Soey Milk Pushes Boundaries with ‘Dare to Love’ NFT Project
Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs have graduated from the laughing stock of the crypto world to a global phenomenon fuelled by celebrity and ‘memelord’ endorsements. So what are they? In short, they enable buyers to purchase a digital version of a piece of art which resides on the blockchain. While NFTs started out with trivia such as memes, the art world is beginning to grasp the potential benefits.
Even the British Museum has jumped on the trend, selling NFTs of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. One of the advantages to artists is that they can earn royalties from each subsequent sale, which is of course not the case with physical artworks. Think of Banksy for example, whose art is worth millions but he wouldn’t see a penny from its sale at Christie’s – hence his ‘Love is in the Bin’ stunt in 2018.
Like any form of market speculation, it’s hard to predict what will happen to NFTs in the longer term and whether it’s a bubble of magic beans or a worthwhile investment. Artists are beginning to look at what they can gain from selling a digital rather than physical version of their artworks, and how they can add additional value. Rather than just producing a digital version of a painting for example, how can they make it interactive or digitally enhanced?
One artist who seems to have cracked the crypto world is Soey Milk, who has launched some NFT versions of her paintings in partnership with LGND and 3D artist Matteo Santoro. Soey is one of the most successful contemporary artists working today. Her captivating figurative paintings evoke feminine power and energy, as well as vulnerability. Having earned a place at the forefront of the LA art scene, she has now had multiple solo exhibitions at Evoke Contemporary and Corey Helford Gallery including Ribbons and Connotations earlier this year.
Soey has added additional value to her digital art by working with Matteo, who sculpted 3D versions of the figures in her paintings, bringing them to life in an entirely new way. Matteo describes his process/witchcraft below, which could have huge implications for the way art is marketed and sold in the future.
This is how the NFT platform LGND decribes the Dare to Love project: “The first ever presentation of dimensionalized works from Soey Milk, paired with four love poems. Milk’s debut on the blockchain features the theme of amāre, spiraling from and through its many faces. In these four pieces, Milk explores the moments before and after the captured dream-like states her paintings present and in doing so gives the viewer an even more ethereal embrace.” Fans of Soey are bound to snap these up and most have sold out already.
To launch the project and add yet another dimension, the art was projected on to the Modi Nochi mansion in Beverly Hills with projection mapping.
You can see more of Soey’s work and the Dare to Love project here:
www.soeymilk.com
