RSS
Close

Category: Visual Art

b

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.

b

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.”

{See more}

b

Tabaimo

Tabaimo’s immersive, haunting video installations delve into the complex contemporary psyche, exploring themes of isolation, anxiety, and malaise. Surreal and a little unnerving, lovely and delicate and nightmarish, they are evocative of traditional Japanese woodblock prints and combine hand-drawing with computer animation. An exhibition of Tabaimo’s works is currently at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

{See more}

b

The Reigning of the Moth

The Reigning of the Moth is a delightful short film by artist Katie Eleanor. Jumping back and forth between color and black-and-white, this oneiric offering is full of surreal imagery and the charming disjointedness of a silent film. A young girl encounters a group of black-garbed, witch-like beings in the forest, who attempt to transform her. I love the design of the intertitles. Occult, nonlinear, eerie, and whimsical, this film is a love song to past cinema and is hauntingly piquant in its own right.

b

Jessica Dalva: Hapax Legomena

Jessica Dalva’s show Hapax Legomena is exhibiting at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in LA now through May 31st. I love the unearthly beauty of these figures with their milky opaque eyes, haunting expressions, and intensely eloquent bodies, posed within their black frames.

“The term ‘Hapax Legomena’ is used to describe words that only appear once in a text or language, often rendering them untranslatable. Each piece in this series revolves around an individual word, a facet, a unique expression of a part of the complex variety of personal battles we fight….The show focuses on one’s relationship with oneself, internal wars, and the entanglements of love. The sculptures are a navigation through fears, moments of clarity and joy, and nightmares.”

{See more}