…Frontextos has become ritual, meditation, prayer. Action is the mantra.
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Via Film Equals
Strange Beauty: The Female Body Spectacle in Jodorowsky's, Santa Sangre
Her body is an “exotic” thing that cannot rest within the boundaries of appropriateness.
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Ashely Adams
Poetry by Ashely Adams
Jupiter
There is a storm older than the world (at the center of everything),
churning gods’ blood
(eating the flesh of their flesh).
Its daughters turned
into ice and rock under a jealous rain, bending
all the softness into metal.
(Don’t look).
This gale sings in hydrogen tongues
and swallows
swallows
swallows
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Ashely Adams is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of South Florida. Her work has appeared in Flyway, Heavy Feather Review, Fourth River, Anthropoid, Permafrost, OCCULUM and others. Her favorite astronomical body is the Galilean moon, Europa.
How To Make Our Bodies Of Open Space
There’s a photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe, her face hung like a moon and her hair pulled in a dark crescent, that has always haunted me. The image pulses with power, attacking the contemporary moment with the timelessness of an icon or a specter.
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Alex Iona
Zodiac Diptych by Alex Iona
To express the tragedy of a legend through a single gaze, to evoke emotion through posture, to shape an identity in the classical veil of mythology.
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Natasha Carlos
Self Portrait: Natasha Carlos
My body is present in my landscapes, because I want to reflect my immersive, exploratory relationship with nature. There are countless landscapes in art history that feature women as beautiful props in the foreground with nature serving as a mere backdrop. There is no real dialogue with the environment. Artists like Ana Mendieta and Judy Dater challenged that norm and prompt me to think of the role my own body plays in the landscape.
Penguis by Sebastiᾶo Salgado
Description: This photo provokes an image in my mind of the passing of millenia and the relentlessness of the cycles of life.
On Black & White Photography & a Memory
I have always been drawn to black and white photos more so than color. I know the basics of color theory: black is the reflection of no color and white is the reflection of all colors and the colors we perceive are a matter of how much of the color present in light is reflected versus how much is absorbed. But theory does not help me answer these aesthetic questions: What is the appeal of black and white photography? How do photos, whether in black and white or color, relate to the stories we tell ourselves about the world?
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Sketch by Arielle Jones
Alternative Gardens: 7 WOC Talk Wellness, Ritual, and Artist Identity
...in the flowers of their intersectional feminism
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Photo credit: John Eric Ligon
The Vintage-Inspired Jane Austen Playing Cards You've Been Looking For
Aces represent Pride and Prejudice; Hearts display Emma; Clubs detail Persuasion; and Diamonds showcase Sense and Sensibility.
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Photo Credit: Perfume Shrine
The Power of Scent: 7 Fragrances That Invoke The Supernatural
There is no remedy for the spell of fragrance. To me the most haunting aspect of scent is not the conjuring of someone else but of a former self—the ghost of you. I recently stumbled on a box of tiny perfume bottles that I collected as a child. As I pulled them out and dusted them off, I suddenly became overwhelmed with emotion. At first it was holding the bottles, seeing their colors and shapes and arranging them on my dresser that made me remember the little girl that did the very same thing decades ago.
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PHOTO CREDIT: Synesthesia Music Collective
A Visual Diary of Iranian-Dutch Singer-Songwriter & Multi-Mediaist, Sevdaliza
I immediately became engrossed with her trip-hop and R&B sound that is reminiscent of artists like Tricky, Massive Attack, and Portishead. The visually surreal magic of her videos is dark, ethereal, melancholy, evocative, and seductive. One can’t help think of Björk when watching the filmic narrative of the songs on screen with Sevdaliza’s opulent and Giger-esque biomechanical body in “Marilyn Monroe” or the erotic centauress in “Human.”
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Photography by Toby Penney
Toby Penney is a southern artist working in paint, photography, printmaking and multiple sculpture media. She creates work accepting, even glorifying simple objects and fleeting moments. Penney holds a sculpture degree from Middle Tennessee State University. From 2005 until 2010 she held a Vitreography internship with Master Printmaker Judith O’Rourke at Harvey K. Littleton Studios, in Western North Carolina. She was honored when asked by the studio to photograph the process for the first Littleton sanctioned studio manual/ book about Vitreography. In the Fall of 2008 Toby was the guest artist in the printmaking department at Penland School of Craft, working with book/paper artist Frank Brannon of Speak Easy Press. Find Penney’s paintings in private and corporate collections and museums. Her images can be found on the cover of Professional Artist Magazine and Hellbent Magazine and featured in Numinous Magazine, Feroce Magazine, and Polonium II, a book by David Downs, among others. She is currently developing a new publication featuring interviews with working artists and crafts people as well as exploring film making as a medium to expand her voice.
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Marcelles Murdock
Photo Essay: Harvesting Moonlight from Our Bodies
When my father took the bet and became a fulltime artist, my brother and I were teenagers. From the window of our comfortable luxury car he pointed towards a broken down truck; I remember him saying, "Well kids, if I do this, that’s the car we’ll be driving." Rather naïvely my brother and I chanted, "We don’t care dad—follow your dreams," and other mindless prat one says when they don’t know any better. The truth is, this world devours dreamers and breakdowns don’t end with our cars—uncertainty bleeds into every aspect of life. The road of an artist is wild and rough; even worse, when that road begins to narrow and show signs of an ending, that initial excitement of the unknown turns to fear. My father faces a future without the comforts of stability; he doesn’t always bare this burden well. It doesn’t help that there is a roar of voices ready "to tell him so" and accuse him of choosing his troubles—but my dad didn’t choose poverty, not really. He acknowledged the possibility of being broke, but he thought he could out craft disaster—he embraced the uncertainty of the road before him with every intention of making his way as an artist. It isn’t his fault that while the world appreciates art, it rarely values it.
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Via On the Fringe Cinema
Magick Mirror: A Few Places You'll Find Fairy Tale Fashion Relics
...a feverish quest for youth and beauty.
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via ToonBarn
Betty Boop: Vintage Animation For Your Inner Goth-Child
Halloween may be over, but who says the eerie, the spooky, and the outright weird must be seasonal? This compilation of vintage cartoons is all of those things and watchable all year round. Cartoons have not always been immediately associated with bright colors and light, child-friendly themes. In the early years of cinema, from the silent era and into the talkies, animated shorts were a constant accompaniment to feature films shown in cinemas. During this time, animated shorts were a vehicle for whimsical musical entertainment, but at the same time, they were not always the twee flights of fancy that became the overwhelming norm when the Hays Code came into strict enforcement. In pre-Code Hollywood, the animated short was an opportunity for artists to let their strangest aesthetic whims come to life. The shorts produced by Max and Dave Fleischer are particularly distinguishable by their surreal aesthetics and distinct German Expressionist influence. The following four cartoons exemplify the Fleischers' signature brand of the bizarre, fitting fare for anyone with a taste for creepy, vintage curiosities.
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