Australian artist, Guy Whitby has recently caught my attention with his ironic and intriguing button mosaic celebrity portraits.

Whitby’s celebrity mosaic portraits are made up of items such as pay phone buttons, keyboard buttons, and granny squares. These pieces provoke an interesting conversation on the push and pull of past versus present. While using vintage media to create his works, they are actually all designed digitally and do not exist in the 3-dimensional world!

Guy describes the thought behind his artwork on his online portfolio:

“My youth was spent without computers or mobile phones yet the transition to them being such a vital part of my life seemed effortless and mandatory. Only now as our world becomes touchscreen dependent do I reminisce upon the buttons I used to push. Perhaps I will miss pushing buttons when they are all gone? Perhaps in the push of a button there was something more tangible than the brushing of a touchscreen. Though buttons to me also suggest the en masse world in which we currently live. They are made in factories in their hundreds of thousands they are not unique, they are not special. And now these buttons are relics of an analog age. Perhaps I draw a parallel between discarded analog devices and my own mortality. For I too one day will become discarded and irrelevant, just as my once treasured Sony Walkman was reverentially discarded.”

I have shared tons of photo mosaic portraits on here. Some of these photo mosaics are designed digitally and others fall into the more traditional hand placed category, but it isn’t often I see an artist combine both techniques! Nevertheless, these mosaics still caught my eye. There’s something captivating about images that appear to be one thing and then becomes something else entirely once you take a closer look!

Sources: Guy Whitby Portfolio and Guy Whitby Instagram