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 […]
Eric Schaller is a writer and illustrator possessing a unique, precise, and decidedly weird aesthetic. He has contributed art to publications such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Last Drink Bird Head, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris story cycle, most notably in the chapbook of “The Exchange,” later included in the Ambergris collection City of Saints and Madmen. Earlier this […]
“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 […]