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Category: Visual Art

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The Drowning Woman: Surreal Photography by Kalliope Amorphous

The soft, dreamy experimental photography of Kalliope Amorphous, often featuring self-portraits, is a visual poetics, sometimes black-and-white, sometimes saturated with beautiful, nostalgic color. Techniques of distortion, doubling, mirroring, blurring, and multiple exposure are taken to the extreme, but come together to produce wonderful and arresting images that explore themes of identity, mythology, consciousness, and memory. The loveliness juxtaposes against the alienation expressed through them, such that the subjects are sometimes barely recognizable as human. Fragmented, unfocused, ethereal, fragile, as these murky portraits are, they are also spiritually radiant. Ophelia drowning in her watery bed, twins, and witches are some of the archetypes rendered tangible-but-dreamlike in Kalliope’s unique way. Ominous, tender, suffused with mystery, these images are a perfect fusion of melancholy beauty and striking experimentalism. They are so evocative, strange, hazy, and brilliant.

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Vile Creatures: The Art of Lindsey Carr

Lindsey Carr is an artist/illustrator based in Glasgow whose creations I find delightful. Having admired her work for many years, I love the direction that she’s taken in recent years – richer, more substantial, with bold yet translucent color. The antique, luscious, yet delicate qualities of her paintings filled with flowers, animals, and mythical beings lure the eye and enchant and refresh. Taking inspiration from Rococo art, still lifes of the Old Masters, and the naturalist illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, the gloss and glimmer of Carr’s painted world is refined as well as vibrant. Her charming, surreal, historically influenced style is eminently suited for depictions of chimerical figures such as Alkonost.

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Sarah Jarrett

Sarah Jarrett’s gently intriguing, melancholy collages combine strong color, imagery from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and a fabulous sense of surrealism. She is highly prolific, with a profusion of emotive collage works. Transposition, juxtaposition, silhouettes, and flowers all play a large role in her work. Lovely and mysterious and musing, the many layers and textures of her ethereal world draw the viewer in to its sense of tragic intimacy.

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Bea Bastet

The artwork of Beatriz Bradaschii contains a sweet surrealism. Flowers, insects, human teeth, and eyes all recur as symbols in a rich, gently melancholy world evocative of lore, both whimsical and macabre. Her Victorian-inspired, Wonderland-esque aesthetics, the imagery of a severed head, lacerated heart, exposed rib cage, carnivorous flowers, or pox-ridden countenances of haunting beauty, are rendered in a precious style, and speak of emblems of particularly feminine horror, as well as the terrors of childhood. Her highly imaginative, cunningly layered sculptures are also incredible – including Memento Mori Mushroom, which features a detachable face revealing a skull hidden behind it. I have one of her lovely clay pins, hand-painted in acrylic and gouache.

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Age of the Succubus: Nona Limmen

I love the hazy, dreamily melancholy photography of Nona Limmen. The poetic vintage graininess, the doubling/multiplying and blurry transposition of imagery, shadowy and ethereal atmosphere, and ritualistic poses all create a soft world of arcane magic, the sphere of an almost nostalgic occultism: a folkloric vision that looks as if it has been translated through the lens of classic and beloved cinema.

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Clockwork Angels: The Art of Masaaki Sasamoto

The glowing paintings of Masaaki Sasamoto are drenched with gold and a mellow, old-world radiance. Butterflies, fairies and other mythical beings, girl-automatons with exposed machinery, flowers, winged seraphic figures, are common motifs in his work. The mildly serene and rather enigmatically inexpressive smiles of his subjects seem to emanate a nature half-deity, half-doll. Sasamoto combines traditional Japanese techniques with modern aesthetics in a unique, luminous, memorable style that evokes antiquity, a fantastical air, an atmosphere slightly surreal and wondrously airy yet rich.

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Sena Adjovi

The glowing, tender portraits of Montreal-based artist Sena Adjovi feel like poems. Softened, gently distorted and fragmented, etherealized and haloed with light, these images are like how the dead would remember their loved ones. Often fading, half-disappearing, or only partially realized, they leave an impression of warmth in our minds. The palette is usually muted yet has a lustrous quality, investing her subjects with an otherworldly aura and a subdued radiance. These graphite and oil paintings are “bathed in gloomy or comforting atmospheres [and explore] themes of alienation, loneliness, vulnerability, hope and stillness.” Yet through this ambiguousness Adjovi’s works cannot but convey a sense of belovedness and mystery around those who are depicted.

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Audrey Benjaminsen

Audrey Benjaminsen’s lovely, sweeping illustrations, with their lush, vivid colors and sinuous forms, perfectly render the haunting scenes from The Turn of the Screw, Dracula, and other Victorian classics. The clarity yet expressiveness of her imagery is felicitous to a world of specters, languishing ladies, gnarled fairies, and mythical creatures.

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Witches’ Flowers: The Art of Rosalie Lettau

The daintily dotted pencil, graphite, and digital illustrations of Rosalie Lettau are full of goats, witches, flowers, and sharp-nailed, enveloping hands. There is a grainy texture to the blacks as of careful static, as well as a poetic luminance to the whites. The themes hint at a folkloric world where witches sign compacts with the devil, where they choose armfuls of lovely flowers which obscure their faces, where youths lie down in fields dreaming of a life beyond their known boundaries, and where the witches are hunted down and hanged from trees along with their familiars. It seems as if both the witches and the witch hunters come from the same seemingly peaceful place, a place where maidens either slowly dream their lives away, or turn to the occult arts. Each subject is a rustic figure in a mythical village, a sleeping village that presents both its light, wistful face, and its dark, mysterious, and demonic face. The darkness resides in the persecution and death of witches, even more so than in the maiden-witches’ tokens to Satan.

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