Magnificent Creatures | The Every Thursday Free Online Comic

DWAP Productions has decided that to attain full perfection, the Magnificent Creatures site needs a touch of crazy chick-ness – so here I am! My name is J and I’m A Parallel Beast’s new High Priestess! I’m going to spew textual content related to such topics as art, music, books, culture in general (etc., etc.), and of course DWAP Productions and their dark deeds.

The first thing I want to announce is the imminent release of the sweet little comic called Absolute Monsters, by Dale Wilson and DCastr (Taco Comics). It’s a monster fantasy,  packed to the brim with formidable creatures who incessantly chew on each other and root for their favorite politicians, a male and a female, who meet in the “City Hall of Municipal Suspicion” to battle for the right to “Bed the Legislation”. The art is gloriously goofy and spunky. Come back here often.

Sitting on my desk is a blood-red CD-R from Phantasma Disques called “A Witch House & Okkvlt Guide to Twin Peaks vol. 2.” Witch house, which pulls influences from all over the place (goth, dark ambient, Throbbing Gristle, hiphop, dubstep, boybands, you name it) seems tailor-made for Twin Peaks tributes. Heck, David Lynch is smeared all over the whole genre. With it, you get odd humor, an ability to find strangeness and poignancy in the kitschiest areas of pop culture, and of course love for eerie sounds and sound effects. The Phantasma Disques compilation is a noisy, gothy froth with some tracks teetering on the verge of collapsing into total formlessness and unintelligibility. There is of course a total glut of witch house on the Internet; YouTube and vimeo are filled with producers with names like =▼†■□■†▲=. The compilation is still highly recommended because it offers some freakier examples. Here is a track from it, created by Mater Suspiria Vision (who actually run the Phantasma Disques label).

MATER SUSPIRIA VISION - The Ring (2010) from Mater Suspiria Vision on Vimeo.

I spent last week’s Doomsday wandering around San Francisco’s own “Art Basel” – the new artMRKT contemporary art fair. What surprised me most was the relative absence of sleazy & garish pop surrealism, given SF’s prominent role in the development of the psychedelic/punk subcultures that influenced the said style. Maybe all the lowbrow stuff was at the San Francisco Fine Art Fair, where, as I recall, there was no lack of it last year?.. Meanwhile, artMRKT was big on quiet realism, pretty abstracts, and various quirky objects. There was even a large 19th-century style academic landscape on a prominent wall (whaaaaat? I mean, I’m not at all against academic painting, but that was a modern & contemporary art fair, and didn’t modern art arise as an antithesis to that kind of work? Or was there a feminist slogan or a corporate logo in the lower left corner which I didn’t notice? Or am I being bitchy?) Anyway. There also were some decent works by a couple of the art world’s most overblown figures (Vik Muniz, Damien Hirst), as well as a small number of mildly disturbing pieces, including Margaret de Lange’s “gothabilly” photographs of her own daughters in the wild. Oh, and here’s a list of works which I personally found the most interesting.

1. Michael Wolf’s photographs (Robert Koch Gallery)

The 2010 World Press Photo recipient, Michael Wolf was represented by pictures from two of his most enthralling series – “Architecture of Density” and “Tokyo Compression.” The former consists of huge photographs of tower blocks, with no top or bottom seen, which emphasizes the architecture’s absolutely monstrous scale. Those pieces remind me of Andreas Gursky’s masterworks “99 Cent” and “Chicago Board of Trade,” where the proverbial sites of modern capitalism are transformed into maddening abstractions. As for “Tokyo Compression,” those are photos of people in crammed subways, with their faces pressed against steamy windows. Their eyes are closed, and they are all very beautiful, like Laura Palmers wrapped in plastic. There is a solemnity to those images, as if each face has been fossilized that way. The works are brimming with social pathos, as if each and every one of them was meant to stand as a condemnation to the ruthless modern times. In a way, this series makes me think that Michael Wolf might be a 21st-century Social Realist.

©Michael Wolf official website

2. Chul Hyun-Ahn’s light installations (Timothy Yarger Gallery)

Using fluorescent lights, boxes and mirrors, Chul Hyun-Ahn (influenced by Zen Buddhism, yes he is!) creates fascinating spaces for you to stare into and imagine that you’re staring into infinity. The most cunning ones are those that suggest corridors which bend upward or downward. Lovely art magic, Olafur Eliasson-style.

©Juxtapoz

3. Judy Pfaff’s photogravures (Tandem Press)

There is no need for surrealism when you have images of stupefyingly ornate Turkish ceilings collaged together so as to provoke a feeling of the absurd (not sure if that was the artist’s intention though… but anyway). There is something alien and even sickening in these symbols of uncontrolled wealth. Off topic: Judy Pfaff decided to use silver-leaf frames for her photogravures, which was a terrific idea. Very stylish.

©Tandem Press

4. Dinh Q. Lê’s Buddha and Jesus (Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

That was such a powerful piece that I can’t wrap my head around the fact that it wasn’t displayed more prominently. Hm, to my surprise I can’t even find a picture of it on the web, even though I’m sure I saw the work somewhere before, maybe even at the SF MOMA. It is a large piece, with an image of a guy woven between Buddha and Jesus (weaving images out of photo strips is what Dinh Q. Lê does). A glorious combination: the contemporary man, ghostly, dissolving into a grid, positioned between those monolithic figures with all the weight of history behind them. And in a way he is also woven into them, kind of feeding them. Examples of Dinh Q. Lê’s work can be found here.

5. Awesome works on paper, especially collages (Gallery Paule Anglim)

Collage is the mother of the 20th-century culture, suckaz!!!! At the artMRKT there were some sweet examples, which I will very gladly share.

A punch-in-the-face collage by Californian artist Jess, which my husband described as FIERCE. Fitting word.

From Underthesun

A piece by Ken Graves, known for his exquisite surrealistic homoerotic works. Not sure if this is the one I saw at the fair, but he has a lot in a similar style, and they’re all very good.

©Ken Graves and Eva Lipman

And, finally, behold the acerbic political works by former economist Enrique Chagoya.

From Biennale of Sydney

From artnet

Posted by J

Time to meet the man behind the art part of the new Absolute Monsters project: David Castro aka DCastr. His monsters and dark heroes are drawn with enviable skill and gusto, and they look so damn delighted that you can’t help but feel happy for them. You can see that the man truly feels for his monsters - whose most prominent feature is almost always long beautiful teeth.

Linkses:

DCastr on deviantART
Taco Comics - DCastr’s blog
DCastr on Facebook
DCastr on Twitter

This cute and demented guy actually reminds me of some creatures that can be found in the work of the surrealist artist/ feminist blogger Kristen Ferrell:

Posted by J