Another trailer for Alice: Madness Returns
Here is a trailer, featuring gameplay, for Alice: Madness Returns, which was released earlier this month (making it the fifth and final trailer).
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!
Tags: alice in wonderland, american mcgee, colorful, cute n creepy little creatures, dark fairy tales, dreamscapes, gloomy color schemes, hauntingly beautiful, horror video games, innocence/menace, insane asylum aesthetic, insanity, madness, neo-victorian, psychological horror, surreal, trailers, victorian
Jana Brike’s “The Book of Taboo”
Jana Brike currently has a solo exhibit at ArtHatch in Escondido, California. Titled The Book of Taboo, this lush white-dominated, pink-tinged series focuses on prepubescent, androgynous girls and boys with milk-white skin and cherubic features, and portrays the theme of (yep, you guessed it) corrupted innocence. Lurid and twisted sexuality, eerie and sinister surreal imagery combined with the sweetness and purity of the diminutive figures, gambol and play in these portraits of children suspended somewhere between childhood and adolescence, between innocence and depraved malice. Jana Brike explains the influences behind these paintings here.
Tags: children, dollflesh, innocence/menace, jana brike, lolitaism, pop surrealism, sexuality, white
Poor Little Dears: The Sinister and Mysterious Childhood Depictions of Hikari Shimoda
Hikari Shimoda‘s creepy paintings of children depict them as sweet, sinister, wounded and abused. The eerie mouths, asymmetrical, strange little faces and one-eyed appearance (often one milky eye, one bruised and bloody-looking) of these alien but painfully familiar little beings, rendered in bright or pastel, almost child-friendly, but also quite subtly mixed and profound, colors, all serve to give a creeping sense of the corruption of innocent childhood, an inversion of the saccharine bliss associated with little children.
As Shimoda explains in her artist’s statement, “Contrasting with my daily cheerful demeanor, my unexpressed emotions accumulate inside of me. I feel like an outsider, isolated, lost, and have a hard time building relationships with others, but I never give up being part of the world. The secret to survival? Observe, feel, and listen to yourself. I stand in front of my canvas and confront it, releasing all the built-up unverbalized emotions, the chaos, and the unnoticeable darkness. Even though I know my contrasting side will be shone in the light with no place to hide, I paint to live and to be connected in this world. I accept and understand myself more through my artistic processes than anything else. As I know myself more, I can see others better.
My motif is mainly children. They are nobody, and yet, they could be somebody. They could be me as a small child, or they could be somebody’s inner child. Children, as ambiguous of an existence as they are, reflect my personal world and the universal problems that society today has.”
Tags: bandages, bizarre, bruises, children, colorful, cute n creepy little creatures, distorted bodies, dollflesh, injuries, innocence/menace, lolita-esque, mute, neo-victorian, pastel, surreal, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, unnaturally colored flesh, wound
Sas + Colin: Sas Christian
Sas Christian is a painter of portraits of women who are beautiful but also just a bit dangerous or deadly, with their unsettling gaze, focusing unnaturally enlarged, glassy eyes, which are her trademark, on the viewer. Sas is often referred to in conjunction with her husband and fellow artist, Colin Christian (who I will do a post on a bit later). Sas + Colin are an electric duo in the contemporary art scene. Their art shares many similarities, with related themes running through it, but also differs quite dramatically. Below is a sample of Sas’ work.
Tags: enlarged eyes, expressive, innocence/menace, medical-themed, nurse, photorealism, pop surrealism, portraits, strange beauty
Darling Mutants: The Art of Karolin Felix
Karolin Felix is a Dublin-based artist who creates sweet, pretty, sensual, pastel-colored digital paintings featuring dainty women, often mutated or in some way deviating from the physically normal but delicately beautiful, with just an edge of evil or menace flickering like a tongue around them.
Tags: candy-coated deformity, innocence/menace, lolitaism, neo-victorian, nouveau circus aesthetic, pastel, pop surrealism, sweet/melancholy
Trailers for “Alice: Madness Returns”
Several months ago I posted the short teaser trailer for Alice: Madness Returns, the upcoming sequel to American McGee’s Alice which will be released on June 14th of this year. Here are three more trailers which give an enticing taste of the game:
Tags: alice in wonderland, colorful, dark fairy tales, dreamscapes, hauntingly beautiful, horror video games, innocence/menace, insane asylum aesthetic, insanity, madness, neo-victorian, psychological horror, surreal, trailers
Ray Caesar – “A Gentle Kind of Cruelty”
Ray Caesar (see my previous post on him here) is currently exhibiting a solo show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, entitled A Gentle Kind of Cruelty.
Images from the show below via Blood Milk, Hi-Fructose, and Arrested Motion. I love the beautiful detail shots taken by JL Schnabel of Blood Milk, which show the true marvelousness and beauty of Caesar’s work as it would appear close-up in person.
Tags: 1940s, 1950s, art shows, colorful, cute/creepy little girls, doll-like, dollflesh, femininity, hauntingly beautiful, historically inspired, innocence/menace, interiors, lolita-esque, monsteresque, neo-victorian, pop surrealism, ray caesar, retro, sexuality, victorian
Satanic Reveries: Paintings by David Stoupakis
David Stoupakis’ meticulously crafted, realistically rendered, colorful paintings contrast innocence with sin and corruption, and are reminiscent of medieval religious paintings, inverting that religiosity with a sinister perspective. His work reflects the influence of past, traditional art, evoking an almost classic sense of harmony, in the way that the paintings are composed and the backgrounds are rendered, and his subjects are also drawn from the Victorian era.
In my very humble opinion, Catholicism is the sexiest of the major religions, with the most striking visceral/visual impact, and Stoupakis uses his subversion of that element to create a sense of enthrallment and delight in his self-contained, perfectly framed paintings filled with symbolic objects and done in bold colors.
Tags: apples, children, classicism, cryptic, david stoupakis, innocence/menace, modern fairy tales, neo-victorian, pop surrealism, religious imagery, symbolism, twins/doppelgangers/doubles
Toads and Diamonds: The Art of S.Jin
S.Jin‘s gorgeous drawings and watercolors contrast the daintiness of porcelain-doll Victorian girls with macabre sexuality, bruising trauma, and sinister anatomical metaphors. Her delicate, exquisite linework is sometimes accompanied by magical little poems and pieces of writing that exudes her fairy-tale aesthetic.
Tags: anatomical-themed, animal skulls, animals, antlers, bones, branches, bruises, deer, flowers, innocence/menace, intricate line drawings, modern fairy tales, nature, rabbits, skeleton, teacups, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, victorian
Rotten Little Darlings: The Art of Zhang Peng
Zhang Peng creates creepy and lush photomanipulations of doll-like little girls, each of which portrays a perverted, twisted innocence as the subjects are caught in the midst of acts of violence – still lifes with a quietly macabre quality. These images seem, to me, to make a statement about the role of innocence in contemporary Chinese culture, the odd midway that women occupy between child and object, and the shrine of youth, subverted and corrupted.
Tags: bathtubs, children, dolls, innocence/menace, pop surrealism, red and white, roses, zhang peng
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