You spend the first part of your life discovering your senses, then realize you're trapped by them. The rest (hopefully) is spent trying to transcend them.
What is is it like to come back to your senses?
The foundations of this project took 16-years to build, with contributions from models, studios, real painting, and project partners.
there are now 26 SESSIONS WITH 26 NEW MODELS FOR STILLS ARTWORKS AS WELL AS VIDEO, expanding to Senses AI as well.
The Senses series is a collision of fashion modeling, Instagram culture, and a deep artistic wellness practice.
In fashion, models are often pushed toward unhealthy lifestyles. The shoots commodify them—they're there to sell the perfume, the car, the makeup, whatever. On Instagram, influencers trade on their beauty, sexuality, and following to sell products.
The Senses project flips this dynamic. It’s not about the product. It’s about the person—down to their human core. Their childhoods, their traumas, their dreams. The art comes later. The “selling” happens once the piece is complete.
The experience itself is transformational—unlike anything most of them have ever felt.
VESA’s art has been featured in various international and national press from Forbes to YLE News along the years.
What the works will look like in the online Asvoria gallery complex.
Watch a recent “catch up” episode with VESA and Lotta, his co-founder and wife, regarding the most recent shoots on Senses and more.
The mood board of The Senses project includes Gustav Klimt, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Carl Gustav Jung, Salvador Dali, Quentin Tarantino, a dash of Versace, and William Blake.
This is all mixed together with a new photography process, digital collaging, and web3 tools.
“The best way to describe working with Vesa is transcendence. Our personal and professional stories were integrated into hours of creation in flow. Most people think that the power of art lies in its ability to bring people together, but at its core, art returns us to ourselves. It connects us with our most vulnerable and ecstatic emotions, elevating the human experience beyond survival into a shared journey, into transcendence.”
Check out the first 30 1:1s on SR from the link
The Series has a lot planned and will continue for years to come.
Legendary collectors Mondoir and Colborn are Senses 1/1 holders.
We don’t know some of the transfer prices like the one for Colborn.
We are also making a 1000 edition of generative Senses art, which is trained on 10.000 images of VESA’s photography of models and another 10.000 images of his layer paintings and style.
The first 11 works of the series of 100 are now live with Trio / Ordinals Bot
The first artwork “Gen 2” is now available to purchase from Rarible.
As you can see from these posts, VESA & team spend a lot of time not only making this art tastefully & respectfully, but also telling the story of what these artworks are about. While we of course understand that the volumes of people doing things on socials need automation, we are increasingly in a situation with machines that art, soul and nuance are taking a beating in front of the ever increasing machine that is our world.
Luckily we have projects that support us and a community that understands what we are doing.
We did a drop with Crypto dot com for 12 limited edition pieces in Spring 2023.
A News BTC article on to go deeper into the substance of these works.
The series is currently looking for new models and collaborators.
The studio is in Helsinki, Finland, but international shoots are also possible.
All collaborations are done under a contract and agreed with the model before the shoot. To ensure both the artist and model are protected, we have a protocol in place to make sure the personal space of the model is respected. Safety is a high priority.
This mini-documentary is an oversight of VESA’s career over the past 15 years as a visual artist.
Some of the press from along the years.
VESA is represented as an artist by Cermak-Eisenkraft Gallery.
