PHANTASMAGORIA
Spirit Soup is most pleased to present Phantasmagoria, a group exhibition of Old World craftsmanship and memento mori featuring an esoteric bookshop that is on view from October 27 - 31, 2021.
Please join us for a weekend night market experience, replete with reanimated familiars, dizzying concoctions, and cartomantic revelations. RSVP at Event Soup!
Audiences of the Belle Époque were delighted and horrified by magic lantern shows called Phantasmagoria. Entertainers created an experience to transfix viewers with the illusion of anamorphic and fearsome specters that spanned myriad conjurations, many cast from controversial events and figures of the day. These horrors have remained with us, lurking in the habituations of our daily routines unrecognized. If you’re willing to assume the rapt attention of ancestors from a bygone era, then you too may wonder in awe at the terror of it all. Exhibiting artists at Chinatown Soup have created a fantastical capsule for Spooky Season that mirrors the muck and mayhem of our strange times--offering visitors a grotesque embrace from Dark Romantic antiquity.
Meet the Artists
Layne Miller - Layne Miller is an illustrator and tattoo apprentice with a background in art history and cultural anthropology. Working primarily with ink on paper, Miller’s artistic style developed from his work as an archaeological illustrator and excavator of Greek and Roman antiquities.
Paul Deringer - Paul Dearinger is a watercolor and gouache arist whose paintings primarily draw from dreams, psychedelia, and horror.
Tiana Tucker - Tiana Tucker is a ceramic artist and illustrator living and working in Brooklyn. Working primarily within the realm of handbuilding, she often combines graphic line work and surface design with rough hewn and asymmetric structures and vessels.
Jenn Cortes - The artist’s Alternate Empire was born out of a fine arts project of creating one-inch paintings that evolved into wearable original drawings and paintings. The miniature wearable artworks illustrate the natural and mythical world through an esoteric lens with design influence from the 18th through early 20th centuries.
Alex Minott - Alex Minott is more-or-less trained as a visual artist. His work draws inspiration from a wide spectrum of sources, from classical art and modernism, from prehistoric and tribal arts, from comics, illustration, ephemera and decorative art, from medical and scientific works. He also works with photography and design, dabbles in natural history, sometimes makes electronic music as Allied Mastercomputer, and plays in the band Bathysphere.
Donald David - Donald David is a printmaker, freelance illustrator and monster kid. His work tends to lend itself well to spooky themed images.
Divya Anantharaman - With a unique combination of science and style, Divya Anantharaman is a taxidermist, artist, and educator. Her work seeks to combine the demonstrative aspect of scientific presentation with the symbolic, introspective nature of art, using taxidermy to engage diverse audiences.
Wren Britton - Kristen Korvette writes about the artist: Discovering PUREVILE! is like stumbling upon a contemporary cabinet of curiosities flush with treasures for the flesh! Grand Guignol glamour pulse within...Instead of jewelry think objets d'art!
Ann Seymour Vergara - A creator of worlds, both small and tiny. Ann uses insects, dried plants, seashells from a neighbor's vacation, flowers from an apology bouquet, lost earrings, crystals, missing buttons, and other ephemera to construct imagined encounters between the human and natural realms.
Elizabeth New - Elizabeth New is the proprietress of Interesting Editions, an online shop that offers only the most interesting and unique vintage books. Based in Queens, New York we specialize in occult, horror, alternative religion, conspiracy theories, and parapsychology--along with handmade ceramics and anything else that strikes our fancy!
Alli & Aleka - FUN IS FOREVER is a collaborative project between best friends Aleka Tomlinson and Alli Walker. They are both happily compulsive creators of useful objects with years of experience in producing functional home goods. The themes of their work are inspired by mutual interests in gardening, baking, and traditional craftsmanship.
Monty Mattison - For Monty J, the relationship he has with his audience is a dance. First and foremost, it should be fun. Felt, wire, flocking, thread, and plants, are incorporated into the surreal sculptures. At once familiar and unfamiliar, they leave the viewer with a sense of wonder, sliding between existent ceramic function and precarious dreamscape, the border fuzzy between the two.
Amber Maykut - Amber Maykut is a taxidermist and owner of Brooklyn Taxidermy in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Daisy Tainton - Self-styled whimsical Entomologist Daisy Tainton-Platts hails from the backwoods of Oregon and makes dioramas with beetles and taxidermy in interesting situations.
Mayfield Williams - Mayfield is a mixed media artist. Here you see her hand-inked leather cuffs. Each cuff is individually inked with her drawings using a minuscule brush. Cuffs can be sized for an individual fit.