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Masks and Phantasms by Damselfrau

Damselfrau’s enchanting masks, bizarre, gorgeous, totemic, resplendent and larger than life, are reminiscent of some imagined and heretofore-unknown folk culture. These portraits of a fantastical people are often featured with an arrangement of flowers, which also lend their explosive vividness to the ultra-saturated and violently jubilant palette. Damselfrau says, “I have used fine lace, carried by the nineteenth-century Norwegian author Camilla Collett, hair from two-hundred-year-old Japanese geisha hair pieces, as well as everyday stuff, found in the street….I am led by the phantasms appearing in the process of the making and the materials themselves.” I am quite a monochromatic creature personally, so I appreciate the incredible vibrancy and wild color of Damselfrau’s outré creations.

Artist Magnhild Kennedy interprets the moniker Damselfrau (frau referring to married women and “damsel” being an unmarried young lady) as “married to oneself.”

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Ethereal Corruption: The Profane Transmutations of Fecal Matter

Fecal Matter (Hannah Rose Dalton + Steven Raj Bhaskaran) are an Instagram duo who use extreme, transformative makeup and prosthetics to create preciously bizarre, outré, and alien looks, mutating ethereal beauty into something transgressive and disturbing. Their aim seems to be to disgust and enrapture in equal measures, to simultaneously fascinate and repulse. They reside permanently beyond the pale, with a sly sense of humor which seems to parody high fashion. Dalton’s medical-themed image of a white-and-pink, pastel, veiny, flower-adorned, bile-eyed, wounded, sickly, modelesque semi-human being or anthropoid alien is unnervingly brilliant.

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“The murder was sleep. And death was not what we thought.”

…it was a world to sink one’s teeth into, a world of voluminous dahlias and tulips….The trees were laden, the world was so rich it was rotting….she trembled upon the first steps of a sparkling, shadowy world, where giant water lilies floated monstrous. The little flowers scattered through the grass didn’t look yellow or rosy to her, but the color of bad gold and scarlet. The decomposition was deep, perfumed… But all the heavy things, she saw with her head encircled by a swarm of insects, sent by the most exquisite life in the world….The Garden was so pretty that she was afraid of Hell.

{Clarice Lispector}

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Nuit Atelier

I’ve admired Nuit Atelier since its inception in 2012 by designer Anastasia Ikonnikova. Modern romantic clothing which harkens to historical fashion, “each garment is designed to shroud and strengthen the body, ennobling and mystifying the human form.” Characterized by beautiful draping, luxurious yet hardy materials, satin, linen and gauze textures, it achieves timeless classicism combined with raw, modern edginess. Frothy, frilled white blouses, voluminous bishop sleeves, blood-red velvet gowns, and dramatic black coats and cloaks with mysterious, enveloping oversized hoods. There are also more minimalist basics that are perfect for everyday wear. I could happily construct my entire wardrobe from Nuit’s offerings.

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Throwing the Stones: Jewelry by Chase + Scout

Informed by the natural world, hidden microcosms, and the talismanic properties of primitive rites and objects, Austin-based Chase and Scout creates unique, beautiful, and unsettling jewelry pieces such as the datura seed pod necklace below. The natural and the supernatural combine in their art self-described thus: “It is a shared secret between cohorts of common causes, or an answer to an unasked question. It is the sound of moonlight swimming through a dark night, or a deep howl…” Wolf’s-teeth earrings, rings inspired by the texture of the lunar landscape, honeycomb pieces, bracelets with the skulls of Odin’s two ravens, and moth orchid necklaces are others among their varied offerings. From cicada wings to dowsing rods and the Orphic Egg, the concepts for Chase and Scout’s wearable art are endlessly creative.

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Ozabu

Ozabu’s elegant, hyper-realistic pencil and graphite drawings fuse women with birds, mantises, and other fauna and flora. Inspired by Japanese mythology, this delicate linework illustrates a hybrid symbolic imagery with utter precision and ethereal melancholy. Thinkspace describes the figures depicted in her works, which exude a soft radiance, as “woeful apparitions or powerful augurs. Ozabu’s world is a mysteriously beautiful shadow land.” Her solo show Meguru is currently exhibiting at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco through November 23rd.

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Malina

Huzzah, I have acquired a copy of the beautiful sold-out Malina print from BloodMilk Exquisite Corpse! This illustration of expressive hands, flowers, snakes, and planchette, by the amazing Liza Corbett, combines my love of floral arrangements in art with my fascination for spiritualism.

Exquisite Corpse takes its name from the 1920s parlor game in which surrealists each added to an assemblage of words or images in turn, and is a collaborative collective focusing on limited runs of art objects by independent artists and craftspeople, including perfumes, incense, handmade trinket boxes and offering bowls, and other things of uncanny beauty.

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Larval Mysticism: The Art of Alessandro Sicioldr

The ethereal, uncanny paintings of Alessandro Sicioldr have an almost religious beauty. Mystical and intriguing, the melancholy languor of the somberly dressed figures that populate his strange, surreal, desolate dream-landscapes – those pallid, ascetic faces with their opaque and vaguely serene expressions, gentle enigmas all – sometimes partaking of the substance of nightmare with the disturbing contrast between black garb and death-white skin – evoke classical works, medieval spiritual richness and symbolism. Combining traditional techniques with modern aesthetics, these splendid paintings are technically realistic but have a haunting surreality and a high degree of dark imaginativeness.

There are translucent, cocoon-like souls in the skies, multitudes of faces looming titanically above the main subjects, milky luminous streams of souls or spirits, shrouded tiny figures of the seeming dead (or merely transfigured, in the sleep of metamorphosis), a plurality of eyes, faces above and below water… I think of those strange groups of diaphanous beings with opalescent flesh as larvae, an archaic term, larva meaning ghost-like or masked in Latin, which oddly fits due to their rather grub-like reminiscence. These are visionary and hallucinatory, their delicate foreboding, weaved of both gossamer and grave textures, itself a form of beauty. The sense of lostness of individuals in vast grim landscapes also reminds me of artists like Zdzisław Beksiński. Subtle but quite striking, Sicioldr’s work is of the type that is the most appealing to my imagination and so lingeringly lovely for me.

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