Restlessness and uncertainty characterize the mesmerizing artwork of Jenna Andersen. Faceless figures, engulfed by vegetation native to her home state of Virginia, explore mysterious forests and yards. Ghosts peer statically over these spaces, voyeurs to a strange and untouchable world, watching time pass and reality warp, their feelings and identities hidden behind a sheet. Other […]
Author: Hayley Evans
Liminality and Bizarre Beauty: Doll Sculptures by Virginie Ropars
Virginie Ropars is an artist from Brittany, France. A degree in graphic arts led her to the video game industry, and afterwards she knew she wanted to make things with her hands. Her magical, feminine characters, made of fabric and polymer clay, hover in the liminal space between doll art, sculpture, and clothing design. While […]
Update from Postminimalist Tattoo Artist Okan Uckun
We featured the work of Okan Uckun in the past, but in the years since he has continued to create gorgeous tattoos. Formerly based in Turkey, he now works out of Bang Bang Tattoo in NYC. Minimalist tattoos seem to be all the rage at the moment (for example, see here), but Uckun distinguishes his […]
Poisons Museum: Sculptural Critiques by Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov
These spindly sculpted lifeforms are the work of Moscow-based artist Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov. After studying bioengineering and philology in university, he turned to art as a way of expressing his curiosity and concerns around science, knowledge acquisition, and biological processes. “Poisons Museum” is a project dedicated to the problem of global information and “information that can […]
Colorful, Grotesque Creature Mash-Ups by Tom Strom
Tom Strom is an artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland, who paints and tattoos colorful “creature mash-ups.” Among his inspirations are anime and Disney movies—the former for monster design, the latter for colorful backgrounds. He began tattooing over twenty years ago, during which time he experimented with different techniques and developed his style, which is an […]
Darkness and Innocence in the Illustrations of Yuriko Shirou
Yuriko Shirou is a self-taught illustrator based in Mexico. He has worked in many different art styles—including manga, American comics, and figurative art—and has done projects for publishers around the world. His illustrations resemble morbid fairy tales, conflating innocence with darkness. The moth is a recurring symbol, channeling Mesoamerican beliefs surrounding death omens and the […]
Shadow Sculptures Made of Trash by Tim Noble and Sue Webster
If you have never seen the shadow sculptures of Tim Noble and Sue Webster, it’s time you did. By casting light on grotesque assemblages (or “anti-monuments“) of random trash, scrap metal, and even taxidermied animals, this British collaborative duo creates inkblots of ordinary life; things you might perceive are romantic standoffs, wasted youth, and copulating […]
Seungyea Park: Monsters are Everywhere
The art of Seungyea Park (aka, Spunky Zoe) is a meeting with “monstrousness”—that is, the product of our fear as it festers among us. Fear is necessary to social systems because it distinguishes the self from a monstrous Other—the enemy, the freak. “Monsters are everywhere,” Park writes, because we compulsively create them. To help herself […]
Dark Dream Characters in the Paintings of Bill Mayer
Bill Mayer is a well-known artist currently based in Decatur, Georgia, whose curious creatures have been widely featured on magazines, ads, stamps, posters, and more. Since an early age, Mayer has been attracted to things that are strange; this leaning towards oddity is evident in the selection of gouache paintings shown here, which include anthropomorphic […]
Alone in a Dystopian Landscape: Concept Art by Simon Stalenhag
Working in the field of concept art, Simon Stalenhag has conceived a whole world. Using his homeland of Sweden as a backdrop (and more recently, California), Stalenhag merges reality with fantasy, turning coniferous forests and snow-shrouded fields into the sites of alien encounters, apocalypse scavenging, and bloody cyborgian crimes. He spent a lot of time […]