January 2019 – Necromantic

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Lana Crooks’ Soft Curiosities

Lana Crooks constructs perfect, delicate, macabre little “soft sculptures” out of hand-dyed wool, silk, seed beads, and vintage materials. They are like Victorian mourning relics in plush form. Bird skulls dripping blood like jewels, snake bones, death’s-head moths, human teeth, and lush, funereal flowers repose beneath antique bell jars. Whimsical, imaginative, resplendently colored and gorgeous, her “faux specimens” are artfully arranged, reminding one of some long-dead madcap’s oddities collection and also giving off a curious effect of two-dimensional drawings brought to three-dimensional life. These soft creations blending natural history and craft are exquisite and adorable.

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Phantasmal Nostalgia: The Photography of Krist Mort

Krist Mort’s haunting photography uses traditional darkroom techniques, rich in ghostly double exposures and superimposition, to produce dreamy, nostalgic, radiant and mysterious images. Gauzy textures, draperies, flowers, ferns, light and shadow, poetic faces form this fragmented hallucinatory world both veiled and revealed, like a beloved spirit beckoning to us.

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Baroque Biomech Ceramics by Laura Hewitt

Alaska-based artist Laura C. Hewitt creates ceramic housewares that are wildly imaginative, bold, and unique. They convey a sense both of the ancient and the futuristic, the organic and the mechanical, and put me in mind of the china service of an alien dynasty, regal relics of bygone opulence and sinister glory. Delicate and grotesque, they are impactful and lovingly crafted.

Her hybrids of the rustic and the decadently ornate, of the homely and the high-tech, are a delight to behold. I love the shadowy little clustered hollows or dents which are suggestive at once of old lace, of mushrooms, of rot and decay, and of insect hives. Hewitt plays with the juxtapositions among nature, art, and technology, between creation and destruction, and seeks to “animate the pragmatic with mischievousness.”

Gorgeous, savage, one-of-a-kind, Hewitt’s teacups, mugs, and plates are unlike any household ceramics I’ve ever seen. They embody the biomechanical aesthetic in a practical, intimate form, with a touch of playful irony. To use one of these pieces would transport you into otherworldly realms, directly off the Earth, and introduce the unnerving into the mundane, blending the familiar with the mysterious, the deeply unknown and the alien.

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Gris

Gris is a platform adventure game by Nomada Studio which was released in December 2018 and looks absolutely beautiful, taking the artistry possible in the medium of video games to a new pinnacle. It resembles a watercolor painting and, using its delicate, perfect visuals and bright and tender colors, weaves a story which represents themes of fear, trauma, grief, and how we deal with suffering. The imagery of the girl named Gris, as well as the airy palette of the art design in general, reminds me of the gorgeous 1973 anime film Belladonna of Sadness.