Ransom & Mitchell is an artistic duo based out of San Francisco, comprised of Stacey Ransom (designer, digital artist) and Jason Mitchell (director, photographer). Together, they produce vivid, story-filled fantasy images. Their process starts from the ground up, combining set design, costuming, and prop construction with computer graphics. Drawing influence from the “Italian and Dutch […]
Category: Sci-Fi
10 Movies You Should Watch in 2017
As in life, every year represents a clean slate, a new starting point for movies to excite or disappoint. That’s how things roll. 2017 has already proven the point. On the one hand, we’ve had Martin Scorsese’s majestic “Silence.” On the other, Justin Kurzel’s rubbish “Assassin’s Creed.” As we look forward into the remaining 10 […]
Cyborg Sensuality: Mind-bending Digital Illustrations by Giovanni Maisto
Giovanni Maisto is a Venice-based concept artist who experiments with the feminine body in surreal, sci-fi worlds. With the rate of modern technological advancements and the possibilities of bio-engineering, our future is often represented as sterile, unnatural, and devoid of history and meaning—but Maisto’s cyborg bodies are different. Infused with mythology, classical architecture, robotic components, […]
Dystopias, Utopias, and Sexuality: Collages by Jordan Westre
Vancouver-based artist Jordan Westre makes eye-catching collages that anxiously depict future utopias, the apocalypse, and female sexuality. Mixing cutouts from vintage magazines with those from pornographic and editorial materials from any decade, Westre links the values of modern society to past ones, often pulling out cross-generational similarities in regards to war and the treatment of […]
The End is Nigh: 10 Post-Apocalyptic Movies in 2016–2017
From the Book of Revelation, to Y2K, to the supposed end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, it is fair to say that people have long been fascinated by the “end of the world.” This is part of our linear, fatalistic, religious, and/or increasingly nihilistic thinking: If everything had a beginning, then everything has to […]
Dark Fantasy and Industrialism in Stefan Gesell’s Otherworldly Portraiture
Stefan Gesell is a Munich-based photographer who composes breathtaking images that shock and seduce the imagination. Mixing dark fantasy imagery with industrialism and science fiction, Gesell uses his experience as a former graphic designer to tell elaborate stories using the lens. Dark, confident, and even tortured figures confront the viewer with tremendous strength, each seemingly […]
Stunning Animal–Machine Hybrids by Heidi Taillefer
Nature and technology collide in the beautifully bizarre paintings of Heidi Taillefer, a Montreal-based artist who has been showing her work for more than twenty years. Her colorful style is informed by the early twentieth-century surrealists, summoning a broad range of figurative traditions, from the drama of baroque portraiture to whimsical steampunk imagery. Taillefer’s themes […]
Creepy Canada: 10 Horror Films from the North
Despite its picturesque views of mountains, sun-kissed prairies, and deep woods, Canada has a reputation for being a bizarre and scary place. In 1971, Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye argued that the main trend (or symptom) in Canadian poetry was “a terror of the soul” invoked by the vast and unfeeling landscape.[1] While critics have […]
Priestess of the Dystopia: The Artwork of Ashley Joncas
Ashley Joncas is a Seattle-based artist and the founder of the multidisciplinary studio énigme. Combining minimalist aesthetics with “deep atmospheric qualities of an ominous color spectrum,” Joncas’ portfolio is a window into a bleak yet beautiful world. Rain-swept horizons and wandering cloaked figures ignite the imagination, producing a somber yet wistful mood. Joncas is an […]
Bigger Than Us: The Lone Cosmonaut by David Schermann
David Schermann is a conceptual photographer based in Vienna. In a recent project titled “Bigger Than Us,” Schermann brought a Russian spacesuit deep into the mountains of Vorarlberg, Austria. Digitally painted red, the sweeping mountains and valleys take on an otherworldly quality, like a deserted mirror of Earth. Both familiar and alien, the setting provides […]