PhotoVogue Digital Art Collection • First Drop

The PhotoVogue Digital Art Collection is set to release its first group of talented photographers and digital artists from around the world.

In partnership with Voice, the artists participated in a four-week NFT residency program designed to empower artists entering Web3. The theme of the collection is Issues of Representation, working to challenge and reshape dominant visual narratives in today’s society.

We are surrounded by images published in traditional media, social media and everywhere in between. These images have an ever lasting impact on how we perceive ourselves, each other and the world. Although there is a tremendous effort towards expanding our global vision of inclusivity, there is still much work to be done. 

The PhotoVogue digital art collection aims to challenge the visual landscape through artistic expression in this new digital space. Throughout the residency program, the PhotoVogue artists have been encouraged to revisit past collections, create new work, and experiment with tools to explore and express their relationship with representation in their communities and globally.

Discover the collection below and learn about issues of representation from each artist below:

Aart Verrips

What is the inspiration behind your NFT?  I found the inspiration from one AI video that circled the web and here for creating the series ‘Colour Theory’ which explores the relationship between technology and beauty. 

Chiemeka Offor

What is the inspiration behind your NFT? Considering the prompt: ‘Issues of Representation’, it felt most authentic to visually communicate feelings about myself and my body. My body is always with me and all I've ever known. I explore my perception of myself in the many forms, shapes, and layers I take on to feel comfortable. At times hiding, contorting, shifting, and conforming. The dialogue between me and my body is ever-changing. I try to view my being, myself from a perspective of love as I know that is all she wants and truly needs. The rest: anything not of love and adoration was not my own doing, only projections of the outside world imposed on me before I even existed. By confronting this I make peace with it. I realised I was enough all along. Self Portraiture allows me to become the author and subject of this narrative. This is the most empowering part. 

Sasha Chaika

What is the inspiration behind your NFT? Blockchain is a place where I will not be censored. I want to continue my work with the body and here on Voice I am free to express myself in an erotic way. My collection is inspired by fetishes, porn, memes, queer and alternative communities. I like to play with elements of mass culture, but in a deconstructed, twisted way, to refresh and double-check habitual reality.

I was born in Russia, where there was no sex education. Also, as you know, it's a very homophobic place where people want you to conform and be normal. And I was so closed off, afraid to be who I want to be, afraid to represent myself.

I'm impressed by a lot of brave people with different identities who aren't afraid and are proud of themselves. I think everyone should have the opportunity to be themselves, to choose themselves, to change themselves. And I think everyone should have the right to decide what they want to look at and get any information they want. I'm talking about censorship. Censorship is manipulation. It decides for you. For example, Instagram wants me to stop my representation as well, so I decided to create the collection of my banned artworks during the residency.

15% of the proceeds will go to the Witness Change Foundation to support LGBTQIA+ people in areas where love is illegal (especially in Ukraine and Chechnya).

Marisol Mendez

What is the inspiration behind your NFT? My NFT’s are an extension of ‘MADRE’ which interrogates the whitewashed, phallocentric and colonial representation of womenx in my native Bolivia. The project is an exploration of the feminine as it wrestles with religious and cultural interpretations that are dogmatic and reductionist, confining womenx to either the image of the holy Virgin Mary or the sinner Mary Magdalene. Weaving together Andean folklore and Catholic iconography, MADRE spotlights the complexities of contemporary Bolivian identity and reflects on the country’s diverse and multifaceted culture.

Juan Francisco Sanchez

What is the inspiration behind your NFT? In this NFT collection I present portraits of animals, my intention was to get closer to them and try to take them out of context, to portray them as individuals, it is a work in progress that started before and intensified during the pandemic.

Ankita Das

What is the inspiration behind your NFT? 

POV: A ‘foreign’ specimen in foreign lands

This series works with the critical and satirical extension of anthropological portraits taken by colonists to document the culture of the lands they were colonising. It contributed to the stereotyping, fetishistic collection, limitation, and definition of bodies. This colonial hangover persists more than two centuries after it began and influences those in positions of authority wrt socio-economic classes, race, gender, sexuality etc as they describe the bodies and the lives of those who are not. They do this by exploiting and exoticizing those in these positions without uplifting them, in the name of education and awareness. A case in point is trauma porn.

The idea of the ‘other’, the ‘exotic’, the ‘outsider’ persists across lands even now, with the reduction of people and ‘foreign’ cultures to objects and stereotypes. While the colonists have always documented the colonised in their native land, what happens when the colonised come to the colonists' land?

Shitanda

What is the inspiration behind your NFT? This series was created from a point of seeking silence and posing a challange to preconceived stereotypical notions surrounding self identity, beauty and the coexistence of life’s dualities, centered around pain and pleasure.

My intention was to visually explore what our human experience would look and feel like if we are presented with the freedom to to build, dismantle, question and reconceive our perception of self, life’s course and beauty from a raw, honest and unconstrained point of view.

Viridiana

What is the inspiration behind your NFT? Symbols can build the local and global imaginary. In this sense in my work I retake allusions of women’s body representations and bring them to contemporary images, working at the same time with their inherent duality. In my pictures, when the women see the observer as a “confrontational action” in which they are not just seen as the object or the muse, denoting a position of consciousness and establishing the dialogue: “I see you too”.

In this way, I do believe that the perceptions, the imaginary and the narrative could create new power and gender dynamics.