Bizarre or trending subjects, catch a break with our curiosity of the week. Mohanad Shuraideh, alias Vertigo Artography creates surreal collages, influenced by art and our world’s confusion. An exuberant collection.
“Quirky, thought provoking, fun, kitsch, edgy, sinister or dark with a funny twist”
is how Mohanad Shuraideh describes his approach to photography. This artist from Jordan started his career in advertising, as an art director, before creating his own studio, Vertigo Artography, in 2016. “During my earlier work, my artistic style included a lot of photography that I incorporated in visual illustrations and layouts. The creative process itself has an appealing artistry, and I was always experimenting and introducing different designs, textures and mixed mediums on analog and digital illustration”, he explains.
Through his pop compositions, the artist seeks to “find ways of expressing complex and conflicting emotions and finding the harmony in it regardless of the conclusion”. Fascinated by dark humour, he is always experimenting with new ways to interpret social trends. A collection of surreal collages merging cinema and pop culture icons, historical images and absurd scenes.
An exuberant vision of our time
Influenced by vintage, Mohanad Shuraideh incorporates emblematic images of a past era in his work. “The crisp extrovert expressions and vivid colour stories that accompanied the progress of that era evoke both a nostalgia and a naivety”, he adds. To him, we are living in a world where absurdity has become synonymous with normality. A dichotomy that can be found in arts of all decades. “The French school of nouveau realism tried to imagine avant-garde expressions for its time. Me? I am more attracted to pop-icons, distorted landscapes, space and the environment”, the photographer tells us. In a beautiful mess, his collages reunite past and present, old emblems and futuristic tales.
A colourful cacophony illustrating, according to him, “the confusion of our era”. A work finding inspiration in Dada creations, which were, at the time, created to depict a world artists could not begin to understand. Monstrous, spectacular or simply funny, Mohanad Shuradeih’s illustrations abandon realism for an exuberant vision of our time. A threatening military plane dropping bomb-like Instagram likes, or a child’s hand cutting a slice of a cliff resembling a cake… Should we see, in these creations, a mere joke? Or does the artist evoke, through enigmatic pictures, the cult of appearances, and environmental issues? “I want my creations to be thought provoking aesthetically pleasing and encourage people to see the lighter side of life” the artist simply says. A nice way to give meaning to senselessness.
© Mohanad Shuradeih, alias Vertigo Artography
