February 2023 – Necromantic

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The Writhing Anatomy of Melancholy: Artwork by Christina Mrozik

Christina Mrozik’s intricate drawings and paintings imaginatively fuse animal and plant life in order to explore inner worlds. Organic decay, exposed anatomy, unnatural amalgamations of natural entities are common features, with her signature delicate ribbony skeletons resembling grass. Sometimes the animals are wrapped around, shrouded, or embraced by a cage of the grass-like ribbons/bones. Birds emerge gruesomely from the exposed and lacerated throats of larger birds. The precisely drawn depictions of strangely hybridized, combined, distorted, multiplied, fractional creatures are wildly expressive, summoning specters of pain, beauty, and transformation. Snakes, rabbits, doves, seabirds with their merciless gaze…all are pitifully dissected and tenderly displayed, complexly mingled and interwoven, to illustrate phases of the human condition.

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David Altmejd’s Hare

I love David Altmejd’s eerie epoxy Hare (2022) sculpture. It has the quality of a sketch made three-dimensional, with its rather sickish green palette of acrylic paint and colored pencil. This bizarre creature, with its unsettlingly lifelike blue eye, is both evocative of the childhood appeal of rabbits, of incarnations of anthropomorphic rabbits, and yet repellently uncanny. As Altmejd states, “A perfect object for me is something that is extremely seductive and extremely repulsive at the same time.”

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Otherworldly Gems by Omnia Studios

Omnia Studios fashions gorgeous, lavish, surreal and fantastic jewelry. Themes of the occult and mythology predominate, taking inspiration from a range of supernatural symbols and iconography, including cartomancy, Puritan winged skulls, the Moirae (Greek goddesses of fate), and Spiritualist planchettes. One of my favorite pieces is the absolutely incredible Charon’s Lantern Amulet, which represents the lamp of the river Styx’s ferryman, containing quartz crystals for illumination and held by two little ghostly hands. Bold, ornate, and baroque, these splendid jewels are perfect for darkly luxurious occasions or as everyday, beautifully odd statement pieces.

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Immortal Veil: The Art of Maëva Stancil

Maëva Stancil’s lovely dotwork drawings convey a sense of occult grandeur. A cold glitter of stars, skulls, sigils, moths, and sprays of flowers create a visual language for a mystical world made ominous by statuesque hooded figures and mysterious disembodied hands. The medieval combines with fantasy elements in a style that is spare, yet rich with the suggestion of arcane knowledge. Grim and somber as the strange figures are, their foreboding is offset by the fragments of nature surrounding them.

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