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Tim Lewis’ “Pony”

Tim Lewis’ Pony is a bizarre and uncanny kinetic sculpture that was exhibited at 2009’s Kinetica Art Fair. Unsettling and uber-realistic, Pony looks somewhat like a surreal ostrich-esque creature composed of human arms, pulling a small carriage behind itself; motion-sensitive, appearing to “walk” in a very eerie and delicately articulated fashion, it is another creepy and brilliant intersection of art and technology, and a provoking piece of interactive sculpture. Its title also suggests a veiled commentary on the relationship between humans and domesticated animals.

Tim Lewis – Pony

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Hell House: The Art of Esao Andrews

Esao Andrews combines a colorful palette with a surrealistically Gothic sensibility. Some of his paintings are twists on traditional portraits from earlier epochs akin to the work of Nicola Samorì. Wildly dilapidated and foreboding houses are a recurring motif, and, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s psychological horror stories, depict the inner, psychic falling-apart, decay, distortion, and warping. Fairy tales and folklore loom in the forefront with menacing or perverse appeal. His vibrant style often illustrates bizarre, obscene aberrations, contrasting atrocious or monstrous things such as a giant, bloated black spider with a symbol of sweetness and purity, a child or an angel.

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Mia Calderone

Ghostly, sinuous, beautifully illustrated apparitions with elongated, eerie, torturously expressive wraith-like hands figure prominently in Mia Calderone’s exquisite and highly personal ink drawings. Her influences and inspirations include Catholicism, medieval illuminated Bibles, Art Nouveau (particularly Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley), and contemporary artists Takato Yamamoto and Laura Laine.

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Film Review: The Reflecting Skin

1990’s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s stunning. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of entrancing. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I liked it very much. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” aesthetic for me, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.

Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and isolated gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot so impressively), The Reflecting Skin is – sort of – about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow living in a house nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unfathomable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and recognizing a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him to escape understanding of the strange, horrific, traumatic events taking place around him.

The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played to perfection by Lindsay Duncan – a performance that should be iconic. This film, though rather controversial, is fascinating, and the cinematography alone is well worth the experience.