June 2025 – Necromantic

b

Morgaine Faye’s Armory

The Armory Collection by jeweler Morgaine Faye features gauntlets, escutcheons, daggers, Lucerne hammers, morningstars, as well as an array of medieval weaponry and iconography including swifts and castle towers. The creation of these knightly pieces involves techniques traditionally used in armor- and weapons-making (forging, engraving, colored inlay, riveting, hidden kinetic components), forming a collection of charms, chains, pendants, and rings that can be layered and combined, giving them versatility as well as historical inspiration.

{See more}

b

FIVE IV by E. E. Cummings

if i have made,my lady,intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes(frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind—if i have failed to snare
the glance too shy—if through my singing slips
the very skilful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

—let the world say “his most wise music stole
nothing from death”—
you only will create
(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:
lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

— ee cummings

b

Massillon by Charbonneau + French

This hauntingly whimsical and melancholy series in collaborative photography by Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French is inspired by the life story of ancestor Zeta Eliza Woolley, “transposed through the surreal imaginings of the artists into a fairy-tale of suffering and unpredictable beauty.” Using film and traditional darkroom techniques, they explore the narrative of the life and death of Zeta in the town of Massillon, Ohio in the late 19th century. The resulting images are intensely dreamy, radiant, and sadly lovely.

I love the texture of these photographs, their poetic granular, luminous quality, and the surrealness which conveys both humor and a deep, abiding sense of sorrow. The sweeping vistas of a bleak, unforgiving beauty, the febrile impression of Gothic Americana, the symbolic depictions of the frustrating binds of a Victorian prairie existence…all of this is to me fascinating and full of a nostalgic, pensive evocativeness. These images feel informed by memory, dream, history, lore, family myth, and daydream. I also adore the name of the artists’ Website (“seven sisters asleep”).

{See more}

b

The Bone Artist: Duy Ng

Duy Ng assembles incredible framed displays of skeletons of snakes, reptiles, and fish, including stingrays, pufferfish, seamoths, and also more fanciful specimens such as dinosaurs created from the bones of other creatures. Meticulously and elegantly arranged in their ornate vintage frames, lovingly articulated, these pieces are beautiful, pristine, and evocative, showing imagination as well as perfectionism.

{See more}

b

The Surrealist Bestiary of Marzena Ablewska-Lech

Marzena Ablewska-Lech, self-described as a Jungian reader and “collector of wounds,” is a London-based Polish artist. Intensely inspired by her dreams, her work often contains fantastical creatures, archetypes, ladies and beasts reminiscent of medieval and Renaissance art. Her works are like illuminated manuscripts with their small motifs, gold foil, and rich colors. The backgrounds sometimes give a sense of infinite convolution and entanglement; at the same time her depictions have a naive expressionism, and the curlicued, quaint forms which hearken back to illumination. Her style reminds me of a cross between old-school surrealists such as Remedio Varos or Leonara Carrington and medieval religious art – a strange and wonderful combination.

{See more}