Lully, lullay, thou little tiny Child,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Lullay, thou little tiny Child,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we do sing
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Herod, the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young to slay.
That woe is me, poor Child for Thee!
And ever mourn and sigh,
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Painting of Massacre of the Innocents by Pieter Bruegel.

I wish I could see all that is around me in mere shapes and forms; stripped of all realism and minimal in details.

Paintings by Chris Langstroth.

There are few works of art that move me as this particular self-portrait did. Staring myself in the eye is not something I enjoy - it frightens me to see past this carefully constructed mask and into the depths of my soul. That requires a tremendous amount of courage: courage to face the facts - that time inevitable consumes our youth, that sickness inevitable consumes our strength, that death inevitably consumes our dreams and aspirations.

Despite their reputation for emotional restraint, Victorians indulged in complex and elaborate rituals surrounding death and mourning. No better example is the case of Leland Stanford Jr., the only son of Leland and Jane Stanford, who died at the tender age of 15 from typhoid fever while on a visit to Florence, Italy. The family’s immense loss became the impetus for several commissioned monuments and works of art that perpetuated their son’s memory… [such as] paintings, photographs, and documents relating to the life of Leland Stanford Jr., as well as objects such as chalkboards from séances held by Mrs. Stanford after her son’s death…

Text and paintings by Darren Waterston.

“Being perfect artists and ingenuous poets, the Chinese have piously preserved the love and holy cult of flowers; one of the very rare and most ancient traditions which has survived their decadence. And since flowers had to be distinguished from each other, they have attributed graceful analogies to them, dreamy images, pure and passionate names which perpetuate and harmonize in our minds the sensations of gentle charm and violent intoxication with which they inspire us.”

“So it is that certain peonies, their favorite flower, are saluted by the Chinese, according to their form or color, by these delicious names, each an entire poem and an entire novel: The Young Girl Who Offers Her Breasts, or: The Water That Sleeps Beneath the Moon, or: The Sunlight in the Forest, or: The First Desire of the Reclining Virgin, or: My Gown Is No Longer All White Because in Tearing It the Son of Heaven Left a Little Rosy Stain; or, even better, this one: I Possessed My Lover in the Garden.”

Text by Octave Mirbeau. Paintings by Bobbie Burgers.

The big city: the life that pulses through the highways promises limitless possibilities. The bright garish lights, the mechanical bleats on the streets, the dead soulless stares, the invisible waves from every direction, the constant change - yes, they quench the thirst of the ambitious. It simultaneously drains and refuels me. Enough, it is time to go back to the soft glow of my computer…

Paintings by Jennifer Seymour.

I have always had an interest surrounding social interaction and architectural space, though throughout the past few years I have been articulating the compositional elements within my work and highlighting the dynamism of spaces in my work through exposing my process. I explore a variation of paint application, expressive mark making, bright under-painting and optical mixing. The bright under paintings act as unifying devices that localizes colour and provide the viewer with entrance and exit points throughout the painting. The layering of colour and forms and the combination of existing, familiar forms with imagined components acts as a visual dialect that expresses my interpretation of the urban dynamic. I want my work to allow for the viewer’s engagement on multiple levels. It is my intention that the artificial constructions I create will generate contemplation of the ongoing development of the social spaces in which we live. The spatial relationships that exist between humanity and architectural spaces are integral to an understanding of our visual world, as we make deliberate choices to define our surrounding spaces we are ultimately defined and affected by the spaces that surround us.

Images by Canadian artist James Olley. Additional text sourced from Artist’s Statement.

It is a vice. I do love sugar. But I used to have other vices too. I think the other vices have just fallen by the wayside, and sugar has stepped up a little bit to take their place. But that’s not actually why I got into it. In the beginning, I was looking at ad icons as a metaphor for pleasure and desire. Something that would be really universal. There’s something about sweets and sugar that makes most people’s eyes light up a little bit, or at least understand that it’s about a kind of desire that has no place in terms of necessity. So it’s just for pleasure, and that’s what I was after. I wanted to make a whole place that’s just about pleasure.

Text excerpted from interview by Ariston Anderson for 99%. Please visit Will Cotton’s website to view more of his work.

The audience detects Photorealism in Hyung Koo Kang’s work, but Kang is not a photorealist. Even though he admits that Chuck Close left an impression on his work, Kang’s work is fundamentally different from Photorealism, which transfers the photo into a painting. This is because Kang’s work is devoid of a preexisting photo of what is represented. In the case of Photorealism, the photograph is developed into a photorealistic work, so there is a certain subject that is represented. On the other hand, no matter how realistic Kang’s images are rendered, the subjects of his portrayal do not actually exist.

The stare penetrates the audience, and its power is prickling. The perceptibly tactile effect caused by the stare, and the resulting intimate relationship between the work and the audience define the ‘punctum’ situated in Kang’s work. According to Roland Barthes, the photograph’s punctum comes from indexicality, or from the things that actually existed. However, Kang’s work rests on fiction. It is a lie that presents what was never there as something that once was. How can an image without indexicality have punctum?

Such possibility depends on how the meaning of reality has changed. Warhol’s reality was made by reproducing. However, today’s reality does not just rest on being reproduced but simultaneously being created or synthesized. Reality is no longer something given (datum). It is already something artificially synthesized (factum), created by digital production and composition. To the digital audience, the reality itself is taken as an image that is created and composed. Hyung Koo Kang’s work illustrates that through the visual actualization, the synthetic reality can also have punctum.

Text written by Jungkwon Chin for Arario.

I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do, they are always in full colour. The environment is always fully formed - each detail, each intricacy laid out with utmost clarity. Unbound by the physical constraints of reality, it is exuberant and phantasmagoric. I never want to leave…

Scott Everingham creates environments that are at once tangible and indeterminate, acting as modes of escape to fictional or alternative realities. In these spaces, oil paint makes up the structure and life of architecture and human presence, and its materiality is used as a tool to characterize familiar signs and forms. His approach to the development of a painting is impulsive and instinctual, with each mark informing the next - producing work that is both deliberate and spontaneous. Everingham’s ambiguous, unfamiliar settings – with broken structures and visceral anatomy made from the language of paint – may suggest an insecure state of being, but may also bear moments of utopian renewal.

For more information on Toronto-based Everingham’s work, please visit his website. Additional text sourced from Jennifer Kostuik Gallery.