A boy aiming his slingshot into the sky seems to aim both at the broken windows of an abandoned building but also a series of birds that seem to appear in the gaps of cracked glass, transfixed in various stages of flight.

Artist Pejac is well known for his negative-space interventions, from pealing back paint chips to carefully reveal brick beneath to other contextual installations. Much of the art is in the craft: a meticulous removal (or breaking) of materials to slowly reveal some new whole, much like a sculptor chips away at a marble edifice.

This latest piece was produced during his residency with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Croatia, where he spent multiple weeks crafting site-specific works.

Camouflage (Tribute to René Magritte) is set in the huge windows of an old paper factory power plant, depicting a flock of birds that might be hard to spot were it not for the outline of a boy taking aim below them. His figure calls attention to the larger work, signalling a passer by the existence of something both large and subtle going on in the frame.

The implied story is one about hunting and survival, the birds disguising themselves against a backdrop of broken window panes, making them harder for the child to spot. The boy, too complex a figure to render through even the most craftily broken glass, is painted over a series of panes (images by Sasha Bogojev).

Combining the raw exterior remnants of source stones with the finely-tuned architectural details of sacred spaces, these marvelous fossil-like miniatures combine compelling elements of organic forms with heroic amounts of human effort.

Matthew Simmonds studied art history before becoming a stonemason, then turned his knowledge and skill toward a hybrid pursuit: sculpting spaces from sandstone, limestone and marble.

What he uncovers inside each chunk becomes part of a graceful juxtaposition with the rough and unaltered exterior shells that remain. His works also convey a sense of discovery, as if archeologists had dug down to find these marvelous wonders buried in history.

“Making a play of architectural spaces on a small scale, the solid stone is opened up to reveal internal worlds, often intricately carved, in which the changing viewpoint and light play a strong role in defining the sculptures.”

“Drawing on the formal language and philosophy of architecture the work explores themes of positive and negative form, the significance of light and darkness and the relationship between nature and human endeavour.”

Geoff Manaugh highlighted Simmonds work but also connected it to similar approach taken in a stellar piece of museum advertising set in wood, a promotional image of modern architecture hewn from a log, made for the Cité de l’Architecture.

The world of future-focused artwork tends to examine extreme outcomes, but this artist’s visions represent a compelling range of possibilities from catastrophic to optimistic, Dystopian to Utopian with other shades of gray in between.

First consider the range of negative outcomes and what they would do to villages, towns and cities around the world (as illustrated in this first round of images above and below) – built environments afflicted by surprising climatic changes like heat waves, ice storms and droughts.

On the one hand, Evgeny Kazantsev considers these disaster scenarios, from dust storms in Barcelona and villages in the Alps without snow to Venice gone dry and oceans overrunning desert cities. But this is only half of the story.

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Pushing the limits of the traditional printing craft, these stunning little Japanese flip books illustrate the power of slicing, splicing, zooming and panning, all to create a series of vertigo-inducing effects, dizzying optical illusions and plot twists that take on a quite literal dimension.

Flipping through the pages of these creations of artist Mou Hitotsu reveals a series of hidden surprises, including embedded objects and stories that unfold in the void space cut out progressively in sequential sheets of each volume.

Some of these play into abstract and surreal short stories about planetary systems or biological processes while others are simply used to convey holiday-themed wishes.

Spotted by Travelry during a book convention, there are a number of works in this series from JP Books, each one playfully using similar devices to tell different tales as the pages unfold.

White wall frames cracked red bricks shaped like rust-colored autumn leaves, all trailing down to a black silhouette of a painter and his bucket – but looks can be deceiving, and this lovely mural was not made in the way you might first guess.

It looks deceptively subtractive at first glance, but Spanish street artist Pejac did not chip away at existing paint to create this piece. Instead, he carefully added layers around bricks he wished to shape, almost like a sculpture carving away at a rough block with a careful hand, revealing an object by removal.

Thanks to careful site selection, the faux leaves and branches in the mural are visually tied both to surrounding greenery – they also related to the reddish surfaces of other nearby painted and brick structures. Meanwhile, the black figure at the base stands out against the colorful environs.

An adept photographer, illustrator and installation artist, Pejac’s other works include cleverly altered street signs and carefully orchestrated urban fantasies, the latter created using paper cutouts attached to windows.