Brian Despain – Flow, oil on panel Back in 2016, even though the decision was made for very sound and noble reasons, I was heartbroken when it was announced that owner and curator Kirsten Anderson was closing the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle. The closure of a gallery that, for nearly 20 years, wasn’t just Seattle’s flagship for […]
Where cutting-edge design fuses heavenly bodies, celestial chimera, with the future of human evolution is where we find ‘Shift Souls,’ the captivating new spring Haute Couture collection from Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, recently unveiled at Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The ‘Shift Souls’ collection was inspired by early celestial cartography and its representations of mythological […]
When it comes to working with needle, thread, and linen (or needle, thread, and flesh), Melbourne-based artist Adipocere works a singular sort of magic. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that they whisper incantations over their stitches as they conjure dreamlike images of delicate figures interacting with creatures, plants, and flowers, each […]
Maika: I cannot get enough of photographs that transports me out of myself, photographers whose lenses serve as liminal zones that draw me in and make the world around me fall away as I’m drawn through a portal of their own creation. Nona Limmen is one such photographer. Would that I could afford to surround […]
Maika: For me, attending Death Salon Seattle was a life-altering experience. In addition to the friends I got to meet in person for the first time, new friends made, finally attending one of Paul Koudounaris’ talks, and, of course, meeting The Modern Mortician and Kermit the Dog, had I not attended, I would not have […]
Maika: My favorite photographers tend to be those who create entire worlds, both large and small. Worlds that I wish I could myself inhabit, but instead may only experience via tantalizing and tormenting glimpses, and perhaps what bits manage to permeate my dreams. The singularly beautiful and haunting work of photographer Laura Makabresku has been one […]
Maika: I’m every bit as enamored of and profoundly moved by Christina Mrozik’s artwork as I was when I wrote about it in the summer of 2017. Late last year Mrozik launched a Kickstarter campaign for a book of her drawings and writings, entitled Haunted Bodies. It was overwhelmingly successful – fully funded almost immediately – […]
Maika: When I began writing for Haute Macabre in 2016, one of the very first things I wanted to do was share an essay I’d already been writing and rewriting for years. It’s about the work of artist Scott Radke, one of my favorite contemporary artists, who has since become a friend. Each time I […]
I can scarcely believe the next Oddities Flea Market is less than a week away. While I wish I could magic myself there, it seems like only yesterday I was finally attending one of these dazzling events myself. Every time the market has taken place in New York, I’ve watched from my home, clear across the country in […]
Last Monday, as I was sitting in LAX waiting for my flight home to Portland, my stomach and chest both unpleasantly writhing knots of feels about current events, Sonya sent me a link to this fantastic shirt that their friend, Seattle-based artist Mary Anne Carter, had recently made. Carter redesigned the iconic “I Want To Believe” […]
It’s Pride Month and nearly a year has passed since my essay, “How Not To Be Seen: Unlearning Invisibility,” was first published here on Haute Macabre. So lately I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on that particular piece of writing which, to my surprise and subsequent joy, ended up helping more people than myself […]
As Haute Macabre readers, I expect many, if not most of you are already well acquainted with a certain late 19th century short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman entitled “The Yellow Wallpaper.” However if that title is unfamiliar to you, before you read further, I urge you to take a few moments to experience an […]
Today we’re coveting the most recent version of Dutch designer Anouk Wipprecht‘s fabulous Spider Dress (here’s the first). We remember when it first debuted back in 2015, but when isn’t reactive robotic futuristic spider couture relevant? Wipprecht’s arresting 3D-printed mechatronic design reacts to the respiration of its wearer and movements of nearby people using Intel’s Edison […]
The first time I encountered the wondrous creature that is Arran Shurvinton I was transfixed, but I had no idea who they were. Like many people, I’d simply found a viral video of someone wearing fantastic Nosferatu makeup and prosthetics, dressed in a shiny gold halter top and frilly ivory bloomers, dancing in a vintage […]
Southeast England-based artist Nora Fok creates exquisite works of wearable textile art that look like they were woven using spider silk. In reality Fok uses her own two hands and a fine nylon microfilament, not a team of highly specialized and unusually cooperative arachnids, but I’m no less amazed by her weaving, knitting, braiding, and knotting achievements. […]
I’m not terribly moved by Valentine’s Day. I’m a hopeless romantic in the right context, but the commercial holiday generally feels pretty hollow and forced to me. Or rather, it did until I found just the right angle from which to approach it. It started as one of those fanciful questions born of woolgathering: What if a sea […]
Some personal thoughts on 2017… Oh 2017, you were a very challenging and full year. In addition to all the weight, worry, and woe about current events, my personal life was fraught with stress, growing pains, and heartache, none of which was actually new to the year itself. But the tide well and truly turned […]
Months later and I’m still puzzling over Twin Peaks: The Return, trying to put my thoughts about it together into some coherent, conveyable form instead of just staring into the distance, amazed and awed. I want to discuss it and I’ve done so with friends in fits and starts, but there’s just so much process and speculate […]
Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, endlessly innovative and inspiring, just debuted her Spring 2018 Couture collection entitled “Ludi Naturae,” and now we all want to clothe ourselves in finned, leafy, scaled, and flowing dresses, gowns, and jumpsuits that look like living biotech sculptures from a futuristic utopian fever dream. ‘Ludi’ is the plural form of the Latin term […]
Our collective jaw is on the floor over Turkish designer Dilara Findikoglu‘s spectacular Spring/Summer 2018 collection. Debuted during London Fashion Week, “Seven Sisters of Inherited Sun” is a glamorous, politically and mythologically inspired amalgam of sumptuous gothic finery that’s both sleek and baroque, occult imagery, and a wonderfully lurid punk edge. From the Designer: “You are beside me, winter trees, […]
Cleveland-based artist Scott Radke creates beautifully haunting and utterly unique characters in the form of sculptures and marionettes made of wire, wood, epoxy resin, burlap, and acrylic paint. Some might be quick to describe his characters as otherworldly, but I find them perfectly at home here in this world; it’s just that they inhabit spaces most humans don’t […]
We’re currently wishing we could magic ourselves over to the National Gallery of Victoria where, as part of the NGV Triennial group exhibition, they’re featuring a jaw-dropping installation by Australian hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck, his largest work to date. Entitled Mass, the installation is comprised of 100 individual meter-high fiberglass and resin human skull forms that are piled […]
Looking back I wonder if I was an insomniac child. I don’t know enough or much at all, really, about human child development to know what’s normal. But I do know that, for as much of my childhood as I can remember, it always took me hours to fall asleep at night. On further thought, I […]
If you’re at least as excited as I am about the return of Stranger Things this very week (Friday, October 27th, for anyone who’s been out in the woods pursuing or running from Demogorgons) then you’ll no doubt be as delighted as I was to learn that Netflix partnered with Hasbro to create this wonderfully ominous Stranger Things-themed […]
If you’re interested in postmortem and/or old medical or crime scene photography (for starters), chances are good you’re already well acquainted with the wondrous Burns Archive. Founded in 1977 by Stanley B. Burns, MD, renowned author, curator, historian, collector, archivist, television/film consultant, and one of our personal heroes here at Haute Macabre, The Burn Archive is the largest private […]
Japanese metal artist Taiichiro Yoshida creates chimerical sculptures of birds and other animals using flowers and feathers made of copper, bronze, or silver. Yoshida forges his creatures’ exquisite blooms and plumes by hand using traditional hot metalworking techniques that date back to sometime between the 2nd and 3rd century BC. We’re especially covetous of the pieces in which Yoshida incorporates the animal’s […]
We’re thrilled to share the news of a marvelous and timely new book ready to come into being via Kickstarter. BECOMING DANGEROUS is a collection twenty personal essays written by “witchy femmes, queer conjurers, and magical rebels on summoning the power to resist.” BECOMING DANGEROUS is a nonfiction book of deeply personal essays by marginalised people using […]
We’re entranced by this phantasmagorical video created by designers Alexa Sirbu and Lukas Vojir with music by Zelig Sound. Entitled “flow/er“, the experimental CG short barely lasts 30 seconds, but that’s one of the amazing things about dreams. While in the mind of the dreamer they might feel as though they go on forever, as far as our brains are […]
We’re thrilled to share the news that tomorrow the extraordinary creatives at The Vacuum are releasing an exquisite new limited edition print entitled “A Vast Palimpsest.” It’s a stunning collaboration between Vacvvm co-founder Aaron Horkey and Pressure Printing and their biggest release to date. “This is a deluxe giclee reproduction of a pencil & gouache drawing I […]
I gasped audibly the first time I set eyes on the work of contemporary artist Leslie Ann O’Dell. Entirely self-taught, O’Dell combines photography, digital art, and sometimes traditional elements to create portraits of nightmarishly beautiful creatures, each born of her own imagination yet to me feel like still more characters from unknown folktales I’m now yearning […]
