Don't Get It, But Love It!
Do You Remember When This World Was Ours?
Living & Dying in the Afterword
by Justin Mezzell
Image gallery below
Us 'artistes' sometimes produce things that make people scratch their heads. We get these strange, abstract ideas in our brains, then express them in a way that doesn't make much sense to anybody. Many people are perturbed by these weird ramblings, almost as if the artist was trying to demonstrate superior insight, or even worse, communicate in some sort of code. Perhaps that's indeed what's going on some of the time, but it's usually not what I see when I look at art. Usually, I just like to take it on it's esthetic merits alone.
I admit that I don't really 'get' what Justin Mezzell is trying to say with 'Do You Remember When This World Was Ours?', but man does he ever say it well. This is the sort of combo photo/illustration work that gives me goosebumps, creating nearly photo-realistic worlds that feature elements tantalizingly beyond reality. More than any other technique I've seen, this kind of stuff transports you to another world; one that could just almost be real, and looks so dramatically cool that you wish it was.
I've seen it most often employed in the sci-fi genre — for digital matte paintings and the like — and it's the style that inspired me to produce two images of my own last year; entitled 'Robot' and 'Toronto'. See them below.
But my stuff is amateur hour, and the following images demonstrate that. I've included a write-up from Justin and also the pages on which the images are meant to be seen. (I gather that the work was done for some sort of magazine) Maybe you can make more sense of them than I could.
Either way, whether you understand this art or not, I'm sure you'll agree that it's worth looking at.
Enjoy!
From Justin Mezzell's original post on Behance.net
Do You Remember When This World Was Ours is a graphical narrative into fiction and the created worlds left vacant by the conclusion of the story. As the characters continue to live on in our memories, their bodies remain in a sort of stasis while the world begins to be reclaimed by the earth and ultimately into the void--forgotten. It is told in seven movements.
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Original Images
