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Author: L

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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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Carbonized Forest

The eye that was open on Friday.
The portent and the portent’s flensed hide. Ribbons of flesh
swarming downward. Like a school of leeches
deserting some unlit cataclysm.
And a briary phantom there, Stygian, erect.
Saying, here is the untranslation of the world.
Mounted on a spire of form.
The disembarkation of abyss. Fragmentary sputtering.
And what you thought were dark whiptails of illumination
were bristles from a shaved bear
being milked for bile in a rusting cage. Nested
among the mesh of soft translucent sounds
fallen from your lips, the
vestiges of someone’s breathing.

{by Forrest Gander}

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Sigil Studio

Sigil, the rawly beautiful jewelry brand of Seattle-based designer Anita Arora, is inspired by primal, powerful landscapes. Rare minerals sourced in faraway, desolate, and magnificent places such as Tibet, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands are fused with hand-forged metals which seem to have grown into the mineral structure. Ghostly, smoky stones vary with strikingly colorful stones reminiscent of the Northern Lights and black volcanic rock. Rugged and talismanic, they have a wonderfully organic feel.

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I built a self outside my self because a child needs shelter

{She gave me a birdcage for my bird, I think
I might have loved her a basket
full of beautiful poison berries}

Gala Mukomolova’s Without Protection is a heady draught: it is disjointed hallucinatory image, weaving mythology of the fearsome Baba Yaga with vignettes of chaotic frenetic modern life. Mukomolova uses the English language in an unpredictable, splendid way, bending it to her will, her witchlike power. This compact collection is infused with strange color, both violent and tender. It reaches deep into me. Sometimes almost ugly, not always delicate or shrinking by any means, it is a censer of potent fragrances to my overfastidious brain.

Excerpts after the cut.

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