I went by the Morgan Lehman Gallery today and have a new favourite artist: Paul Villinski (warning Paul: I'm fickle, so you won't be my favourite forever, but I'll always love your works).

He's doing a lot of work with butterflies; here's how the gallery describes it:

Flight and transformation are themes that pervade Villinski's eclectic body of work. An avid sailplane pilot, soaring flight has aesthetic and conceptual implications for Villinski. In his most recent body of work, this interest takes the symbolic form of butterflies, precisely cut by hand from discarded aluminum cans. The individual components, each unique and often pigmented or gilded, are sculpted to represent specific species of butterflies. Villinski painstakingly deploys hundreds of these fluttering elements across the gallery walls in pointillist compositions that resemble minimalist, geometric paintings.

Villinski's fondness for utilizing found objects is a way of giving new life to discarded things. In his work, the objects become stand-ins for the people who once used them, and thus become studies in identity. The butterflies are at once whimsical and evocative. They refer to loss and potential rebirth, while creating a fantastical environment in which littered cans become delicate and beautiful entities. Villinski's serene installations are a means for contemplation and transformation.

Enough description, here are some photos of his works on display.  This one's called My Back Pages and he's used records to create the butterflies.  Very painful to see someone turn classic works by Bowie into Butterflies (maybe that's why it's listed at $25K).

Rover consists of found beer cans and paint:

Lumen is, again, beer cans, but this time painted an Yves Klein-ish blue: