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Ecclesia

Ecclesia Jewelry evinces a godly geometry. Combining medieval themes and inspirations with modern aesthetics and natural forms, it is simultaneously minimalist and baroque. I love the pieces incorporating pearls (there is an ingenious, multi-stranded necklace of pearls, The Splitting of a Cell, in which the strings of pearls resemble spindle fibers during mitosis), and concentric lines reminiscent of organic shapes, and the sinuous, hypnotic forms of fire. There are rosaries, castles, chalices, tears, fascinating prismatic stones, and even a beautiful piece representing the milky eye of a blind dog called Eyes of a Blue Dog (or the Milk-Eyed Mender). Ecclesia has a highly distinctive style which evokes Catholic symbolism as well as the pure and intricate creations of nature.


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Gacela of the Dark Death – Federico Garcia Lorca

I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don’t want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I’d rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.

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Vessel by Damien Jalet

Vessel (2015) is a strange and lovely creation by choreographer Damien Jalet in collaboration with multidisciplinary sculptor Kohei Nawa.

Human bodies take totemic, writhing, fluid, and torturous forms, combining and resisting assimilation, constantly morphing and shifting. Slightly uncanny, it feels like a ritual that is being enacted, and has the clarity of a hallucinatory vision. Seeming to take place in a black void of night, on a body of water dimly moonlit and only made visible by its dark ripples, it has the terrible perfection of a transposed dream.

“At the intersection between sculpture and choreography, the two art forms meet and become indivisible. Taking the contradictions of the human body as their starting point, the artists, together with a group of seven dancers, create a fascinating work embracing regeneration and deterioration, solid and liquid, anatomy and mythology.”

Jalet also choreographed the iconic dance sequences in 2018’s Suspiria. The unnerving, complex, unique and vital qualities of his art feel alienating, but necessary – inevitable the moment that they are revealed. They are beautiful in the sense of something that is not known, not imagined, not thought of, until he calls it forth, at which point it answers an unspoken call in us.

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Sena Adjovi

The glowing, tender portraits of Montreal-based artist Sena Adjovi feel like poems. Softened, gently distorted and fragmented, etherealized and haloed with light, these images are like how the dead would remember their loved ones. Often fading, half-disappearing, or only partially realized, they leave an impression of warmth in our minds. The palette is usually muted yet has a lustrous quality, investing her subjects with an otherworldly aura and a subdued radiance. These graphite and oil paintings are “bathed in gloomy or comforting atmospheres [and explore] themes of alienation, loneliness, vulnerability, hope and stillness.” Yet through this ambiguousness Adjovi’s works cannot but convey a sense of belovedness and mystery around those who are depicted.

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Audrey Benjaminsen

Audrey Benjaminsen’s lovely, sweeping illustrations, with their lush, vivid colors and sinuous forms, perfectly render the haunting scenes from The Turn of the Screw, Dracula, and other Victorian classics. The clarity yet expressiveness of her imagery is felicitous to a world of specters, languishing ladies, gnarled fairies, and mythical creatures.

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Embroidery by Lost Teeth

Lost Teeth/Natalia Czajkiewicz is a painter, musician, and textile artist based in Seattle. Her work is described as “meditations on grief, hope, memory, control, fear, and privilege in an increasingly dystopian society.” Natalia’s embroideries are minimalist and quaint, having a precious poignancy, a dark and childish quality.

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“First Dates” by Arseny Tarkovsky

Each moment of our dates, not many,
We celebrated as an Epiphany.
Alone in the whole world.
More daring and lighter
than a bird
Down the stairs, like a dizzy
apparition,
You came to take me on your road,
Through rain-soaked lilacs,
To your own possession,
To the looking glass world.

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Witches’ Flowers: The Art of Rosalie Lettau

The daintily dotted pencil, graphite, and digital illustrations of Rosalie Lettau are full of goats, witches, flowers, and sharp-nailed, enveloping hands. There is a grainy texture to the blacks as of careful static, as well as a poetic luminance to the whites. The themes hint at a folkloric world where witches sign compacts with the devil, where they choose armfuls of lovely flowers which obscure their faces, where youths lie down in fields dreaming of a life beyond their known boundaries, and where the witches are hunted down and hanged from trees along with their familiars. It seems as if both the witches and the witch hunters come from the same seemingly peaceful place, a place where maidens either slowly dream their lives away, or turn to the occult arts. Each subject is a rustic figure in a mythical village, a sleeping village that presents both its light, wistful face, and its dark, mysterious, and demonic face. The darkness resides in the persecution and death of witches, even more so than in the maiden-witches’ tokens to Satan.

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The Night Forests of Tuesday Riddell

Cocoons, snails, snakes, birds, and insects populate the still yet intensely alive nightscapes of Tuesday Riddell. There is a glow in her works depicting the nocturnal life, death, and decay of forest creatures. She uses the long-lost technique of japanning in her delicate works, also often incorporating gold leaf and silver powder. This imparts the ghostly, ethereal feel to the illuminated plants and animals against their velvety black backgrounds. Riddell is inspired by Sottobosco painting, a 17th-century subgenre of still lifes which explored the forest floor and creatures of the undergrowth. The lovely little foxgloves, the sinuous ferns and stems and branches, all exude a subdued, almost phosphorescent light – the lustrous quality of her scenes conveys a sense of the mystery of nature in all its renewals and depredations. All this serves to create a unique effect which makes her lacquered and gold-pigmented paintings immediately recognizable, an impression of stillness teeming with slightly sinister life, as well as a certain flatness which is intriguing and evocative of historical art.

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