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The Inner Cathedral: The Exquisite Dolls of Mari Shimizu

The ethereal creations of Mari Shimizu are hauntingly beautiful and impossibly detailed. Shimizu crafts elaborate ball-jointed dolls which possess an angelic appearance of purity and seem haloed by their tragic suffering. The figures are saints, martyrs, Madonnas, and vampires emanating an aura of innocence overshadowed by affliction. Many of them contain intricately carved Gothic arches, chapels, or even miniature Gardens of Eden within their torsos – the most delicately beautiful element of her works. These hollowed-out cavities of the architecture of anatomy are inhabited by demons and angels, homunculi, scenes evoking Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, as well as antique cabinets of curiosities. Combining biblical themes with her love of historical fashion, Mari Shimizu’s doll sculptures are like three-dimensional paintings with as much detail and subtlety as that medium, in their small-scale, inner paradises and hells.

The roughly 2-foot dolls are characterized by both captivating realism and disturbing surreality. Their unnnerving, almost obscene quality reminds me of the doll projects of Hans Bellmer, an inspiration of Shimizu’s. Working with traditional Japanese materials, Shimizu forms the heads and limbs out of papier-mache or clay, and the hair is made with goat’s hairs or silk threads.

Reminiscent of Anatomical Venuses, these entrancingly lovely, dolorous ladies have a wasted, spiritual look and sometimes are even dissectible/vivisected, with removable organs. The lacy decay of some of their figures, with spots in their flesh as if eaten through by decomposition, exposing ribs and inner cavities, is touched with a melancholy, morbid sensuality. Their bodies seem to be both the sacrifice and the altar upon which they are sacrificed. Also intriguing are the sculptures that represent dryads of the dead, human-tree hybrids seemingly overtaken by decay and strange growths of skulls and corpse-like beings.

These fragilely beautiful girls, with their air of adolescent bloom, at the same time give the impression of being catacombs containing hordes of the dead and decomposing. Thus, they are always both radiant and dark. Although they seem like the miraculously preserved and incorrupt bodies of saints, they have a breath of the crypt. I particularly love the Death and the Maiden-themed pieces which vividly depict the juxtaposition between a young girl in the bloom of youth and the macabre specter of Death, giving shape to a figure that seems literally torn between youthful beauty and grim dissolution. One of these is currently available for sale on Akatako, as well as one of her anatomical girls, in a violin case.

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Monique Motil’s Miniature Marvels

The very eerie and very elegant creatures of Monique Motil are assemblaged from a variety of organic and synthetic materials, including bones, beads, textiles, and animal body parts. Attired in exquisite, fanciful costumes which are meticulously crafted, rich brocades and velvets, embroidery, and beadwork, each one-of-a-kind creation presents a persona combining the historical and the present, the live and the dead, the human and the animal.

With a sense of the dramatically uncanny, these aristocrats of the macabre, beautiful apparitions, avian or mink, beaver or cat skull-headed, carry out an endless mourning. They are pervaded with a sense of agedness, which is soaked into the richness and detail of their garments, and have all the delicacy of the most fragile and lovely dolls, without their quality of preciousness.

Instead, these creatures exude a foreboding sense of being timeless, deathless, ruthless executors of justice, vessels of past vengeances, long-carried grudges and dark passions. With their cruel claws, their magisterial dignity, their lace and fripperies, Monique’s hybrid creations embody haunting gracefulness on a small scale. Monique Motil also designs shadowboxes, assemblages, headdresses, and other artistic artifacts.

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Black Veil Studio

Black Veil Studio comprises a team of identical twin brothers who are tattooists and artists, based in Salem, Massachusetts. Their work is inspired by their fascination with Victorian mourning etiquette/culture and the rich lore of their ancient city. The resulting imagery is lovely and often disturbing. The vacant, fixed eyes of the spectral female figures gracefully haunting their work convey a subtle horror, and witches, demons, spiders, bats, crescent moons, New England colonial houses abound in their illustrations. The macabre panoply of images which merge beauty with eeriness make for arrestingly picturesque tattoo designs. Prints, candles, and sundry goods are available from their Shoppe of Drear and Wonder.

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Julie Heffernan’s Surreal Historical Portraits: Worlds/Selves On Fire

Julie Heffernan creates delightful, gorgeously rich portraiture which is a sly twist on historical art. Evocative of Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo paintings, her works feature a bursting profusion of flowers, trees, vines, fruits, animals, cities, gemstones, and fires in varying scales. Landscapes like visions, so shimmeringly lovely and ethereal, alternate with classical nudes surrounded by prodigious masses of flora and fauna, as well as portraits of high society dripping with luxurious ostentation. The colors are sometimes amazingly vibrant, the reds almost painfully beautiful. Heffernan combines a masterly technique with irony and surrealism in a super-encrusted, elaborated, and enameled style that synthesizes many genres and periods of painting. These metaphorical self-portraits and portrayals of an opulent and decaying world represent the trail of disaster, the constant crises, small fires catching on the exquisite hems of ladies’ gowns…in short, the picturesque carnage of a society in decline.

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Erik Bergrin

Erik Bergrin is an artist and costume maker whose collection of fiber sculptures called Shadowwork, incorporating techniques such as sewing, weaving, and coiling, are visual expressions of a ritualistic ceremony that created a mental hell. Resembling massive cocoons or sarcophagi for human forms, outlandish, abstract, and powerful, these sculptures are savagely original and dreamlike. They are terrifying, enigmatic, eerie, and wonderful. He is currently working on a stunning series based on his interpretation of the eight dissolutions of the Buddhist death process.

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An Excerpt from Bonedog by Eva H.D.

And the home-style silences and clouds
contribute to nothing
but the general malaise.
Clouds, such as they are,
are in fact suspect,
and made from a different material
than those you left behind.
You yourself were cut
from a different cloudy cloth,
returned,
remaindered,
ill-met by moonlight,
unhappy to be back,
slack in all the wrong spots,
seamy suit of clothes
dishrag-ratty, worn.

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Puparia

Puparia is a wonderful and enigmatic animated short film directed by Shingo Tamagawa. With a delicate, vibrant, and fluid art style, Puparia depicts a series of human “witnesses” to mysterious creatures or beings whose beautifully fantastical nature is truly dreamlike. At under three minutes long, it gives a compelling glimpse into a world and mythology which would be incredible to see fleshed out in a feature-length production. It is highly opaque and non-disclosive, but the term puparium means the “hardened last larval skin which encloses the pupa in some insects,” perhaps hinting at the transformation of human beings into different life forms. The white-haired girl who is gazed at by the crowd seems to suggest this coming metamorphosis as the hallucinatory colored patterns on her skin evoke the patterns seen in the creatures and strange world around her.

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The Transmundane Jewelry of Arcana Obscura

Kate Hockstein of Arcana Obscura creates jewelry designs inspired by historical and occult themes, ranging from Georgian and Victorian mourning jewelry, alchemy, Egyptian symbolism, to vanitas art, medieval weaponry, and splendors of the animal world. Using the lost-wax casting method, she represents flowers, serpents, flails, sinister left hands, life-sized sculptures of tiny fishes, mortuary designs such as the winged skull that was favored by 17th-century Puritan gravestone carvers, and the inverted torch which is found in 19th-century cemeteries. I love her penchant for Latin mottoes, and her pieces, which have a fascinating story behind each inspiration, bring to life fragments of the annals of arcane history.

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