Colossal

Built throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the Aylesbury Estate is an enormous public housing complex in South East London that at its peak, boasted 11,000 residents. Like other social projects of this kind, Aylesbury has struggled with violence and vandalism throughout its run, and in 2005, local officials decided to demolish the estate and rebuild in phases rather than rehabilitate the existing structures.

Like the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin, the first time I found myself in front of a painting by the Spanish-Mexican artist Remedios Varo (1908-1963), I was stunned. Who was this elegant owl-figure with dainty fingers and feet? What was animating the creaturely machine at her side with tentacle-like brushes as hands? And, would I ever be able to look away? Feeling mesmerized and awe-struck by Varo’s Surrealist visions isn’t an uncommon position to find oneself in.

“I try to avoid playing it safe or going for the obvious. Instead, I look at plants from a different perspective and express them in my own way,” South Korean artist Taehyoung Maria Jeon says about a fantastical series of illustrations.

Delicate waves, mysterious fissures, and diffused lightning set some of the scenes in Sarah Lee’s dreamy landscape paintings. Moons with strangely direct beams of light and supple mountains cradled by lakes and forests are tinged with magical realism. Most of the works seen here are part of Lee’s current solo exhibition titled Deeper at Albertz Benda, in which the artist highlights different ecosystems and the nature of clarity and concealment.

In tender paper collages featuring woodland creatures in relief, Kanako Abe imagines dreamlike scenes reminiscent of childhood narratives and folk tales. Giant wolves, diminutive bunnies, and curious deer wander through a Narnia-like realm that we glimpse through foliage-filled portals. In her practice, “the paper becomes a canvas for stories untold, where every cut is a deliberate step into a world where imagination and reality intertwine,” a statement says.

“Do you ever think about concrete?” opens the trailer for The History of Concrete, a documentary released in select theaters in the U.S. last Friday. If your answer is no, the quirky new feature by filmmaker John Wilson may mean you can’t get it out of your head.

In the winning video of Nikon’s Small World in Motion competition, Dr. Ning Xu captures the abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD)—a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. “When people watch cilia beating, they immediately understand that something beautiful and important is happening inside us,” says the Beijing-based researcher.

Vibrant, amorphous shapes intersect with squiggles and occasional geometric lettering in the murals of Chicago-based artist Emmy Star Brown. She describes her studio practice as a space where her inner child emerges, paring down her expressions to formal qualities of line, shape, and contrast.

It’s all things avian at Bird Photographer of the Year, the world’s largest contest dedicated to images of feathered creatures planet-wide. This year, the program welcomed more than 24,000 entries from photographers around the globe, capturing diving penguins, urban denizens, mating rituals, dramatic flights, and more.

In our era of digital screens and virtually endless images and videos, it’s a challenge to imagine the time before photography existed. Two centuries ago this year, French inventor Nicéphore Niépce successfully captured the first known permanent image. He called his new process héliographie, or “sun writing,” employing light-sensitive bitumen dissolved in lavender oil, which he used to coat a polished pewter plate.