Wandering Gazes

Looking into the eyes of other walks of life, finding bits of myself...

[hifructosemag]

Widely considered one of China’s most significant contemporary artists, Zhong Biao creates surrealistic paintings that contemplate the passage of time, especially as it applies to China’s urban evolution. His explosive and colorful paintings are a visual collage of imagery representing his personal experiences, layered in with references to politics and contemporary Chinese society. These references include images of children in 1960s Cultural Revolution-era clothing, Han Dynasty terracotta figurines, beauty pageant imagery, and English language banners. Often, his works portray realistic figures that that seem to defy gravity, leaping and flying over spaces of blank canvas, set against dystopian Chinese cityscapes shown at different angles.

See more on Hi-Fructose.

[hifructosemag]

There may be no such thing as a magic carpet, but Argentine artist Alexandra Kehayoglou’s distinctive carpet designs will instantly transport you to another place. Her imaginative works have been described as romantic and fairytale-like woven playgrounds, imitating textures of nature like moss, sand, water, tree bark and grassy pastures, as in her “Pastureland” and “Garden” series. Kehayoglou sources her materials from the leftover scraps from her family’s carpet factory in Buenos Aires, shown here in this short video documentary about her work. One of Kehayoglou’s latest projects, titled “En los pies de Elpiniki” (At the foot of Elpiniki) is a giant, elaborately woven shoe that fantasizes about the beginnings of her family’s tradition of making carpets. 

See more on Hi-Fructose.

[apolloison]

That's fucking awesome!!

[hifructosemag]

Italian artist Agostino Arrivabene paints an iconographic universe that exists somewhere at the division between the real world from the spiritual realm. Previously featured here on our blog, his works include landscapes, portraits, and large paintings allegorical and apocalyptic in nature. Subjects of his paintings often appear as if from another time and place, celestial bodies and nudes emerging from the earth that recall the figures of those who influence him, particularly Gustave Moreau and Odd Nerdrum. Arrivabene describes his personal world as one that is eclectic and occult, where his artistic lanuage changes depending on his life experience. His upcoming solo exhibition at Cara Gallery in New York, “Hierogamy”, delves into mythological themes and ideas about personal intimacy, change, and time. 

See more on Hi-Fructose.

[hifructosemag]

Minnesota based artist Alex Kuno best describes his work’s narratives as apocalyptic, satiric fairytales. His mixed media illustrations are as dark as they are whimsical, following deranged subjects, often children, rendered in acrylics, graphite, chalk, ink, ballpoint pens and crayons on pine boards. His early series, after which he named his website, calls this world the “The Miscreants of Tiny Town”, inhabited by lost orphans looking for a home in an endless, foreboding landscape that has as much personality as its characters. Though nightmarish, there’s also a sense of romance in his young subjects’ undying desire to eke out a better existence for themselves. A story about romance is at the heart of Kuno’s latest series debuting on Valentine’s Day at Dorothy Circus Gallery in Rome. 

See more on Hi-Fructose.

[demonprincex]

Guidelines for Burroughskowski-Hemingway Monthly: A Hypermasculine Lit Mag

The following was performed and recorded live at Hopleaf by Cassandra, a comedy collective that seamlessly weaves outrageous characters, storytelling, live lit, and music into one hilarious live show.

DUDE 1: Hey there my man. If you’ve wandered on over to this little web portal, you must be interested in submitting a dark, rugged piece of prose to our humble little magazine, Burroughskowski-Hemingway Monthly.

 DUDE 2: But before you start banging on that typerwriter you keep in your grandma’s kitchen, you oughta know a few things.

 DUDE 3: We have some very specific guidelines for dudes and broads who want to submit their shit to our magazine

 DUDE 2: Yeah. And before you submit, you better make sure you know how we like to party around here.

 DUDE 1: We’re not your typical namby-pamby pussy-wussy realist lit mag.

 DUDE 2: This ain’t no Ploughshares or McSweeny’s dude.

 DUDE 1: We are a PULP FUSION ALT WORD ZINE.

 DUDE 3: We don’t believe in labels, genres, adjectives, clauses, human motivations, or cause and effect relationships.

 DUDE 2: We want your ass to dazzle us. Tear our fucking nuts off with your narrative-shattering grimy slimy gritty roadkill trash garbage sewage art.

 DUDE 1: We don’t like Victorian lady tea and crumpets stories, okay.

 DUDE 3: we’re POST POSTMODERN OKAY WE’RE EDGY

 DUDE 2: …also if you can work in some noirish elements and have the main character bang a hooker that dies before the story is out, that would be cool too.

 DUDE 3: NO WORD LIMITS JUST WRITE FOREVER DON’T EAT AND DEFINITELY DON’T SHOWER. NO COMIC SANS. NO GRAMMAR.

 DUDE 1: Narrative arcs and multi-dimensional characters are for nerd-ass squares, okay, make all your characters fucking talking bricks with bad attitudes, alright.

 DUDE 2: No growing no learning no feelings.

 DUDE 1: Also, We’re a non-paying market, the fuck you expect.

 DUDE 3: YOUR PAYMENT IS EXPOSURE. WE WILL EXPOSE THIS AWFUL EARTH TO YOUR DAMN DIRTY PROSE. ALSO WE WILL EXPOSE OURSELVES TO YOU AND/OR YOUR GIRLFRIEND

 DUDE 2: Also, don’t write anything that will make us feel guilty about being MEN’S MEN, okay? Don’t talk about gross things like feelings or periods or historical contexts of oppression that have led to a general over-valuing of writing that is perceived to be individualistic and aggressive in an anti-social, hyper-masculinized way…

 DUDE 1: ….uh

 DUDE 3: OUR WRITERS ARE MEN. AND BROADS WHO LIKE FUCKING MEN. WITH BALLS. OKAY!

 DUDE 1: We accept all types of work and writers as long as it’s just FILTHY with grit.

 DUDE 3: HERE’S A PROCESS TIP! WRITE AT THE BAR WHILE GIVING OFF AN AIR OF BROODING MYSTERY AND NINE DOLLAR GROCERY STORE WHISKEY THAT IS NOT AT ALL DISCONCERTING TO BE SITTING NEXT TO!

 DUDE 2: OH HELL YEAH

 DUDE 1: Things we like in a story:

 DUDE 3: BITCHES WITH LEGS. BROWN BOOZE. CIGARETTES. CIGARETTE SMOKE. GUN SMOKE. GUNS. MURDER. INTRIGUE. BULL RIDING. MEN FIGHTING AS THEIR ONLY WAY OF SHOWING HUMAN AFFECTION. NOT USING QUOTATION MARKS FOR DIALOGUE

 DUDE 1: Things we fucking hate include:

 DUDE 2: Women talking to other women about something other than a man, black characters that don’t use some weird affectation of jive talk, people that don’t wear fedoras, blind characters who aren’t magical and wise, lesbian characters that don’t become straight when they meet our rugged, square jawed protagonist

 DUDE 3: AND TINY DOGS THAT DON’T MOTHERFUCKING HUNT

 DUDE 2: DON’T WRITE ABOUT THAT SHIT

 DUDE 3: Don’t you dare write about that shit.

 DUDE 1: Send us your werewolf police detective screenplays. Send us your cowboy that fucks three-pussied aliens stories. Send us your haikus about chasing beaver in Logan Square.

 DUDE 3: SEND US YOUR SHIT.

 DUDE 1: If you think your work meets these guidelines, just scrawl it on the back of a postcard with a buffalo on the front of it and drop it into the postbox

 DUDE 2: We use a PO box because we don’t want THE MAN to track us down, MAN

 DUDE 1: Also our moms got tired of piles and piles of short stories about wrestling zombie Teddy Rosevelt ending up on our doorsteps and shit.

 DUDE 2: Yeah.

 DUDE 3: OH HELL YEAH

 DUDE 1: Anyway, thanks for checkin out this dank dark corner of the web, man and or lady person. And thanks for reading Burroughskowski-Hemingway Monthly. Party on…

 DUDE 3: Party the FUCK on!

End

[therealuniverse]

Van Gogh and the Morning Star Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ is perhaps one of the most iconic depictions of the night sky. In fluid brushstrokes of blue, yellow and white, the sky is a swirling mass of stars glowing above the peaceful village. It is a landscape of energy connected to the quiet earth by dark spires of Cypress trees. Given van Gogh’s attention to detail in his other works depicting the night sky, researchers believe that in ‘Starry Night’ the dominant white star left of centre is the Morning Star. It is now common knowledge that Venus is in fact both the Morning and the Evening Star. When the sky is clear, you can see Venus glowing brightly to the west at night or the east in the morning. It is the closest planet to the Earth and because its orbit is inside ours, it seems to follow the Sun around the sky. When Venus is positioned on one side of our Sun, it follows behind it, making an appearance not long after sunset. As the sky grows darker, it begins to shine brightly as the Evening Star. When Venus is on the opposing side of the Sun, it appears to lead the Sun on its journey. Only a few hours before dawn, Venus rises from the horizon once more as the Morning Star. However, once the Sun follows, the sky is already too bright for Venus to be visible. After the Sun and the Moon, Venus is the brightest object in our sky. Named after the Roman goddess of love, its resplendence is due to the highly reflective clouds coating the entire planet. This permanent cover of dense clouds is composed of 3 layers, with the lowest one containing droplets of sulphuric acid that stop most of the sunlight from penetrating through. Only 20% of the Sun’s light reaches the rocky surface of Venus. It warms up the rock and releases heat in the form of infrared radiation. This radiation is then trapped by the thick cloud cover, causing the planet to heat up in an extreme example of the Greenhouse Effect. While the scorching surface and inhospitable nature of Venus has given rise to the epithet “Earth’s evil twin”, it continues to be a dazzling sight in the night sky. When writing to his brother, van Gogh described a night in which he saw the country through his window. It was long before sunrise, “with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.” But despite the many names Venus has had throughout history, this luminous planet continues to infiltrate our culture - one example of which can be found in van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’. ~ eKAT IMAGE CREDIT: ‘The Starry Night’ (1889)  SOURCES: 1, 2, 3   Rees, Martin 2012, ‘The Solar System’, Universe, Dorling Kindersley Limited, London.

[spaceandweed]

👀

[opticallyaddicted]

LIGHT BEYOND SOUND” By Tatiana Plakhova

http://www.complexitygraphics.com/

[buzzfeed]

The snapchats that lyxdelsic are pretty much art themselves. 

[apolloison]

Yes!!

[iwriteoutofnecessity]

You cracked me open and spread my lungs apart like cobwebs, fishing through my chest cavity, your hooked fingers searching for my calcified heart.

You were tripped up on my razor wire arteries and my licorice veins filled with your candy apple kisses and venomous syllogisms that never were void...

[returnpoint]

Mornings come difficult for some people; and I don’t mean the waking up part. I mean the sun illuminating the reality of a situation, the reality of reality, if you will – I appreciate the pleonasm of that sentence myself.

When I was younger I used to wake up before dawn to catch up...

[constantterribleness]

And we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

[opticallyaddicted]

The amazing stained glass work of

Judith Schaechter

Judith Schaechter is a Philadelphia-based artist known for her work in the medium of stained glass. Her pieces often exhibit elements of parable, and her distorted faces and figures, along with her own self-professed atheism ironically clash with her medium’s religious tradition.

http://www.judithschaechter.com/Home.html

[hifructosemag]

Physicist Arie Van’t Riet became an artist when he started experimenting with X-Ray photography. Read more on Hi-Fructose.

[fariedesign]

At the fractures of the first second after the big bang.

Fariedesign | Society6 | Facebook

[fer1972]

Bones + Mushrooms: Illustrations by Hernan Chavar 

[hifructosemag]

Dutch painter Chris Berens’s work (featured in our book Hi-Fructose Collected 3) can be described as storybook-like with a darker twist. His light, airy oil paintings have a luminescence about them, as if his figures and the spaces they inhabit have a crystalline translucency that imbues them a magical-feeling ambiance. Berens recently collaborated with best-selling young adult fiction author Kami Garcia on an illustration project. An artist herself, Garcia is a long-time admirer of Berens and asked him to create three new paintings to be reprinted in her forthcoming novel, Unmarked. We bring you a first look at these new pieces before they debut in the book, which hits stores later this week. See more on Hi-Fructose.