Tagged with graffiti and marred by a chipped facade, a stately Victorian home in a Sydney suburb is the site of a brilliant site-specific installation by artist Ian Strange. “Light Intersections II” uses angled beams of light to impale the derelict structure and permeate outer walls, windows, and the ornate, metallic railing on the second-floor balcony. Illuminating the battered building, Strange’s monumental public work is one of his many projects that explores ideas of home through architectural interventions. More

Every month, Colossal shares a selection of opportunities for artists and designers, including open calls, grants, fellowships, and residencies. If you’d like to list an opportunity here, please get in touch at hello@colossal.art. You can also join our monthly Opportunities Newsletter.   iStock Creative Inclusion Grants Featured The inaugural iStock Creative Inclusion Grants will award four emerging photographers $5,000 each to support a project that draws attention to underrepresented communities. More

DENVER — Colorado became the third U.S. state to detect a case of the omicron variant in a woman who had recently traveled to Africa, state health officials announced Thursday. The Colorado case comes after two other confirmed omicron variant cases were found in California and Minnesota. Officials in Colorado ...

There’s a human impulse to preserve life’s blissful moments—a quick scroll through your camera roll will probably give you plenty of evidence—one Carly Glovinski gives into by bottling up the rich, swirling gradients the cloak the sky at day’s end. Her ongoing Canning the Sunset project, which the New Hampshire-born artist began in March of 2020, layers hand-colored sand in reused glass jars to capture the last hours of light before they descend into dusk. More

BRUSSELS (AP) – The United States, European Union, Britain and Canada on Thursday slapped simultaneous sanctions on dozens of officials, organizations and companies in Belarus, with the EU taking aim at those accused of taking part in a “hybrid attack” on the bloc using migrants. The four have targeted Belarus ...

Birmingham, U.K.-based artist Zoë Hillyard revitalizes shattered vases and bowls by melding traditional craft techniques. She wraps a mishmash of vintage silks and fabrics around individual ceramic shards, binding the broken pieces with tightly stitched thread. Appearing glazed with antique florals and other ornate motifs, the patchwork forms contrast the original shape of the pottery with the newly mended exterior, a reconfigured finish that’s commonly disrupted by missing pieces and jagged edges. Gathering the source materials from ceramicists’ reject piles or by receiving broken family heirlooms for commissions, Hillyard works with the initial shape and purpose in mind. More

BEIJING (AP) — China’s aviation regulator cleared the Boeing 737 Max on Thursday to return to flying with technical upgrades more than two years after the plane was grounded worldwide following two fatal crashes. China is the last major market where the Boeing 737 Max was awaiting approval after the ...

What happens when a pair of curious (and hungry) rats find themselves in a kitchen of potions, tonics, and jars of strange preservatives? “Experiment” is a short film by Zoé Berton-Bojko and Susana Covo Perez—they produced the piece as part of their graduation project at the School of New Images—that follows two dueling rodents as they spar over a single dried mushroom. Once they each finally take a bite of the magical fungi, glass-shattering, fiery chaos ensues in a manner that’s as graceful as it is humorously bizarre. More

A column of metallic type scales the former Zenger Transformer Substation in Prague, melding the historic venue with the visual identity of the new art institution housed in its space. Conceived by the Czech Republic-based Studio Najbrt, the uniquely positioned logo wraps vertically around the corner of the Kunsthalle Praha building and is based on a typeface by German designer Jan Tschichold, who created it in the 1930s around the time the station was built. More

Coinciding with the rise of repurposed fabrics and visible mending, the Amsterdam-based design studio Peterson Stoop is combatting waste in one vector of the fashion industry. The company, which was founded by Jelske Peterson and Jarah Stoop in 2013, salvages worn shoes otherwise destined for landfills—it’s estimated that a single pair of trainers can take 1,000 years to break down—and repurposes them into mules, high-tops, and loafers. Combined with cork, leather, and other natural materials for support, the new shoes highlight the original logos and tattered fabrics through a patchwork of thick seams. More

President Biden is reportedly considering stricter requirements on travelers entering the U.S. as he preps a Thursday speech on ways to stave off a winter COVID-19 spike and deal with the omicron threat. The draft proposals, first reported by The Washington Post, would require all travelers to be tested within ...

In the first edition of “Arrivals”—a monthly column dedicated to new voices in photography—Wesley Verhoeve introduces us to Erinn Springer’s latest project; a tender meditation on family life set in the Midwest.

TOKYO (AP) — Japan continued its aggressive stance against a new coronavirus variant on Wednesday, asking international airlines to stop taking new reservations for all flights arriving in the country until the end of December in a further tightening of already strict border controls. The transportation ministry said the request ...

As President Biden’s new coronavirus travel ban took effect Monday, security experts say he’s left a glaring hole in his scheme: the southern border.  Visitors coming from South Africa and seven other African nations are now banned from trying to reach the U.S., amid fears of the new omicron variant ...

Honoring the humble shape of the vessel is at the center of Carol Long’s practice. From her studio in rural Kansas, the artist throws simple ceramic cylinders that she contorts into supple butterfly wings,  curved chrysalises, or vases with embellished handles.“When it comes off the potter’s wheel, that’s just the beginning,” she tells Colossal. “I usually sit for a second and look at the piece and see which way I can push it out or in.” The resulting forms are evocative of both flora and fauna and traditional pottery, although Long’s sculptures emphasize smooth, sinuous walls and squiggly bases rather than angled edges. More

BERN, Switzerland (AP) — Olympic officials in Switzerland urged the federal government Tuesday to exempt international athletes and officials from new quarantine rules that threaten the hosting of World Cup events in winter sports. People arriving from the rising number of countries on Switzerland’s red list must enter mandatory 10-day ...

The cheeky, uncanny works that comprise Yoon Ji Seon’s ongoing Rag Face series bring the knotted, twisting, and generally convoluted entanglements of a subject’s psyche to the forefront. Her photographic portraits are printed on roughly cut pieces of canvases and then overlaid with rows of tight stitches and loose strings that drip from an eye or loop across a face. Adding color and depth, the threads “can be seen or felt like internal conflicts, external stimuli, umbilical cord, blood vessels, sagging skin, hair, or time as a point of each viewer,” the artist says. More

 In Anu-Laura Tuttelberg’s stop-motion short “Winter In The Rainforest,” time passes at an unusual pace. The Estonian writer, director, and animator (previously) sets a cast of fragile, porcelain puppets within the lush rainforests of Chiapas, Mexico, and the Peruvian Amazon, a contrast of real and manufactured that grounds the surreal story. Throughout the film, carnivorous flowers trap their prey, an articulate grasshopper climbs a tree, and a miniature girl wakes from a stupor at a clip that’s wildly different from their timelapsed surroundings, which are evident through leaves shaking in the wind and shadows rolling across the landscape at a quickened tempo. More

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Barbados stopped pledging allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II on Tuesday as it shed another vestige of its colonial past and became a republic for the first time in history. Several leaders, dignitaries and artists, including Prince Charles and Rihanna, attended the ceremony that began ...

Anna Biret is an artist with a gift for seeing the world as a deeply rich place of light, contrasts, colors, textures and shapes. With this kind of vision and attitude, ordinary moments can become extraordinary — if only for the fraction of a second it takes to make a photograph.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Barbados stopped pledging allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II on Tuesday as it shed another vestige of its colonial past and became a republic for the first time in history. Several leaders and dignitaries, including Prince Charles, attended the ceremony that began late Monday in ...

Since Tbilisi Mural Fest began in 2019, the streets of Georgia’s capital have seen the towering, large-scale works of artists like Collin van der Sluijs (previously), Case Maclaim, and Faith XLVII (previously), whose celestial, intersecting circles are a highlight of this year’s event. The 2021 festival features nine pieces in total that range in aesthetic and subject matter, including a mythological, black-and-white stencil by MonkeyBird (previously), bold botanicals by Thiago Mazza (previously), and a striking trompe-l’œil papercut by 1010. More

SCI-Arc’s Master of Science in Fiction and Entertainment is a one-year, three-semester program during which students work with world-renowned professionals from the entertainment industry to develop expertise in worldbuilding, storytelling, film, animation, visual effects, and video games to build new forms of creative practice.
 Our perception of the world is unquestionably determined by the extraordinary shared languages of fiction and entertainment. Through these stories, we exchange ideas and engage with our environment. Fictional worlds have always been sites where we can prototype new scenarios and emerging cultures. More

WASHINGTON (AP) – “Gifts from the Heart” is the theme of President Joe Biden's first White House Christmas. First lady Jill Biden was scheduled on Monday to unveil decorations matching the theme, said to be inspired by people the couple met as they traveled the country this year. “The things ...

Previously having captured the Dolomites and New York City’s Central Park in a candy-colored glow, photographer Paolo Pettigiani now adds urban and rural France to his ongoing collection of infrared images. The magical series documents the rolling lavender fields of Provence in watermelon hues and Versailles’s landscaped terraces or the Gothic abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel in bright, saturated tones. Pettigiani shoots each location with a full-spectrum camera that unveils otherwise invisible wavelengths and enhances the trees, grasses, and stone surfaces that reflect infrared light with varying shades of pink. More