“Remember: Ignore the warnings your parents gave you as children. Be nosy and talk to strangers. Wander. If you sit in one place all night you will miss everything. If you have any questions or need assistance come and find me. I will whisper secrets in your ear. Cheers, Cynthia von Buhler Send from the future.” I […]
On his departmental homepage at Vanderbilt University, Mark Hosford, Associate Professor of Art, describes his work as using “narrative imagery to reveal societal wonders and blunders.” I’m not sure reveal is the right word to use, given how much transgressive laughter and horror fill Hosford’s strange dreamscapes. His work makes us see a world where Freddy Krueger from […]
You haven’t really experienced the power of the contemporary surreal until you stand in front of a Jonas Burgert painting. The canvases are massive, sometimes spanning whole walls, depicting carnivalesque apocalyptic scenes of mass confusion and strange beauty. The bodies within these scenes are beyond human, something in between our most animalistic selves and the zombie creatures […]
The Village of Doel in Belgium, just south of the border with the Netherlands, has been around for centuries. But back in the late 1990′s a decision was made to clear the town to make way for new expansion plans for the port of Antwerp. Because of the new construction, the law states there must be land set aside […]
While creating the comic Reading The Weird for Weirdfictionreview.com, Leah Thomas came up with these sketches of some of the monsters, human and otherwise, from fourteen of the stories collected in The Weird compendium — perfect for 12 Days of Monsters! Well, actually 15, as the gnole appears in stories by both Lord Dunsany and Margaret St. Clair. […]
Monsters are tricky things. We love them, fear them, need them, despise them when they invade our dreams a little too often. Their ubiquitous and yet marginalized presence in our lives rests on the contradictory emotions elicited by such creatures. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes “The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety and fantasy (ataractic […]
Aeron Alfrey creates unique imagery inspired by strange fantasy worlds filled with monsters, magic and death. His art has been published in numerous books and shown in galleries around the world. His monsters, perfect for our “12 Days” feature, are often frightening, but all are so intricately designed that every time you look closely something else […]
If the truly Weird causes a sense of great dread, then the grotesque provides another approach to the inexplicable through aggressive horror and humor. Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that the truly grotesque stands “at the margin of consciousness between the known and unknown…calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world” (3). Caught […]
I first met Travis Louie in 2008 at Carrie Ann Baade’s Surrealist Tea, where a lovely group of artists got a chance to meet and eat tiny delectable sandwiches and drink a good spot of tea. I imagine the Victorian beasts of Louie might do something similar, for certainly they seem to be the most well behaved of all […]
O.L. Samuels is an artist who makes his strange and beautiful creatures “with the help of the spirit.” Each piece is carved very precisely based on how the spirit moves him and then he spends hours painstakingly decorating them. He has used tree trunks, branches and roots, layers of paint, glitter, sawdust and beads. Surprisingly he is […]