Chris Dent is a 22-year-old British illustrator and artist who explores the energy of urban street culture through densely informative drawings of cityscapes. Dent often captures his imagery with pen directly on paper, preventing any reworking and allowing the first mark-making instinct to dominate. The artist recently graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in London with a degree in illustration. Since his graduation, the young artist has been busy working on commissioned illustrations for Zoo York, Capitol Records and Swindle Magazine, among many others, and has also co-founded HYBRID BUNNY, a collective group of illustrators and designers. Dent has exhibited his work with the Subway Gallery and Notting Hill Arts Club, both in London.

Artist Susan Giles’ work takes root in the eye of the tourist. The artist has presented hours of video documentation taken by vacationers and amateur videographers around the world. In 2005, Giles participated in the exhibition “Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist’s Eye,” curated by Francesco Bonami at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago. Unassuming establishing shots of local scenery are spliced with scenes of street performers and the insides of airports, among countless other nondescript locations. In a recent exhibition with the Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, the artist recreated a portion of the Eiffel Tower made completely of constructed foamcore in a work titled “Pilier Sud.” Both bodies of work, while formally different, present very similar conceptual concerns dealing with ideas related to tourism, place and photographic documentation. The artist is a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a Fulbright Full Grant to Indonisia sponsored by the Museum Nasional in Jakarta and Sekolah Tinggi Seni in Indonesia. Giles has exhibited with numerous national spaces such as Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York and Deluxe Projects in Chicago.

During the preparation of “Nest,” a new exhibition on view at the Deitch Projects‘ 76 Grand Street gallery, artists Dash Snow and Dan Colen invited 30 volunteers to spend three days shredding 2,000 New York City telephone books in a grimy and most unusual installation. The group spent midnight to 8 a.m. each night wading in waist-deep shredded paper, creatively destroying everything in their process by drinking, peeing and painting while spending quality time together creating their dwelling. This performance was based on previous incidents where the artists rent a hotel room, shred phone books, string up the sheets, turn on the taps and take drugs such as mushrooms, cocaine and ecstasy until they feel like hamsters (read article in NY Magazine). Since the events took place, the gallery has remained in the condition the artists left it and will be on view for the public until August 18. Although Snow and Colen create very different works independently, Snow’s work is grounded in photography and Colen’s in painting. Both artists bear a gritty, raw and rebellious sensibility in their work. Snow has exhibited recently at Sutton Lane in London and Rivington Arms in NYC. Colen, a previous DailyServing feature, recently exhibited “No Me” at Peres Projects in Berlin and “Secrets and Cymbals, Smoke and Scissors (My Friend Dash’s Wall in the Future)” at Deitch Projects and Peres Projects in Los Angeles.

On March 22, artist Josiah McElheny presented a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City called “Artists and Models” to discuss his investigation of models and how they operate in relation to sculptural thought rather than direct function or information. McElheny is interested in the idea of a model as an “aesthetical utopia that could never be built.” In a 1929 conversation between sculptor Isamu Noguchi and architect Buckminster Fuller, the idea of an experimental environment containing no shadows was determined feasible if a totally reflective form was constructed in a completely reflective space. While never completely realized by Fuller or Noguchi, McElheny, who is known for working with glass, used this reflective principle to create a series of sculptural models, both large and small, called “Extended Landscape Model for Total Reflective Abstraction,” which contained a mirrored glass table with hand-blown mirrored glass objects placed directly onto the table. These works were eventually, over a period of about four years, extended into other works that illustrated the same principle through other environments and models. Many of these examples can be viewed currently at the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago in “Josiah McElheny: Cosmology, Design, and Landscape Part Two,” while other projects and ideas are discussed in season three of the ART:21 series.

The recent silk-screened wallpaper works of artist Shannon Wright depict a healthy human urinary tract. The series was inspired by a comment made by one of the artist’s friends: “You should really make art about your hypochondria. You’ve got a gold mine there.” The artist has been exploring systems, diagrams and the phenomena that they attempt to represent through a range of media during the past 15 years, using sculpture, video and vector-based drawing. Consistent throughout all of Wright’s projects is a biting dry humor that helps to offset the scientific tendencies in the work that is inspired in part by the 18th century Utopian architect Etienne-Louis Boullee, the Scientific Management movement and the “Cabinets of Curiosities” museum display. Wright received her M.F.A. in the time arts department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her B.F.A. in sculpture from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va. The artist has exhibited nationally with shows this year at the ADA Gallery in Richmond and Scope New York and is currently an assistant professor in the spatial arts program at San Jose State University.

The photographic process employed by California-based artist Noah Wilson includes traditional gelatin mono-print photography with direct applications of charcoal. The artist’s main interest lies in the process of development and the possibility and interpretation of uncertainty. Wilson illustrates feelings of tension, isolation and the unknown by rendering portions of a scene, while allowing the remaining sections to be ambiguous and undetermined. The work provides questions rather than solutions, allowing the viewer to connect to the image from popular symbols while remaining free of direct conclusions. Wilson graduated from San Jose State University with his M.F.A. in 2005 and received his undergraduate degree from Humboldt University in 2001. Since, the artist has completed residencies with at the San Francisco Recycling & Disposal. Inc and has exhibited with Manoux Gallery in Berkeley, Calif., Callisto Press Editions Gallery in Yountville, Calif., and in 2005 produced his M.F.A. thesis exhibition in Gallery 2 of San Jose State University.

The landscape photography of artist Kevin Cooley often examines two types of environments: the frozen and the suburban. Many of Cooley’s frozen landscapes are captured in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, an archipelago of Norway. The artist also completed a series of photographs near airports such as Los Angeles (LAX), which illustrate glowing streaks cast in the dark night sky, created by planes taking off and landing. The artist earned his M.F.A. in photography from the School of the Visual Arts in New York City in 2000. Cooley has exhibited nationally in shows such as “Night Shift” at the Massimo Audiello Gallery in NYC (2007) and “Bateaux Mouches” at Ambrosino Gallery in Miami (2005). In addition to Cooley’s fine art, he has also developed an extensive body of work as a commercial and editorial photographer, shooting for clients such as The Los Angeles Times, New York Art World and the Miami Herald.