Lekan Jeyifous

"Urban Growth Strategy 1"

"Central City Settlement"

"Craters"

"Hydro City Settlement"

"Outer City Settlement"

Lekan Jeyifous is a Nigerian born and Brooklyn based... um... architect? yes. Designer? sure. Artist. certainly. His work is much more far-ranging than what I've posted here. This is just the stuff that first appealed to me; work that integrates graphic novel/sci-fi aesthetics with the fascination of detailed charts, maps, blueprints and other technical visuals. In everything he does the presence of New York City, and Brooklyn especially, looms large. This is urban art with an urban message to an urban audience. The message? Well, maybe it goes something like this. "This place is seriously messed up. I wouldn't live anywhere else." He captures something of why the occupants of big cities feel this way: All the crowding and chaos, the slow decay at the margins and the dilapidated facades of industrial ruin somehow manage to co-exist alongside a thriving population ever ready to reinvent itself and its environment. There is an odd phenomenon that exists in the minds of city dwellers where even a dark dystopian vision of the future seems in some ways kind of exciting. In keeping with this sort of futurist mentality he keeps his media process mixed giving it a look both modern and aged. "The drawings presented here started out as digital images that were outputted, sketched and drawn over, and scanned back into the computer in order to be retraced, textured, and layered." All of which makes the images seem as if they were historical documents from some distant future relating to one less distant. You can see more work like this and plenty of other stuff on his website www.vigilism.com
I came across his work initially on the art networking site: bluecanvas.com