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The Wonderland Book

Kirsty Mitchell’s Wonderland Book is an enormous volume containing over 600 photographs, featuring the seventy-four pieces in her Wonderland series. It is a labor of love created in memory of her mother, who died from cancer in 2008, and took over five years to complete. These otherworldly images, lush, extravagant, super saturated with color, feature Mitchell’s lavish, wildly imaginative costumes and embody a fantastical, whimsical, and unrestrainedly vibrant fairytale aesthetic, inspired by the storybooks her mother read to her as a child and by her personal journey of grief and transfiguration.

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Witch-Ikon Book Launch and Art Exhibition

Witch-Ikon: Witchcraft in Art and Artifact is an upcoming publication from Three Hands Press, examining the iconography of witches and their magic through the centuries, to be released on October 28. There will also be an exhibition of contemporary artwork which is featured in the book, running from October 5 to 31 at Mortlake & Company in Seattle. I have long been fascinated by the witch as a powerful image and symbol, and by the history and aesthetics of witchcraft and diabolism, so this promises to be delightfully edifying to me.

“The figure of the Witch has haunted the margins of religion and spirituality for thousands of years, as a figure of transgressive spiritual power, outlaw magic, and alluring sexuality. Equally pervasive is her presence in art, from ancient depictions in the Near East, through the European Middle Ages, down to her present representations in occult subculture….Equal in potency to the figure of legend and romance are the magical artifacts which emerged from the varied traditions of malefic magic… The mask, the idol, the knife, the cauldron, the spirit-bottle, and a thousand other magical objects also serve, like the image of the witch herself, to embody a transgressive and beguiling aesthetic.

The exhibition WITCH-IKON brings together an international consortium of artists with varied esoteric and artistic backgrounds, infusing the witch-mythos with new imaginal vitality.”

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Darla Jackson Sculpture

Darla Jackson creates intriguing sculptures of animals such as rabbits, birds, snakes, and mice, using them to explore human emotions. I am struck by the contrast of black and white in her pieces, the enigmatic nature of the surreal depictions of the animals, and also by the poignant sadness of some of them, the impression they convey of being victimized, abused, and harrowed.

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Fox and Raven: The Photography of Laura Makabresku

Laura Makabresku’s photography reminds me of stills from some lovely film, the type of utterly modern movie that’s in love with the past and seeks, with minimalism and airy grace, to elucidate a series of enigmatic, symbolic scenes in an atmosphere of restrained horror, an exquisite nightmare slow to unfold and penetratingly beautiful. The milky, delicate, startlingly clear palette feels both nostalgic and almost clinical, combining a severe elegance with a soft, ethereal fairytale quality. The imagery is enchanting and sinister, quietly eerie and lambent. It is like a tale of supernatural horror, of witchcraft, of woods, of murder, of treachery, of spellbound sleep, of ritual sacrifice – all watched and attended by the harbingers, animals of ill omen, foxes and crows and goats.

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Lena Herzog’s Lost Souls

Lost Souls is a beautiful collection of black-and-white images by photographer Lena Herzog (the wife of Werner Herzog). Radiant, velvety, and both crisp and dreamlike, these photographs depict specimens in the cabinets of wonder and curiosities and early medical museums that were established beginning in the early 18th century. The subjects are mostly infants with genetic defects and abnormalities that prevented them from surviving, either stillbirths or ill-starred newborns. Declared by the Church to be “lost souls” because of their uncertain status as to heaven, hell, or limbo, having existed as both scientific specimens and as objects of mere curiosity and shock value over the ages, Herzog captures them with a sense of wonder and tenderness, focusing on them a kind gaze which translates them into a transcendent and mysterious realm of intense light and shadow.

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Intermediatheque

Intermediatheque is a gorgeous exhibition space at the JP Tower in Tokyo which feels like a cross between a natural history museum and a yesteryear’s cabinet of curiosities. Assembled by the University of Tokyo, the collection is filled with marvelous displays of hundreds of animal skulls, bones, and skeletons, specimens, taxidermy, and models, and includes such items as an Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, temple fragments that survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, 19th-century machinery, typewriters and microscopes, beautiful rocks and minerals, preserved two-headed turtles, and a whale’s jawbone. It is comprised of both vintage and newer acquisitions. For a lover of curiosities like me, it’s a wonder. Besides the interesting specimens, all the display cases themselves are beautifully done. I saw some very lovely and notable bell jars. The aesthetic arrangement of the exhibitions is striking in its own right. The whole space is a unique hybrid of vintage and modern which feels simultaneously spacious, luxe, elegant, eccentric, and quaint, all contributing to make it one of my most memorable experiences in Tokyo. As a plus, admission is free.

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Kyotaro

Drawing inspiration from manga and children’s picture books as well as psychedelic paintings, Kyoko Aoki, who goes by the artist name Kyotaro, meticulously creates intricate, sinuously flowing illustrations representing unseen or invisible beings. They are wonderfully alive and seem to move with a radiant fluidity. Her work is both delicate and dynamic, full of luminous texture, delightfully rendering “light, deities, beasts, animals, and fairies.”

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