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Ruffs, Pearls, & Rotten First-Fruits: The Art of Nicole Duennebier

The marvelously vibrant works of Nicole Duennebier remind me of a heavenly amalgamation of 17th- and 18th-century aristocratic portraits, vanitas still lifes, and biological illustrations of mysterious deep-sea creatures or perhaps microscopic entities. These complex arrangements are both glisteningly corporeal and abstract, evoking the opaline, viscous translucency of internal organs, at the same time as they cluster in formations seemingly impossible to this earth. They appear to represent a combination of vegetable, organic, and mystical matter. With intriguing titles like Floral Hex and Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness, her series of remarkable paintings present “hybrid images that resemble Baroque still lifes, coral, fur, crystals and close-ups of microscopic fauna,” as well as “chandeliers of polyps, spores, and puss, glowing, growing, oozing, dripping…with hundreds of strands of delectable tiny spheres, tangling and cascading…”

Grapes and pearls are visible in beautiful shimmering dimensions of color, reminding me of the tempting bloom on the exquisitely painted fruit in antique still lifes. Ruffled formations abound, resembling the stiff ruffs and elaborate vestiture of a bygone era. With her classical, masterly style, Duennebier creates a world of fascinating, alluring, corrupt, repulsive, alien, and divine organisms and systems. They are invested with the otherworldly light of the Old Masters, while depicting ungodly combinations, things that ought not to be contemplated too closely. The fantastic forms emerging from the dark void of the background are sui generis, bursting forth in a profusion of incandescent textures and transparent layers.

As the artist statement on her Website elaborates:
Natural phenomenon—dermoid cysts, fungus, invasive flora/fauna—and my love of candied, old-master opulence have a constant presence in my work….I’ve become accustomed to the fact that nature itself, or anything living really, never totally allows you to have a perfectly idealized experience. Everything is always spewing, dripping, rotting a little. Similar to 17th century still-life paintings with those vibrant lusty fruits that show the light fuzz of beginning decay, I don’t see these works as allegorical depictions. To me it is more the realization that both the rot and the fruit are a textural attraction in their delicacy…
The classic chiaroscuro darkness in still-life is a primordial soup, a pool of black that springs forth a decadent, and sometimes horrible, growth. I’ve always been attracted to the obsolete idea of spontaneous generation, all that awful stuff popping into existence for no reason. The paintings reflect this; they are more spontaneous generations than firmly rooted in actual living organisms.

The luscious strangeness of the objects/beings Duennebier depicts, along with her historical influence, composes an incredibly dynamic and scintillating aesthetic universe. Tumorous, malignant, lavish, sumptuous, delicate all at once, vegetable, animal, mineral, undersea, microbial, alien, viscera, carcass, the proliferations of renegade life in Nicole Duennebier’s art are iterations of an invasive, entropic, and unsettling, ever-evolving beauty. The gorgeousness of the cancerous growths of her imagination is limitless. Vaguely sinister, with their alarming encroachment of color, these organic forms are sublime, intricate, and arrestingly unique.

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Anna Akhmatova

This land, although not my native land,
Will be remembered forever.
And the sea’s lightly iced,
Unsalty water.

The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk,
The air is heady, like wine,
And the rosy body of the pines
Is naked in the sunset hour.

And the sunset itself on such waves of ether
That I just can’t comprehend
Whether it is the end of the day, the end of the world,
Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.

— Anna Akhmatova

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Dancing with Ecstasy: The Art of Hydeon

Ian Ferguson/Hydeon creates fascinating, lurid, elaborately vivid artworks depicting group scenes and vignettes from decadent, fantastic civilizations. Striking black and red predominate among bold and vibrant colors, like slashes in the face. The rather flat perspectives and characterizations of the individual faces are reminiscent of medieval and Renaissance paintings. The strange composition and techniques serve to give his work its utterly unique feeling, also its sinister yet alluring air.

Naive and sumptuous at the same time, his mixed-media drawings parade a multitude of masked perverse figures in a claustrophobic world of morbid and lavish imagery. The color is so intense that it draws the viewer irresistibly into these complex tableaux, as if one could become lost in them, in this place and time of a past that never quite existed, a princely realm that never was, but is rather an inventive amalgamation of many, as well as a starkly new imagining.

Hydeon states that his arrestingly imaginative work is inspired by “ancient civilizations, Baroque, Gothic, and Victorian-era architectural movements, medieval, folk, and outsider art, ancient myths, fairy tales, and ideas of consciousness.” Many of Hydeon’s works are available at the Mortal Machine Gallery in New Orleans, including the second one shown below, Losing at Backgammon.

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Marina Mika

Marina Mika is a Croatian artist currently based in Berlin, whose stylish drawings are both minimalistic and highly detailed. Her graceful, attenuated figures are reminiscent of Art Deco illustrations. Influences from Japanese art are also visible in the sinuous contours and depictions of natural forms. Languorously long-bodied, berobed, bedizened with streams of flowers, stars, and feathers dripping like luminous pearls, these precisely drawn, poisonously elegant creatures with their mysterious smiles hover on the obscure brink between witch and fashion plate. One imagines their thin, spiderlike movements, their romances and intrigues beneath strange heavens, as their endless hair spills forth beautifully into the dark air. Black and white, meticulously rendered in pen and ink, Mika’s illustrations also contain hints of delicate color, splashes of dull gold – antique gilding fading off from a decadent world.

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Withermore: The Creations of Caitlin McCormack

The uncanny fiber sculptures and paintings of Caitlin McCormack convey a sense of torment, embattlement, and even tenderness. There is an organic sensation of movement, chaotic groupings and orchestrations, and also an element of whimsy and grotesque humor. These little crocheted creatures, as strangely alive as strokes of paint would render them, embody all the rancor, violent struggle, and darkling energies inherent in the mysterious world.

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Heavenly Inferno – The Church of Sanctus

The new Heavenly Inferno collection from longtime favorite of mine, Sanctus, is available today at 9pm BST. Featuring bishop sleeves, puffed velvet sleeves, trailing hems, fine lace, corsets embroidered with Immaculate Hearts, in gorgeous shades of red, blue, and green, these pieces are each designed and lovingly handsewn by Lucinda Sinclair. They perfectly blend religious iconography with historically inspired silhouettes, dramatic, lush aesthetic conceptions, and modern ethical garment-making.

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The Carnivorous Rose: Art by Kristin Kwan

Kristin Kwan’s realistic, sweet, and melancholy paintings explore themes of life, death, and rebirth through the prism of mythology and lore. Her work, characterized by gorgeous flowers, alien landscapes, animals pierced by flora, and maidens surrounded by serpentine swirls of hair, has elements of surrealism and fantasy, allegory and whimsy, and is sometimes reminiscent of historical portraiture and Madonna paintings. She has a solo exhibition currently showing at the Nucleus Gallery in Portland through October 4th.

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Fine Art and Fashion Design by Hogan McLaughlin

Hogan McLaughlin is an excitingly fantastic, dark, romantic, architectural fashion designer as well as dancer and visual artist. His spidery and highly stylized illustrations, reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley, are full of elegance, melancholy, and bespeak a world of decadent, spindly, eerie beings with outlandish proportions of garment and roiling, torrential masses of hair. The historical influences in his art and design are gracefully eloquent, and he is wonderful at combining stark, structural silhouettes with the soft, romantic, and flowing.

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Tribal Macabre: Miyu Decay

Miyu Decay is the jewelry label of fine artist and designer Stephanie Inagaki. Her signature bat skull is a motif that adorns many of her accessories. Cats, crows, and wolves also have their place among Miyu Decay’s themes. Influenced by her studies in Middle Eastern dance as well as by Victorian mourning jewelry, her designs often amalgamate the tribal, the macabre, and the mystical. The delicate detail of the tiny skulls is contrasted with the talismanic power of the pieces.

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