Category: {fantasy}

Fantasy

Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments

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This weekend’s book purchase looks like an expensive volume but was actually pretty reasonably-priced for a book that’s 126 years old. This is no. III of a three-volume set of the Thousand and One Nights translated by Edward William Lane, published by Chatto & Windus in 1883. I bought it mainly for the copious wood engraving illustrations by William Harvey although the book itself is a beautiful, if battered, work of art: gold edging on the boards, marbled endpapers (something we did at Savoy for Lucy Swan’s novel) and marbling on the paper edges (Lucy’s book had gold edging). Like many fine old books the heavy boards and thick paper stock means it’s very heavy and it’s these quality materials which have helped it survive this long.

I wasn’t going to put this through the flatbed scanner so a few photo snaps follow.

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Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists

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The Chemical Wedding by Madeline Von Foerster (2008).

Art lovers in the NYC area are advised to get down to the Saturday opening of this exhibition at the Dabora Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for some great paintings and a free glass of absinthe. Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists is curated by Pam Grossman who runs one of my favourite art sites, Phantasmaphile. Further details can be found at the gallery pages which include links to the artists’ websites.

Dabora Gallery and Phantasmaphile’s Pam Grossman are proud to usher in the spring season with the group show “Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists,” on view from March 14th through April 12th, 2009. It features fourteen of the most vital and visionary women artists working in the US today.

In literal terms, a fata morgana is a mirage or illusion, a waking reverie, a shimmering of the mind. Named for the enchantress Morgan le Fay, these tricks of perception conjure up a sense of glimpsing into another world, whether it be the expanses of an ethereal terrain, or the twilit depths of the psyche. The artists of “Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists” deftly utilize the semiotics of mysticism, fantasy, and the subconscious in their work, thereby guiding the viewer through heretofore uncharted realms – alternately shadowy or luminous, but always inventive.

Yoko Ono recently said, “I think all women are witches, in the sense that a witch is a magical being.” Each artist in this show is a sorceress in her own right. Endowed with fecund imaginations and masterful craftsmanship, their work transforms the viewer: we become spellbound, bearing witness to their attempts to reconcile the desire for a diurnal beauty with the lure of a lush and riotous inner wilderness. The fantastical is counterpoint to the ferocious, the monstrous to the marvelous. Allusions to myth and metamorphosis abound, as these works channel their own heroine spirits and tell their own secret tales. Here, frame is magic threshold, bidding us to take a breath, and cross over.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has

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The original Polish poster by the incredible Franciszek Starowieyski.

The shrinking pool of films still unavailable on DVD contracted by at least one title recently with the surprise appearance in the UK of The Hourglass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod klepsydra; 1973) from the distinctively-named Mr Bongo Films. I’ve been waiting to see this for at least twenty years so being able to walk into Fopp and buy a copy for a mere £12 strikes me as one of those small but rarely acknowledged miracles of contemporary existence.

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Director Wojciech Has is  better known for his long and weird 1965 adaptation of the equally long and weird Saragossa Manuscript, a rambling semi-fantastical novel by Jan Potocki from around 1805. David Lynch described Saragossa as “Simultaneously horrific, erotic and funny…this is one mother of a film,” and the same description could be applied to The Hourglass Sanatorium, as far as I’m aware the only other excursion Has made into full-on strangeness. If anything, Sanatorium outdoes the earlier film on just about every level. Readers familiar with the writings of Bruno Schulz will already have recognised the title as being a truncated variant of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the second and final collection of Schulz’s unique and very strange stories.

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The art of Ryan Martin

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To Live and Die in LA.

I really like Ryan Martin’s beautiful paintings of fey youths in vibrant, vaguely surreal scenarios. Those familiar with the work of Leonardo da Vinci may recognise Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want as being based on The Lady with an Ermine (1490). There isn’t a great deal of Martin’s work around since he’s only just starting out but you can see more of it at Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art.

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Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.

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Cupid de Locke.