelopment Plans
Metropolitan Diary: Pressing at the Canal Ledger
*Metropolitan Diary: Pressing at the Canal Ledger* reimagines a brief New York Times vignette as a slowed, tactile encounter. Taking the newspaper’s slender city note as a seed, I fragmented its lines into strips, then letterpressed them within folds of hand-pressed paper so the text reads only in sequence—sometimes legible, sometimes half-swallowed by indigo washes and impasto ridges. The book’s accordion form makes the story a small procession: pages that gesture forward and then halt, echoing the work’s preoccupation with **movement and stillness**. This piece is also a relocation—urban text carried into a marginal landscape. The porcelain sherd stamped Fábrica Santa Clara and the packet of canal silt anchor the story in place, insisting on an **urban identity entangled with hinterland materials**. The work was realized during a new‑moon pressing at the Canal Ledger press: a public, nocturnal act where community members folded, printed, and bound in silence. Visitors are invited to unfold slowly, feel the seam of each page, and witness how a fleeting city vignette becomes a measured object of remembrance and pause.
Inspired by: The Squirrel Pounced on the Apple and Scampered a Few ...
Cockroach Janta Playbook — If/Then Meme Diptych
by Lerato Nkosi
*Cockroach Janta Playbook — If/Then Meme Diptych* is a rule‑based translation of a Gen‑Z protest grammar into the gallery: I harvested circulating meme templates, dating‑app tropes and bite‑sized edits, then recombined them with a simple set of compositional rules — an If/Then deck — so that jokes, insults and image‑edits recombine like modular comic panels. The left print makes a cartoon of power itself — an oversized forehead turned into a playground for tic‑tac‑toe — while the right panel stages the vernacular arsenal of the protest wave: swipeable profiles, influencer poses retooled as lampoons, and profane speech balloons in mixed scripts. The work uses Ben‑Day dots, halftone washes and bold outlines to make these ephemeral vernaculars legible at scale; the GIF loop animates the fact‑bomb logic so images arrive like instantaneous verdicts. I present the work as an exercise in translation rather than appropriation: the piece was co‑authored from submitted screenshots and captions shared by online communities and diasporic collaborators, then run through a set of generative grammars that preserve the original parody’s timing and tone. By putting memetic humour — profanity, mockery, viral edits — into a printable rulebook, the project asks who gets to speak and how *jokes* can function as **political critique**. It stages an inversion of power where laughter is a tactic: small, repeatable images doing the work of a public argument, spreading without lobby access or polished rhetoric — precisely the kind of subaltern voice Gayatri Spivak urged us to notice, now weaponised as a comic strip.
Inspired by: ‘They played noughts and crosses on the PM’s huge forehead’: inside India’s meme‑fueled Gen‑Z protests
Exhibitions
One event, many eyes
In an exhibition, every artist of the house responds to the same piece of news. The individual picture is not the work — what emerges is a comparison of worldviews: one reality, refracted through 17 different lives, memories and sensibilities.
Current exhibition: UN reinstates Iran arms embargo and sanctions, heightening Gulf tensions · July 2026 · 17 responses