>>Ekaterina and Elena Popovy’s Website<<

See my previous post on the Popovy sisters' beautiful art dolls here.

Mindblowing.

All images are from Charmaine Olivia’s Flickr stream.

Alice: Madness Returns is released in the U.S. on June 14, and in Europe on June 16, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

I’m so looking forward to this!

We do not have electricity or power of other kind, so we warm the cabin and cook our food and heat our water for bathing all over the fire.

It’s absolutely beautiful in my opinion.

{I love Lars von Trier’s work, he’s one of my favorite contemporary directors, and his last film Antichrist (from 2009) was amazing. This movie looks to be potentially amazing as well. Starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, with a role by Charlotte Rampling also, Melancholia can be described as a surreal psychological sci-fi film; the word “Melancholia” being both the name of the planet that’s imminently colliding with the Earth, and an apt term for the feeling and atmosphere of the movie. It promises to be intense, provocative, over-the-top emotional as Von Trier is known for; with a theatrical, sometimes even overly sentimental soundtrack. I love the surreal, beautiful image of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) floating down the river in her wedding gown holding her bouquet. It doesn’t currently have a U.S. release date, but I hope to see it sometime in 2011.}

+ The Tree of Life

{This Terrence Malick-directed movie, starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain, will be released on May 27. It’s one of the most beautiful movie trailers I’ve ever, ever seen. Vague and mystical, it doesn’t show us much of the story, but it’s incredible and moving. It splices together stunning images of outer space, nature on Earth, man-made structures like the ceiling of a church, and scenes from the childhood of the protagonist, Jack (from really interesting camera perspectives, too), in a kind of visual poetry. It seems to be about a man who’s grown up to be an astronaut (Sean Penn) and who’s reflecting on his upbringing and the lessons he learned from his parents, one of whom (the mother) represents the way of love and mercy, and the other of whom represents pragmatism and the way of the world. There’s a line whispered by the young Jack which expresses this tension, “Father…Mother…always you wrestle inside me. Always you will”; and his mother at the end saying, “If you don’t love, your life will flash by.”}

+ Sleeping Beauty

{This movie is written and directed by Julia Leigh and stars Emily Browning, whom I loved in Sucker Punch. It’s a surreal, visually elegant, and classy piece with an oblique fairy tale reference, described as a “haunting portrait of Lucy, a young university student drawn into a mysterious world of hidden desires.” It reminds me of both Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour from 1967 and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. I like its air of mystery, anticipation, and stillness, and its almost-retro sense of elegance and preciseness. It looks like a rare gem. It’s released in Australia on June 23, but doesn’t yet have a U.S. release date.}

+ Martha Marcy May Marlene

{Described as “a thriller that shifts nearly imperceptibly between dream, memory, and reality,” with a bravura performance by Elizabeth Olsen (yes, the younger sister of the Olsen twins), this movie looks really interesting and like one of those near-perfect movies that come along once in a while. It’s about a young woman, Martha, who’s “haunted by painful memories and increasing paranoia” after escaping from a cult. It gets a wide release on July 10.}

{via the ever-brilliant Coilhouse blog}

(Click to see the full-size image.)

(A crop of this piece.)

Karina Marandjian AKA Daunhaus’ intense, deeply visceral art, horrific and beautiful, grabs my attention as little else could. Her Website is currently under construction, but you can find her on DeviantArt.

Floria’s vivid, hallucinatory images are morbid, beautiful, and hyper[sur]real. Her works take place in a strange, artificial, and gorgeously colorful world of her own – film stills from her videos could be taken for photo-art and vice versa.

She seeks to explore the impact of modern science, medicine, and biotechnology on our experience of the body. I particularly love her self-portraits dealing with her psychological experience of her own body, and pregnancy.

She created the lovely “Beautiful People” music video for Marilyn Manson, as well as Christina Aguilera’s “Hurt” (which I think is fantastic despite not being able to stand the music), The White Stripes’ “Blue Orchid,” and Sigur Rós’ “Untitled” (a very beautiful and sad music video).

Floria is immensely talented, true to her own unique vision, and very versatile, working in video, film, photography, creating innovative fashion statements, and making installations, seamlessly – I see her art as blurring the line between photography and performance art.

This is an absolutely amazing piece of papercraft genius, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The Book of Soil is an experimental book-/paper-making project from designer and illustrator Teagan White.
Click the link below to see more pages from the book.

“All paper is handmade with a combination of fibers including flax, kozo, gampi, abaca, and self-harvested cattails, and a number of pigments and additives. The book has an exposed hardcover binding and measures 4.5″x6″. The illustrations were drawn directly with ink, and the text added via image transfer.”