It’s rare to feel as if an animal can possess you — inhabit your body, mind and spirit as if it were a new lover exploring all your real and artificial selves. Dress your dogs and cats with as many sweater vests, booties and hats as you want; they’ll never come close to the hybrid human qualities that […]
Amid all of the cynicism, snark, satire, and dark irony that pervades this 21st century culture, there is an unspeakable, insatiable need for the wondrous, the fantastic, the doorway into the mythic imagination. We sometimes forget the cost of that journey — how much it takes to truly grapple with alternative landscapes, creatures, or cultures that uncannily tap […]
In his artist statement, Chris Mars rallies a battle cry: “There are the voiceless, who cannot speak for themselves. These are the easiest ones to shrink down. There are words for the non-conformers, simple words that can be quickly acknowledged by those that buy in. Crazy. Faggot. Gang. Rich. One is sinful, one is lazy, one is violent by nature and one is […]
Stacey Steers’s Night Hunter film left me speechless the first time I watched it at the Denver Art Museum in 2011. At that exhibition, it was accompanied by the most delightful and creepy of dollhouses, which you peered into and could see looping clips of film. But it was the full-featured animation (16 minutes and 16 seconds) that […]
When I was in Berlin last spring to give a presentation on the Chapman Brothers and Goya, it was my good fortune to be taken through one of the strangest, most disorienting exhibits created by artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster in collaboration with architect David Adjaye and staged by Blain|Southern. My group was led into a seemingly innocuous […]
Shane LaVancher’s “Creatures” invites us into a lab of hybrids – somewhere in between our technological future and our cave-dweller past. These bodies are beautiful and monstrous, thriving on the ethereal gothic: it is Gattaca meets Nosferatu. In the press release for the show, LaVancher reminds us that “visible changes in the human body are often preceded by unseen changes in the mind. As […]
I first heard about Kate MacDowell’s wonderful sculptures from writer Maria Dahvana Headley while attending the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. MacDowell’s delicate, grotesque creations invert the strange hierarchy we place upon nature, with humankind at the top and the rest of the environment and animal kingdom, well, far below. You might […]
“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 […]