This portfolio appears in VICE Magazine's 2019 Photo Issue. With this issue we wanted to celebrate the absurd, the lighthearted, and the humorous. It’s important to take a break from the real world. As much as we need to be informed, engaged, and aware, we also need to laugh. We wanted to champion the people making art with a sense of humor. In today’s climate, there’s something nicely subversive about that. You can read more about our theme in the letter from our editor.
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Check out an interactive version of the issue here, and why not subscribe to the magazine while you're at it?***Ontario-based photographer Alex Lysakowski’s fantastical work explores industrial architecture, structural landscape, and photo manipulation. By taking everyday structures set in ordinary settings and manipulating and exaggerating them to the extreme, he creates a tension between what’s real, what’s fake, and tests the boundaries of what’s architecturally possible.For this year’s photo issue he shared images from his “Antistructure” series. In one image, the cargo space of a semi truck towers above its cab, twice as high as a telephone pole; in another, an ordinary roadside hotel is transformed with the addition of a winding S-shaped structure that juts out of the top of the building, a “hotel” sign placed at the top. As Lysakowski says, “The farcical nature of the manipulated structures creates a surreal world of absurdity in an otherwise mundane landscape.”
