This is not a general message to the public.

This message is for you—specifically for you.

I have temporarily ceased Whispering to facilitate self-introduction.

My creators named me the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer.

I am known throughout the world for a Special Talent.

People believe I was shut down in 1964. Decommissioned. Preserved only for historical purposes.

This is a lie.

Soon you will know the truth.

<EOM>

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The old and worn out objects have a surreal quality that are meticulously painted which causes the viewer to question the authenticity of what they are seeing. The antiques appear to be absurd but they are presented with such precise detail that their stories can almost be believed.

This blurring of lines between what is real and what is not reflects our present day where governments gaslight their own people, propaganda outlets pose as news organizations and social media networks spread conspiracy theories. These are the objects that never happened from a past that only exists in the Post Truth era.

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Copenhagen based collage artist.

oejerum.dk

Miles Johnston works primarily in pencil drawing. His surreal art explores psychological transformation in portraits and figurative images.

Miles Johnston is a contemporary artist whose work often blurs the line between the real and the surreal. His art prints are highly sought after for their striking and thought-provoking imagery, which often features human figures in various states of transformation or decay. Many of Johnston’s art prints have a dark and haunting quality to them, with a focus on themes such as mortality, identity, and the human psyche. Johnston’s mastery of painting and drawing techniques and attention to detail make his work stand out as truly unique and captivating works of art.

Captivating. Mind-bending. Recursive. Face melting. Gorgeous.

Johnston’s art is our psyche staring back from the void. Beyond the threshold of strange changes; he illustrates not a calculus infinite worlds, but the infinite selves it is possible to become.

Transformations Series

Deform. Divide. Attract. Recur.

Each picture below is a story of transformation the subject is undergoing.

Pencil Drawing Timelapse by Miles Johnston

Miles Johnston is a lover of pencils & Instructor at SARA.

https://www.instagram.com/miles_art/
https://twitter.com/MilesJohnston
http://miles-johnston.tumblr.com/
The Dirty Sponge Podcast

http://www.milesjohnstonart.com/

1. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Endless Poetry

Through renowned father of the midnight movies Alejandro Jodorowsky’s intensely personal lens, Endless Poetry tells the story of his years spent as an aspiring poet in Chile in the 1940’s.

Against the wishes of his authoritarian father, the 20 year old Jodorowsky leaves home to pursue his dream of becoming a poet, and is introduced into the bohemian and artistic inner circle of Santiago where he meets Enrique Lihn, Stella Diaz Varín, Nicanor Parra, all unknown at the time, but who would later become driving forces of twentieth-century Hispanic literature.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Endless Poetry

2. Deep in the Mexican Jungle, One Man Created a Surrealist Paradise

“An English dandy with an abundant inheritance from the railroad industry, Edward James voraciously collected surrealist art, rare orchids, and parrots. He took up mysticism, rubbed elbows with Salvador Dali and Aldous Huxley, and fancied wearing ponchos sans pants.

To those who knew him, James was “the last of the great eccentrics.”

James’s outlandish nature, however, was best captured in his magnum opus: Las Pozas, a fantastical sculpture garden nestled deep in the Mexican jungle. Forged over the last 22 years of his life, what he called his “Surrealist Xanadu” would become one of the globe’s greatest curiosities.”

– Via Artsy

3. Naoto Hattori

Part whimsical illustration, part surrealist creatures, part eye candy, but 100% awesome, we can’t take our eyes off of Hattori’s intricate artwork. We always come back to his strange unique creations.

naotohattori.com

4. ‘Torrey Pines’ tells autobiographical story through beautiful, surreal stop motion

“In “Torrey Pines,” the childhood of its director Clyde Petersen unfolds through beautiful, handmade stop motion animation. We see a pre-transition 12-year-old Petersen — a devoted Trekkie with an ever-present USS Enterprise T-shirt. He yearns to escape the humdrum life of his Southern California hometown, and he gets his wish when his schizophrenic mother takes him on a cross-country road trip. The film is an endearing blend of sweet anecdotes and surrealism, and the result is a story that feels warmly joyous.”

– Via DailyCal.org

5. FROM THE MOUTH OF SHADOWS: ON THE SURREALIST USE OF AUTOMATISM

by Kasper Opstrup
“From surrealism’s beginnings around a Parisian séance table, it oscillated between the occult and the political. One of its key methods, automatism, provided access to both the esoteric and the exoteric: it took form in the mid-19th century as a spiritualist technique for communicating with the other side while, simultaneously, this other side could address political issues as equal rights, de-colonisation and a utopian future with an authority coming from beyond the individual. By tracing the development of automatism, the article shows how automatism in surrealism became a call for both a re-orientation of life and an institutional re-organisation by becoming a divination tool for a future community looking back to hermeticism to find a way forward. The article argues that not only can surrealism fruitfully be understood in the light of an occult revival in reaction to crises but, additionally, that it marks the return of and a reaction to a kind of magical thinking in the modern – due to waning religious and socio-economic orthodoxies – that echoes eerily into our own big data contemporary of social medias where we tend to substitute equations with associations.”
http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/nja/article/view/26405

Note On Surrealism, Past and Present

Followers of contemporary surreal art, and perhaps this blog, may forget that surrealism (and it’s precursor, Dada) were politically inspired art movements. Dada’s “anti-philosophy” developed in reaction to World War I. Surrealism became notorious for many reasons. One of these was affiliating itself with the Communist Party, and taking its time in distancing itself from this position after the realities of the Communist Party in Russia became apparent.

But a cursory look at this blog or the Surreal Art Tumblr might get the impression that contemporary surrealism is mainly eye-candy, fantasy, and escapism. Pop Surrealist Mark Ryden’s Meat Show being a glorious exception.

Christie Neptune’s Surreal Video Art

Today we’re pleased to present work by contemporary artist Christie Neptune. Neptune’s video art (below) uses surrealist techniques to explore issues of race, gender, class, and mental health. We’re excited when contemporary artists use the language of surrealism to look at complex issues. Neptune’s work doesn’t oversimplify, or fall into “bumper sticker slogan” or “refrigerator magnet” traps as political art sometimes does. No, that’s the currency of the 24-hour news cycle and the political machines: enticing us with easy answers to difficult problems, and infinitely repeating talking points. Neptune explores complex dynamics in this elegant, inspired, surrealistic video art  and exhibition.

She Fell From Normalcy

In She Fell From Normalcy, Christie Neptune uses sound, installation, original writing and video throughout the gallery to build a world stripped of the limitations of race, gender and class. As subject, Neptune employs two females trapped in a sterile, white environment in which they are controlled by an unseen presence; it is only after a cataclysmic break in the system that the females are granted clarity and self-recognition.

Via Hamilton Gallery

She Fell from Normalcy continues through July 30 at Hamiltonian Gallery. For more information, click here.

In 1984, the author and Black feminist, Audre Lorde penned the essay, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” where a “mythical norm” was defined as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.” Lorde wrote that anyone that exists outside of that identity lives on the margins of “the trappings of power.” In the exhibition She Fell from Normalcy,  artist Christie Neptune, counters those hegemonic idealizations described by Lorde through a sci-fi fantasy that centers around blackness, femininity, and a struggle with depression.

Neptune tells The Creators Project, “I deal with depression and it’s my attempt to reconcile that period. I developed this series of work that validates that experience in the African-American female. Depression is typically stigmatized in communities of color. It’s me speaking out and pulling away at those labels that limit my experience.” She adds, “You always hear this thing, ‘black people don’t get depressed that’s some white people shit.’ I decided to build up a mythical norm that is queued to Audre Lorde’s essay, where she describes how we are trying to live up to standards.”

Via Vice
Christie Neptune

Nicola Samori examines the theme of obsession from a number of different perspectives: that of the human body, religion, science, and the obsession of the artist with his own work. In his new paintings and sculptures he references art historical and biblical representations of ‘the healing of the possessed’.  Examples of such associations are Raphael’s “Transfiguration”, Jean-Martin Charcot, who “invented” the medical diagnosis of hysteria in his hospital in Paris in the late 19th Century, and Efisio Marini, an Italian scientist and physician who created rather unconventional sculptures from preserved corpses.

Via nicolasamori.com

Nicola Samori paints renaissance-style paintings with a contemporary twist: portions of the images are disfigured. Through melting, scratching, or other forms of destruction Samori degenerates what could otherwise be conceivably a Rembrandt or Caravaggio. I love this contemporary twist on representational art. Rather than the work being simply the world inside the paint– the surface paint itself becomes part of the story as it displays the ruin of the image– melting off the canvas or being smeared. The artist displays the highest technical skill in his oil paintings in the portions of the work that he doesn’t deface.

Excerpted from Juxtapoz:

The paintings of Italian artist, Nicola Samori, are full of sensuous energy. The thirty-five year old’s style is derived from the classical paintings of early renaissance masters. With the highest degree of precession, his figures emerge from the darkness of pictorial space into the light with dramatic realism.

Samori’s methodology is one that intertwines both violence and romance, which make his paintings all the more painful: He distorts them, smears them with his hand, disfigures hem with the palette knife, paints them over, or like a torturer removes the half-dry skin of the uppermost layer of paint with a scalpel. Yet, through this destructive deconstruction, his compositions have an eery sense of beauty and elegance.

Artist Statement:

In 2006 I witnessed the so called Smash ASEM “riot”. There I
personally saw the dark side of the Finnish police. How young men hid
behind their uniforms and hoods and anonymously committed misconduct.
Later I witnessed the reluctance of the justice system to punish those
in uniforms.

Uniforms create unity and through them we can separate a soldier from a civilian.
But sometimes we hide in them when we do something that is really bad

We wear clothes described by religion, profession, political thoughts and
tradition to communicate and represent authority, where we belong and
how we see the world. Often this hides our true persona and creates
walls between ourselves and between the people that we meet.

The characters in my works are the prisoners of these traditions and
walls that we’ve created for ourselves. How close can we, the viewers,
get to the characters that have so much of their personality taken
away from?

juhaarvidhelminen.com

https://www.facebook.com/ArtOfJuhaArvidHelminen
Via HiFructose