January 2025 – Necromantic

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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.

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“Little soul lost, little shining ghost” by William Archila

Little soul lost, little shining ghost, prepare yourself to descend
into the small chambers that flicker like fireflies. Prepare cattle
& rapid fire which should be the pallor, tenderness of patient flowers.

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The Drowning Woman: Surreal Photography by Kalliope Amorphous

The soft, dreamy experimental photography of Kalliope Amorphous, often featuring self-portraits, is a visual poetics, sometimes black-and-white, sometimes saturated with beautiful, nostalgic color. Techniques of distortion, doubling, mirroring, blurring, and multiple exposure are taken to the extreme, but come together to produce wonderful and arresting images that explore themes of identity, mythology, consciousness, and memory. The loveliness juxtaposes against the alienation expressed through them, such that the subjects are sometimes barely recognizable as human. Fragmented, unfocused, ethereal, fragile, as these murky portraits are, they are also spiritually radiant. Ophelia drowning in her watery bed, twins, and witches are some of the archetypes rendered tangible-but-dreamlike in Kalliope’s unique way. Ominous, tender, suffused with mystery, these images are a perfect fusion of melancholy beauty and striking experimentalism. They are so evocative, strange, hazy, and brilliant.

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