June 2021 – Necromantic

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Theeth Jewelry

Mushrooms entwined with crystals and small animals are the signature of Theeth Jewelry, hand-crafted by Portland artist Kimi Kaplowitz. These unusually beautiful and intricately delicate pieces are brilliant in design and marvelously executed. Macabre, lovable, unique, with the little imperfections born of the process that make them more astonishingly memorable, they are cast from original specimens and tiny things, spiders, cicadas, serpents, mantises, ferns, and the omnipresent mushrooms with their fragile striated gills. The resulting dear objects are odd, captivating, and spectacularly special.

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Infernal Physics: The Art of Daniel Martin Diaz

Arizona-based Daniel Martin Diaz depicts a strange, whimsical, and curious blend of scientific and philosophical concepts in his graphite drawings and paintings. His fascination with anatomy, biology, cosmology, quantum physics, and metaphysics comes across in his works, full of an obscure and awed humor. He draws inspiration from old scientific diagrams, which, notwithstanding their utilitarian intent, he finds very beautiful. These bastardizations and quaint amalgamations of disparate themes, esoterica and bygone sciences, the secular and the sacrosanct, give off a sense of wonder pertaining to the universe and all beyond the seen realm, conveying an intimation of layers upon layers of worlds and modes of knowledge.

Aliens, UFOs, Hermetics, viruses, Soviet spacecraft, cathedrals, medieval Christianity, Madonnas, death’s-head moths, sovereigns and memento mori, and the recondite elegance of physics diagrams, all combine in a panoply of visual information and expression. Diaz says of art that “It tries to dissect what is yet unimaginable, give value to the valueless, and meaning to what it is to be human.” The eccentricity and fusion of antique beauty and arcane knowledge in his work reminds me of the wondrous quasi-historical and -scientific imagery to be found at The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. This form of imaginative alternative-history-making is exactly to my taste, an exercise as much intellectual as it is aesthetic.

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