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Category: Visual Art

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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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The Night Forests of Tuesday Riddell

Cocoons, snails, snakes, birds, and insects populate the still yet intensely alive nightscapes of Tuesday Riddell. There is a glow in her works depicting the nocturnal life, death, and decay of forest creatures. She uses the long-lost technique of japanning in her delicate works, also often incorporating gold leaf and silver powder. This imparts the ghostly, ethereal feel to the illuminated plants and animals against their velvety black backgrounds. Riddell is inspired by Sottobosco painting, a 17th-century subgenre of still lifes which explored the forest floor and creatures of the undergrowth. The lovely little foxgloves, the sinuous ferns and stems and branches, all exude a subdued, almost phosphorescent light – the lustrous quality of her scenes conveys a sense of the mystery of nature in all its renewals and depredations. All this serves to create a unique effect which makes her lacquered and gold-pigmented paintings immediately recognizable, an impression of stillness teeming with slightly sinister life, as well as a certain flatness which is intriguing and evocative of historical art.

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Laura Makabresku

The nostalgic, saturated, slightly grainy photography of Laura Makabresku calls to mind the highly tactile quality of vintage snapshots and the beautifully composed splendor of Andrei Tarkovsky vignettes. Ordinary yet marvelous household objects, teapots, vases of wildflowers, religious items, candleholders, a bowl of strawberries – a room, steeped in honeyed, sweetly melancholy and golden light, from which the warmth of a remembered family member has just been withdrawn: all these well-worn fragments of a life add up to the ineluctable magic of the beloved everyday. They are visions of a lost yet imperishable past seen through the magnifying haze of memory.

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