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Crafting the Hierophanies: Moon and Serpent Jewelry

Handcrafted by Istanbul-based artist Göksu Şimşek, the delightfully whimsical and spooky offerings of Moon and Serpent Jewelry Design draw inspiration from her diverse interests in the occult, witchcraft, alchemy, esoterica, mythology, museology, antiquity, and the 16th through 19th centuries. Gnarled, earthy, fantastical, enchanting and lovely, these pieces speak of poisonous flowers, mandrakes, the mythical chicken-legged house of Baba Yaga, Victorian mourning, sigils and talismans, old woodcuts and engravings, and a myriad of other spiritual and historical artifacts. They remind one of the power of raw pagan religions as well as the highly ornamented and enameled affectations of the 18th and 19th century. The macabre beauty of her creations is also wonderfully wearable, not seeming cumbersome at all.

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The Lost Surrealism of Remedios Varo

The beautiful, rich, luminous, and everlastingly mysterious paintings of Remedios Varo, one of the major female surrealists of the first half of the 20th century, have an almost precious precision and an effect of miniaturism. Enigmatic, sometimes comical, with an incredible depth of color, her symbolic imagery reveals a hidden world which is hauntingly lovely, an internal labyrinth, landscapes that gently unsettle and lure with their indefinable melancholy and sense of strangeness. Inspired by mysticism and alchemy, she also evoked a sense of claustrophobia, of cloistered and hushed, shadowy existence, of entrapment.

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For Whom Were You Anointed?

Suspiria is a stunning remake of a 1977 cult favorite by Luca Guadagnino, who also directed 2017’s achingly lovely Call Me By Your Name. Loosely based on Dario Argento’s colorful and visually inspiring original, this film far surpasses its predecessor in my opinion. It borrows the intriguing bones, the atmosphere, the incoherent narrative of the first movie and transforms the concept into a taut, thrilling, and haunting piece of cinema with glorious visuals and a solidly compelling story.

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Saintesses by Sad Riot

These are lovely interpretations of four female saints by Sad Riot: Lucy whose emblem is eyes on a golden plate, her eyes having been taken out; Philomena the virgin martyr who underwent numerous torments, scourging, drowning, being shot by arrows (and was finally decapitated), rather than become the Emperor Diocletian’s wife; Maria Goretti the eleven-year-old child, stabbed fourteen times with an awl; and Cecilia, who lived for three days after being struck on the neck three times with a sword.

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Semi-Opaque Sleeper: The Art of Christina Bothwell

These extraordinary and peculiar sculptures by Christina Bothwell play with transparency, opacity, and the meanings conveyed by textural contrasts. Suffering seems to engrave the faces of her figures and to stamp its personality upon them. They have a naive simplicity along with their subtle symbolic tones. I have never seen sculptures quite like these before, and they are instantly distinctive and unforgettable. Her rendition of the sleeper using solid, opaque substance for the physical form and that lovely, occluded-glass material for the astral body or spirit is such a succinct, apt, and beautiful visual metaphor. Friendship, childhood, transformation, isolation, the aching love and expectancy of motherhood, the waking nightmares of life…everything within the shadowy depths of the vast human heart seems embodied in her bold yet delicate sculptures.

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