Second Look Series | MakersPlace Magazine

Life is filled with missed opportunities. To go down one path, one must necessarily forego others. Reflection on the past and wondering “What if?” is rarely healthy. That is unless you can do something about it.

It’s not every day that a person is offered a second chance, but this might be your lucky day.

In the melee of the market, it’s impossible to keep track of all of the fantastic art debuting hither and yon, so we’re reintroducing some of the notable pieces that snuck under the market’s overwhelmed gaze over the last few months.

In the Second Look Series, we reintroduce multi-edition and single-edition works. All single-editions in the series have one-time lowered reserves, a perfect chance to snag a grail that may have passed you by.

Woven Portal No. 52.A by Saks Afridi

From another otherwise sold-out drop, WOVEN PORTAL No. 52.A is a work of sci-fi Sufism from Pakistani artist Saks Afridi’s collection of 100 artworks that blend spaceship navigation interfaces with the infinite geometry of Persian rugs. This artwork is part hand-generated, part software-generated, a collaboration between man and machine, tradition and technology.

This Woven Portal incorporates the first and 25th letter in the Arabic language, Aleph (ا) and ‘Nun’ ن, respectively. I first encountered this particular ن in a book of calligraphy at Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The winning bidder will receive WOVEN PORTAL No. 52b as a companion/collector bonus work via Airdrop within 3 days after the auction closes.

Original Price: 0.4 ETH
One-time Second Look Price: 0.28 ETH

Asteroid Field by Monfa

Costa Rican-born and Mexico-based designer, illustrator, and digital artist Monfa builds charming, child-like worlds from basic geometric shapes. His series of works illustrating remote, worn, and sometimes seemingly uninhabitable habitats, Monfa creates a lore without clearly drawn characters. In these pieces, the characters are implied by the place they live the same way footprints imply a certain species was here.

There is no time to see every detail or know what happens there, just an image; all the stories behind it must be imagined by you. “Asteroid Field” is one of unsold pieces from Monfa’s recent drop, “Asteroid Fields Forever,” a space opera mythology told solely in images of places unknown.

Read our interview with Monfa.

Original Price: 1.5 ETH
One-time Second Look Price: 0.9 ETH

The Great Divide by Arya Mularama

The artwork of Indonesian artist Arya Mularama (fka Gogoporen) is influenced by comic books, skateboard culture, and the movies and video games of the ‘90s. His art is a mix of pop culture references and melodramatic mental illness with a colorful infusion of levity. Arya says anxiety and his questioning of existence feed the themes of his work, which combines pop culture references with allusions to mental illness.

For his latest collection, GREAT PAIN, commissioned for Crypto Art Week Asia, Mularama created a series of pieces about anxiety, depression, suppressed feelings, and unprocessed emotions. One of Mularama’s unsold pieces from this collection is The Great Divide (Edition 3 of 3).

đɇᵽɍɇssɨøn by jrdsctt

From OG glitch artist jrdsctt’s first seriescombining his classic glitch techniques with the sudden rise of A.I. prompt-generated imagery, đɇᵽɍɇssɨøn symbolizes one step in the grieving process, capturing the irony of humanity’s last moments.

In the artist’s personal mythology, he sees humanity at the very peak of our technological advances and being able to accomplish things our ancestors could hardly even dream about, only to have everything ended by greed and our own feeble inability to protect our home planet from ourselves.

This 3/3 artwork returns to our drops page because, well, humanity needs a second chance.

Read our interview with jrdsctt.

(City series) Colours of music by Nadiia Forkosh

Ukrainian artist Nadiia Forkosh is currently based in a small Ukrainian town immediately bordering Romania, where she’s lived since she escaped Kyiv in February 2022, at the start of the war in Ukraine. Normally someone who works across physical and digital mediums, Nadiia — having been forced out of her Kyiv studio — is lately working exclusively in digital.

For her first major drop with MakersPlace, her work is thick with yearning for home, though she’s aware that even if she goes back to the place, she won’t be returning home. “(City series) Colours of music” is a 3/3 artwork we’re resurfacing because its vibrant colors and clear message of longing demand attention.

Read our interview with Nadiia Forkosh.

Ticket to Mars II by DENKSTAHL

With his genesis NFT drop, German thinker, poet, artist, and 20-year veteran of digital artistic practices, AL, aka DENKSTAHL, calls into question the value systems that threaten to carry over from late capitalism to destroy the utopian visions of web3.

The HOLY DIRTY MONEY series touches upon money’s religious strings and its real-world impact: money as bribery, money as a finger tilting the balances of justice, money as a justification for destroying childhood through child labor and child abuse, and money as a luxury that corrodes character and warps psychology.

In TICKET TO MARS II, DENKSTAHL mocks the wealth that might one day allow refugees from Earth to escape to a distant planet. The ticket in question? A Black American Express.

Original Price: 1 ETH
One-time Second Look Price: 0.6 ETH

Earth to Space by Hamed Azizi

When man traveled to other planets, he was only looking for life. As depicted in Earth to Space, in the future, earth’s biggest brands will travel to other planets in search of distant target markets. Because maybe in the future, the earth and the environment will no longer be able to bear the myriad cryptocurrencies in existence.

Hamed Azizi is an Animation Director, CG artist, and digital artist with more than 20 years of experience in TV, movies, and advertising. He was selected as one of the leading artists in the Middle East by the Behance website. His works have become a part of today’s fashion world and have been dubbed as unique oriental artworks in the NFT community. H O M E, for example, has been screened at 50 animation and film festivals worldwide and has been nominated and awarded as a finalist in 5 animation and film festivals.

Judgment’s Presence by EYEM

Standing before Desire, fate hangs on a Judge who holds the third unseen truth. Standing in Judgement’s Presence, the scales of justice are unfamiliar — tripartite. Something exists between guilty and innocent, and The Seeker has come to learn what that might be.

Ali Mohamadzadeh — known professionally as EyEm — is a photomontage artist whose work resides in surreal, occult realms. EyEm’s fantasy worlds are not wholly removed from our own but are the ripples of lived experience, ripe with meaning that isn’t as easily noticed in the humdrum day-to-day of mundane existence.

Original Price: 1 ETH
One-time Second Look Price: 0.5 ETH