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Naya Kotko

The fashion photography of Naya Kotko is defined by stunning contrast, bold visual impact, and gorgeous, sumptuous dark costumes. Her imagery often features knife-sharp black crescent moons, Renaissance-style swords, long demonic nails, and red or blue backgrounds against which the monochromatic clothing shows up deliciously. Elaborate headdresses as well as both romantically draped and architectural garments form the mysterious and sibylline attire of the subjects of the photographs, whose faces are often obscured by veiling and cloaking. These semi-visageless figures are intensely dramatic, often being preternaturally extended by the extremely long trains of the outfits, while they contort their poetic, nightmarish hands. Some of the images are deceptively simple and take their effect from striking composition. Some appear to be captured in a kind of void, an atmosphere vaguely but theatrically colored, while others are set amidst the brutal and ornate beauty of natural landscapes defined by sea, rock, or cave. The craggy textures of these settings add depth to the images highlighting the severe black of the clothing. Witchy and eerie, Kotko’s photography is stylishly ominous, occupying a perfect space between surreal and elegant.

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Dark Botanical Jewelry from Dusky Meadow

Dusky Meadow is a handcrafted jewelry brand that takes inspiration from nature, history, and fairy tales. Unique and one of a kind, with a complicated yet raw look, Dominika’s pieces often incorporate images of butterflies and moths, vines and plants, toadstools, ribbon-like branches, moons, and mourning eyes. These wonderfully charming rings and necklaces are sinuous and fluid, but very ornate, like 19th-century household objects. The result is almost finicky, highly encrusted, at the same time having an unfinished naturalness and whimsical imprecision which gives a quality both ethereal and earthy to the pieces. Dominika’s influences range from Victorian accessories, anatomy, Eastern European folklore, Art Nouveau illustrations, to Gothic architecture and celestial bodies. I feel that moonstones are the perfect gem to set off her fantastical designs, and adore her imaginative envisioning of Baba Yaga’s hut with the stars and little gemstone moon in the sky behind it. The lavish creativity, whimsy, and preciousness of Dusky Meadow jewels make them some of the most coveted pieces I’ve lately laid my eyes upon.

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The Domestic Uncanny: Photography by Marianna Rothen

Marianna Rothen’s ultra dreamy, nostalgic photographs explore themes of womanhood, beauty, power, and domestic spheres. Many of them look as if they could have come straight out of the 1970s. With their gorgeous styling, the voluminous retro hairdos of cigarette-wielding housewives, the strange and slightly unnerving spaces that these glamorous beings seem to inhabit, Rothen’s images have a spontaneous feeling of the momentary, candid life caught on the move, yet at the same time a carefully composed, poised look. They are saturated in color and have a lush vagueness – the dreamy fading of the light around windows and skies suggests someone’s loveliest and most undying memories.

Many of Rothen’s photos make use of mannequins, emphasizing the uncanniness of the scenes she is capturing. The results are a mysterious and spectacularly beautiful depiction of the intimacy and eerie violence of a life seemingly lived in domestic obscurity – the drama of a psychological existence made up of husbands, babies, neighbors, girlfriends, isolation, eroticism, rebellion, and psychic death. The playful banditry in several of the tableaux, with the women holding knives and guns, seems to subvert the violent games of little boys – and the fact that only mannequins represent men is a reversal of the perceived doll-like nature of little girls who grow up to be wives and mothers.

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Oracles and Phantasms of Caitlin McCarthy

Caitlin McCarthy is one of the artists whose prints I have the most of in my home. They are eminently frameable, hangable, and delightful. I love her goddess series, which renders feminine deities and figures of folklore from across the world in concise and whimsical portraits. Her drawings also feature characters from horror films, Gothic authors, and Spiritualists. As McCarthy states on her Website, she is fascinated by “Victorian sensibilities and the occult,” and her work portrays “visions of dark dreamy women in the form of seers, mystics, goddesses, and witches.”

McCarthy’s graphite illustrations have an eerie and ethereal feel, sometimes dark, sometimes darling. I like the radiance that comes across in some of her monochromatic works, the sense of an otherworldly glow, and a certain wispy quality, being able to see the strokes of the pencil. The ribbons of ectoplasm that curl out, seance-style, from some of the entranced figures, are also appealing to me. These women’s eyes often appear blind but perhaps gifted with an inner sight. Amidst lit candles floating in midair, in their pointed hats, veils, and headdresses, they dream on in their melancholy bliss.

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Precious Weapons: Jewelry by Ossia Obscure

Dublin-based Ossia Obscure handcrafts beautiful pieces of jewelry, taking the shapes of medieval and ancient weapons, as well as forms in nature and symbols of magic. Among these designs there is a witch’s broomstick, Nordic runes, a cat skull, a pomegranate, teeth and bones, chalices, Celtic battleaxes, and a spiked mace. Saoirse at Ossia Obscure creates new versions of these artifacts, drawing inspiration from fantasy, Gothic imagery, and medieval cultures. Fancifully designed and meticulously crafted, these miniature tools and weapons are each a unique marvel. I love the little details on them, the textures and irregularities. Although they depict brutal and crude objects, I feel that they have a wonderfully quaint, almost friendly look to them.

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Tender Chimera: The Art of Takuya Mitani

Takuya Mitani creates delicate, detailed paintings portraying mysterious youths in a chimerical state. Accompanied by a myriad of strange creatures, flowers, emblematic objects such as Eden-like apples, mystical and heraldic imagery, they seem surreally transforming, or merging into their noble and enigmatic accoutrements. These symbols and articles revolve around and halo the lovely, tranquil beings whose very placidity seems to belie sinister interior layers. There are birds and rabbits and horses, as well as chimerae with their fantastical hybrid forms, and the subjects, too, seem chimerical, always transfigured, metamorphosing, or, as it were, marred by a grotesque yet ethereal blending with other elements in the images. There is also a motif of angels, with arched wings indicating a strange divinity for these tender youthful beings. Meticulously drawn, complexly composed, rendered with an eye to detail and a careful realism, Mitani’s paintings with their almost pretty air are provoking and lulling, combining an intriguing, soft, otherworldly aspect with historical and surrealistic elements.

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[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.] Alejandra Pizarnik

All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me, I make the day that begins on my account, that sobs because day falls like water through night.
All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone. {See more}

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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”).

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Mary Syring

Mary Syring is one of my favorite artists in recent years, and I have many of her prints in my home. Her very recognizable style draws inspiration from the Victorian and Edwardian eras and the 1920s, Spiritualism, horror movies, folk tales, and New England Halloween aesthetics. Endearing, piquant, and elegant, Syring’s illustrations are wispy and sinuous, giving a sense of daintiness along with a mysterious, enchanted savor of ghostliness. The beautifully coifed ladies, specters, vampires, and witches that inhabit her drawings are sweet, a little bit eerie, often sapphic, and invested with the poetic aesthetics of bygone eras. Candles, graceful little hands, ectoplasm, scythes and winged hourglasses are recurring elements in her work. The pretty demureness of Syring’s diminutive figures juxtaposes with the themes of death, passion, mourning, horror, and the supernatural. I love the ornate vignettes full of flowers which frame some of her images; they embellish them in such an interesting and lovely way.

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