Tayler Patrick Nicholas
There is a type of beauty at play here similar to the aesthetics of scientific photographs, which alienate and disembody the observed object. This is the “sea change” of the close-up: when what is in front of us turns into “something rich and strange” just by the sheer fact of our proximity. The dichotomy of strangeness and familiarity is also at stake in Makai’s personal iconography, letting every element become identified as something similar to claws, leaves, shells or gems, but never precisely named and thus remaining ambivalent: somewhere between the unknown and the materialised.