This week, I’m highlighting Best Self at Brooke Benington. This current exhibition is curated by the artist, Polly Morgan and closes on June 28th, featuring Juno Calypso, Mat Collishaw, Polly Morgan, Christopher Page, Boo Saville, Julia Thompson & Bengt Tibert. The show explores identity, beauty, and the performance of self in the digital age. As one of the showcased artists is an ai artist, Bengt Tibet and is featured in this issue of Aithena Art Magazine, I was inspired by this show to curate an issue around the theme of “best selves” – or fractured versions of them created by the AI artists listed below.
Read my take on Best self and look at work by all the featured artists here .
I don’t live in London, I’m based in New York, so I didn’t get to see the show in person. What initially caught my eye was the inclusion of Mat Collishaw, an artist I really admire for his ability to work across so many mediums to communicate exactly what he wants to say. As a traditional artist who also explores multiple mediums and now, AI art, I was especially drawn to his recent use of AI in some of his work. I tend to keep my two practices separate and go by @perfectagala in the AI art space, but I love that he brings everything together so seamlessly. His genius installation The Mask of Youth reflects on the masks Queen Elizabeth I wore throughout her life.
This show is very cleverly curated. Best Self unpacks the illusion of perfection with wit and whimsy, examining the tropes and ideals of beauty and youth shaped by digital culture. Through sculpture, painting, AI, installation and even anti-ageing serums, the exhibition satirically explores the pressure to perform a flawless self and what is revealed when that performance slips.
By placing AI-generated works alongside traditional media, Best Self blurs the boundaries between human intention and machine interpretation. It suggests that identity is no longer solely self-made but increasingly co-produced through both organic and artificial means.
We can perform, polish, repair, and refine the self in ways that grow increasingly unreal. Layer by layer, identity is reshaped through edits and imagination, blurring the line between what is real and what is constructed. The artists featured in this issue inflate, shrink, exaggerate, blow up, burn, transmogrify, spin, float, and reveal a fractured humanity through beauty, humor, and all the magic that AI art brings to the mix.
Issue 10 Featured Artists
From oversized bums encased in neon lycra to open-mouthed spinning faces, from shrunken, icon-like figures to inflatable fashion drifting among flying plastic dolphins, this issue embraces the bizarre, the cursed image, and the gleefully off-kilter ai videos.
@floam.world – Floam World is the creation of Leilanni Todd, a creative director and digital artist whose work spans experimental film, fashion, art, and synthetic world-building. Launched in 2022, Floam World is a floating, ever-expanding universe built using generative AI, humor, and absurdity; a place populated by glamorous, synth-sentient beings and surreal marine life.
@BengtTibert invites us to set subtlety aside. Bengt creates art with a taste for catastrophe and a flair for fun, In presenting a high-voltage parade of images that perhaps ask: what if being fabulous means embracing our flaws? – this work celebrates how we perform our identities, inflate our self-image, and shapeshift through a world teetering on the edge of absurdity.
@uglyy_fruuit has created their own AI art movement aptly named traumatic post-realism, a style that crowds, fractures and distorts images to reveal digital scars. A self-descibed “pixel masher”, using gen AI to reassemble visuals into funny, glitchy, provocative, and fragmented forms and cursed images.
@_udart_ – Her AI-driven work twists almost-recognizable body parts into strange, beautiful forms. Fingers become dancers, faces spin in kaleidoscopic loops, and mouths fold inside out. The sound is essential and excellent. Turn it up. This is art that swan-dives into the weirdness of generative AI, soaking in its quirks and pulsing with surreal energy in a Dadaist homage.
@babka_robot – there’s a spectral elegance in her work, a quiet surrealism that recalls the dream logic of Toyen’s paintings, reimagined through machine vision. The results are both intimate and otherworldly, images that seem to breathe with their own strange rhythm, caught somewhere between the organic and the synthetic, the human and the post-human.
Together, these artists ask us to consider the upsides, insides and downsides of being our best selves.
Click on each name to see samples of their art works.