Colossal

Inside the cavernous former train station that now houses Hamburger Bahnhof, 400,000 wooden cubes stack and topple into piles. Conceived by Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė and commissioned by Chanel, “We Make Years Out of Hours” is a large-scale installation that invites the public to remake structures from these 10-centimeter blocks made of pine and spruce.

Lapelytė often combines sound and performance and collaborates with both professionals and novices. This participatory work continues the artist’s interest in collective making and caretaking, particularly as it relates to shared authorship and how we might amend and reshape what currently exists.

A trio of weekly performances on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays will feature a libretto with the words of 15 writers, including Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, Lebanese-American painter Etel Adnan, Iranian filmmaker
Forugh Farrokhzad, and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Centered around community, love, and loss, these songs create another dimension in the space to consider agency and hope.

“We Make Years Out of Hours” opens on May 1 and is on view through January 10, 2027, in Berlin. Explore more of Lapelytė’s multi-disciplinary works on her website and Instagram.

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“We live with so many hard things,” says Sheila Hicks, “that we’re crying for softness.” The pleasure, simplicity, and tactile qualities of textiles ground a new film from Louisiana Channel, which explores the ways in which fiber art remains both evocative and relevant in this increasingly digital era.

“7 Artists on Soft Sculptures” weaves together a variety of distinct approaches to textiles. Nick Cave describes incorporating found plastics, toys, metals, fringe, and more into elaborate suits that mask the wearer’s identity, while Icelandic artist Shoplifter shares her obsessions with brightly dyed synthetic hair, which she transforms into immersive installations.

And Kaarina Kaikkonen offers her deeply personal reason for incorporating used clothing into her large-scale installations: “When I was 14, after my father’s death, I wanted to wear his clothes,” she says. “I felt very strongly that my father is near me if I wear his clothes.” This invisible presence continues to inform her work, offering a connection to people and times passed.

Louisiana Channel hosts a trove of videos featuring artists, writers, and designers, including earlier studio visits with Shiota and Shoplifter, on Vimeo.

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Growing up in the Australian Outback, where he first picked up a camera as a teenager to document his surroundings in the bush, Jon McCormack developed a keen eye for the beauty and subtleties of nature. Throughout his career, he’s stepped foot on all seven continents. Yet the idea for his new book, Patterns: Art of the Natural World, emerged from a period of quieter reflection.

Like many of us during the pandemic, McCormack’s travels were limited to his immediate area. He began visiting the same spots repeatedly and “discovered a new way of seeing, using photography to reveal the hidden harmony and symmetry of the natural world,” says a statement. Patterns, forthcoming from Damiani Books, draws upon this patient and attentive approach to nature’s rhythms, emphasizing its interconnectedness, resilience, and fragility.

The snapshots view slivers of our world from a range of perspectives, whether honing in on the recurring features of crystals or flying over a flamboyance of flamingos in Kenya. Patterns contains 90 striking images and text contributions from fellow photographers and conservationists.

Find your copy on Bookshop, and keep up with McCormack’s travels on Instagram.

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What better way to meditate on nature’s most majestic features than to recreate its details one stitch at a time? Since picking up a needle and thread in 2020, Cassandra Dias has translated rugged cliffsides, neat vineyards, and sun-streaked mountains into lush embroideries.

The Southern California-based artist uses a technique known as thread painting, which combines a variety of stitches to create richly textured scenes. Having developed a dreamy, impressionistic style, Dias’ embroideries mimic the pointed and gestural movements of a paintbrush, with the depth of impasto. Whether depicting a single autumnal tree or a wide seascape stretching for miles, the artist’s works direct attention to the minuscule details and the abundant life all around us.

Many of the images shown here are from Dias’ forthcoming book, Richly Stitched Landscape Embroidery: Mastering Thread Painted Scenes, which will be released in May. To dive into her techniques and distinctive approach, pre-order your copy from the Colossal Shop. You can also find more on Instagram.

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Over the course of two decades, Queens resident Joe Macken meticulously built an entire city from the ground up. In fact, he built New York City—the whole thing—one building, house, and bridge at a time. Now, his expansive scale construction is on view in He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model at the Museum of the City of New York.

Macken began working on the 50-by-27-foot model in 2004, first in Middle Village, Queens, before moving to Clifton Park, New York. It comprises 340 individual sections, each built from everyday materials like cardboard and glue, with many of the buildings constructed of balsa wood and detailed with pencil and paint. He completed the structure in 2025, and it’s now on long-term view at the museum, where visitors can walk around it and are encouraged to use binoculars to find familiar buildings and neighborhoods.

You may also enjoy the “Panorama of the City of New York” at the Queens Museum, which was completed in 1964 and took a team of more than 100 people about three years to complete.

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One of the most common sights in cities is birds perched on power lines, although it rarely elicits a second look. Starlings chortle, pigeons coo, and the occasional hawk perches on a pole to scan the ground for its next meal. And yet, as normal as this seems, there’s nothing natural about it. Instead of trees, these feathered creatures rely on whatever infrastructure is around them, from wires and pylons to fences and rooftops.

For Ohio-based artist Rachel Mentzer, nature’s resilience is central to a practice focused on sustainability and environmental renewal. Her work “invites viewers to reflect on the interplay between human activity and the natural world, emphasizing the adaptability and fragility of nature,” says a statement.

Mentzer’s practice emphasizes collagraphy, an intaglio printmaking technique in which flattened materials—especially paper and card but also other items like leaves or acrylic surfaces—can be used to create a plate from which to make prints. She meticulously carves the delicate surfaces of found cartons with motifs of birds, trees, and energy infrastructure, then brushes them in polyurethane to preserve and prepare them for printing. Occasionally, she also employs chine collé, which uses delicate papers, to add colorful backgrounds.

The artist then coats the design with ink, wipes off the excess, and places the damp substrate into an etching press to transfer the image to a larger sheet of paper, producing the final piece. Thanks to the pressure of the transfer and the way the ink seeps into every handmade and incidental mark, the final print reveals a textural composition with crisp outlines. Birds and urban details alike are inextricable from the silhouette of a material that may have otherwise been destined for the landfill, summoning a constant reminder of the relationship between humans and nature.

Mentzer’s work was recently included in the Manhattan Graphics Center’s community print studio exhibition, and this summer, she’s looking forward to participating in the Suzanne Wilson Artist-in-Residence Program at Glen Arbor Arts Center in Michigan. See the artist’s process on her website, where you can also check if she will be at an art fair in your area throughout the spring and summer. See more on Instagram.

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“Play is how we give permission,” says Vitor Freire, co-founder of the Amsterdam-based studio Imagination of Things. “Permission to challenge what’s fixed, rehearse what doesn’t exist yet, and close the distance between people who wouldn’t otherwise meet.”

Freire and co-founder Monique Grimord take play seriously and, in a new project, their studio created a vast repository of 169 artworks, designs, games, and more that have offered an unexpected encounter with imagination and joy. From Rael San Fratello’s award-winning “Teeter-Totter Wall” to the healing Wind Phone project to a 12-foot puppet walking the world, Unruly Play is a multi-decade archive of participatory projects, public spaces, and digital creations that invite surprise and camaraderie.

“Our collaborators have always asked us where our ideas come from,” Gimrod says, “and the truth is that they come from references that rarely talk to each other—it can be a seesaw through a border wall or a phone booth connected to the dead… We wanted to create unusual dialogues and support new creative practices, and Unruly Play was our answer for that.”

Fully interactive, the project is searchable by theme or browsable through a shuffle feature. To dive deeper into the power of play, check out this compendium of artist-designed spaces.

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When we consider that enormous metropolises like New York City and Chicago have only come into being within the past few hundred years, it’s impossible not to stand in awe of ancient cultural sites that have existed for millennia or geological features that expose millions—even billions—of years of the planet’s natural history. For Navid Baraty, the contrasts and tensions of contemporary urban life and timeless landscapes merge in otherworldly photographs.

Baraty’s series The Time Between juxtaposes cityscapes with dramatic terrain, from desert dunes to snow-capped mountains. The project revolves around images in which two distinct digital photographs converge in a composite, drawing on the film technique of double exposure and exploring ideas of permanence, presence, and the “space between different scales of time,” the artist says.

The Time Between highlights iconic skylines like Manhattan and Chicago, pairing the outlines of skyscrapers and city lights with dramatic rock formations and atmospheric effects. “The process is intentional but restrained, combining the two frames through careful blending rather than constructing or artificially generating new elements,” Baraty tells Colossal. “I’m interested in combinations that feel impossible at first, yet strangely convincing once they come together.”

See more on Instagram.

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“I started doing photography as a way to express things I don’t understand or to convey a message I’m having a hard time explaining,” Austn Fischer says. “I often work in quite a backwards way, knowing exactly what I want to arrange in front of the camera but struggling to understand the significance in my life until I am able to reflect on it after.”

The Wisconsin-born, London-based photographer taps into fashion as performance, considering how our garments, style, and gestures convey parts of our identities. Contrast is key in Fischer’s work, and it emerges through unusual pairings like lace ruffs atop athletic garb or an angular, black gown with a dainty, horse-shaped wire armature. Whether a portrait or a more conceptual composition, each work harnesses an exuberant sense of play and homes in on our ability to remake ourselves anew.

“Growing up, I had a lot of questions around my sexuality and my own experience as a man. I naturally gravitated towards fashion because of the story clothing can convey in an image,” he adds. “The colours, shape, fabric, and the way clothing wraps around a model create a unique conversation around identity and the body.”

Fischer has collaborated with a range of editorial and commercial clients, shooting Ai Weiwei with a milkshake for The New Statesman, for example, and David Byrne seemingly under oath for Crack Magazine. Whether working on a personal project or a commissioned series, the photographer transforms a largely black-and-white palette that could appear harsh into scenes exuding warmth and softness.

Better understanding his own emotions is Fischer’s priority at the moment, following a series of painful experiences, both personal and professional, that have influenced what and how he’s creating. “Recently, I spent two weeks from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. painting a wall in a church white over and over to understand patience and reflect on myself. I’m working a lot on understanding emotion and myself through putting my body through different tasks or challenges,” he tells Colossal.

Explore more of Fischer’s portfolio on his website and Instagram.

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The act of painting is often seen as a solitary pursuit; we picture the artist alone in a studio, working through compositional puzzles and experimenting with materials of their own choosing. For Dima Rebus, the process is collaborative, although she may or may not know the other participants. In her large-scale works, the London-based artist adds new meaning to “watercolor” as she incorporates water samples collected from strangers around the globe.

In her series Floaters, Rebus processes these crowdsourced units by freezing them with watercolor pigments, which she then allows to melt across the substrate, creating abstract color fields. She then adds figures and elements of landscape, often with a fluid, rippling effect evocative of light glinting off the surface of a lake, as aquatic themes emerge in the form of pools and swimmers.

“Nearly every sample arrives with a letter, opening a dialogue shaped by place, mood, memory, and time,” Rebus says. “Over the years, I’ve built an archive of waters from rain, rivers, seas, oceans, and glaciers, each preserved as both material record and human message.”

Find more on the artist’s Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Water Samples from Around the World Melt into Dima Rebus’ Dreamy Paintings appeared first on Colossal.