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Tender Chimera: The Art of Takuya Mitani

Takuya Mitani creates delicate, detailed paintings portraying mysterious youths in a chimerical state. Accompanied by a myriad of strange creatures, flowers, emblematic objects such as Eden-like apples, mystical and heraldic imagery, they seem surreally transforming, or merging into their noble and enigmatic accoutrements. These symbols and articles revolve around and halo the lovely, tranquil beings whose very placidity seems to belie sinister interior layers. There are birds and rabbits and horses, as well as chimerae with their fantastical hybrid forms, and the subjects, too, seem chimerical, always transfigured, metamorphosing, or, as it were, marred by a grotesque yet ethereal blending with other elements in the images. There is also a motif of angels, with arched wings indicating a strange divinity for these tender youthful beings. Meticulously drawn, complexly composed, rendered with an eye to detail and a careful realism, Mitani’s paintings with their almost pretty air are provoking and lulling, combining an intriguing, soft, otherworldly aspect with historical and surrealistic elements.

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Luminous Procuress: The Photography of Steven Arnold

Steven Arnold’s playful and electrifying tableaux vivants incorporated elements from silent film, the Golden Age of Hollywood, Surrealism, and mysticism. His assemblages are whimsical, sharply contrasting, and delightful for a lover of film history. They are musingly clever and dreamy, evident of a masterful and fantastic touch. These stark black-and-white images exude a quality of theatricality and wild expressiveness, a sense of mischievous quixoticism, which is so striking as well as charming. I wish there were more contemporary artists like the late Steven Arnold. His wonderful photographs put me in mind of a still version of the work of filmmaker Guy Maddin.

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Mary Syring

Mary Syring is one of my favorite artists in recent years, and I have many of her prints in my home. Her very recognizable style draws inspiration from the Victorian and Edwardian eras and the 1920s, Spiritualism, horror movies, folk tales, and New England Halloween aesthetics. Endearing, piquant, and elegant, Syring’s illustrations are wispy and sinuous, giving a sense of daintiness along with a mysterious, enchanted savor of ghostliness. The beautifully coifed ladies, specters, vampires, and witches that inhabit her drawings are sweet, a little bit eerie, often sapphic, and invested with the poetic aesthetics of bygone eras. Candles, graceful little hands, ectoplasm, scythes and winged hourglasses are recurring elements in her work. The pretty demureness of Syring’s diminutive figures juxtaposes with the themes of death, passion, mourning, horror, and the supernatural. I love the ornate vignettes full of flowers which frame some of her images; they embellish them in such an interesting and lovely way.

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Morgaine Faye’s Armory

The Armory Collection by jeweler Morgaine Faye features gauntlets, escutcheons, daggers, Lucerne hammers, morningstars, as well as an array of medieval weaponry and iconography including swifts and castle towers. The creation of these knightly pieces involves techniques traditionally used in armor- and weapons-making (forging, engraving, colored inlay, riveting, hidden kinetic components), forming a collection of charms, chains, pendants, and rings that can be layered and combined, giving them versatility as well as historical inspiration.

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FIVE IV by E. E. Cummings

if i have made,my lady,intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes(frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind—if i have failed to snare
the glance too shy—if through my singing slips
the very skilful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

—let the world say “his most wise music stole
nothing from death”—
you only will create
(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:
lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

— ee cummings

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Massillon by Charbonneau + French

This hauntingly whimsical and melancholy series in collaborative photography by Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French is inspired by the life story of ancestor Zeta Eliza Woolley, “transposed through the surreal imaginings of the artists into a fairy-tale of suffering and unpredictable beauty.” Using film and traditional darkroom techniques, they explore the narrative of the life and death of Zeta in the town of Massillon, Ohio in the late 19th century. The resulting images are intensely dreamy, radiant, and sadly lovely.

I love the texture of these photographs, their poetic granular, luminous quality, and the surrealness which conveys both humor and a deep, abiding sense of sorrow. The sweeping vistas of a bleak, unforgiving beauty, the febrile impression of Gothic Americana, the symbolic depictions of the frustrating binds of a Victorian prairie existence…all of this is to me fascinating and full of a nostalgic, pensive evocativeness. These images feel informed by memory, dream, history, lore, family myth, and daydream. I also adore the name of the artists’ Website (“seven sisters asleep”).

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The Bone Artist: Duy Ng

Duy Ng assembles incredible framed displays of skeletons of snakes, reptiles, and fish, including stingrays, pufferfish, seamoths, and also more fanciful specimens such as dinosaurs created from the bones of other creatures. Meticulously and elegantly arranged in their ornate vintage frames, lovingly articulated, these pieces are beautiful, pristine, and evocative, showing imagination as well as perfectionism.

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The Surrealist Bestiary of Marzena Ablewska-Lech

Marzena Ablewska-Lech, self-described as a Jungian reader and “collector of wounds,” is a London-based Polish artist. Intensely inspired by her dreams, her work often contains fantastical creatures, archetypes, ladies and beasts reminiscent of medieval and Renaissance art. Her works are like illuminated manuscripts with their small motifs, gold foil, and rich colors. The backgrounds sometimes give a sense of infinite convolution and entanglement; at the same time her depictions have a naive expressionism, and the curlicued, quaint forms which hearken back to illumination. Her style reminds me of a cross between old-school surrealists such as Remedio Varos or Leonara Carrington and medieval religious art – a strange and wonderful combination.

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Needle Art by Rima Day

Rima Day is a fabric artist with a background in fashion and costuming. Her Hidden Desires series is a fascinating and exquisite project featuring delicate red threadwork on gossamer white corsets and gloves – accoutrements of a historic past which suppressed feminine passions. The bright threads resemble blood vessels exposed across the diaphanousness of the material; the violence and visceral nature of this visual impression contrasting against the purity suggested by the sheer whiteness of the garments. The ragged red hem of a pair of gloves vividly, almost shockingly visions forth torn veins or nerves. Beautiful and evocative, as well as slightly disturbing, these anatomical/sartorial pieces are carefully constructed productions of an accomplished seamstress exploring concepts through embroidery and textiles.