Genna Gurvich
www.gennagurvich.com

Things are calm, if no one accelerates them. What are these things? They are created by human beings for a specific purpose – they look the way that they are supposed to: beautiful, comfortable, and shiny. What if we extract the thing from its original use and environment, turn off the advertising light, damp down all sounds? Let them be self illuminated.

The images created by a scanner in a high resolution mode.

Alice Jacoby
www.alicejacoby.com

This is a portrait of the spirit and soul of madness. A madness seen only in our dreams. Poised to do battle, sword hanging from her shoulder. In her eyes a ferocity rarely seen in the eyes of a human being.

But is she human, or is she an alien?

You Decide.

Scott Kahn
www.scottkahnpainter.com

"Lunar Eclipse" was inspired by direct observation of this celestial event one cold winter's evening a few years ago. I kept running outside in the frigid, clear night air to watch its progress. Once the surface of the moon was covered in shadow it did indeed have a reddish tinge to it. I paint primarily from memory and imagination, but based on some observation or familiar motif from life and nature which moves me. Observing the lunar eclipse had this effect on me. The red tint to the bare trees took its queue from the reddish glow of the covered moon. It was a simple idea and composition: the moon in the sky and the earth below. I never expected the response it has received, literally from all over the world. It seems to have grabbed people's imagination because of it's symbolism, directness, universality and poetry.

Photography gives me a sense of freedom. It allows me to capture a moment in time where beauty has caught my eye and made me stop to take notice. This tree grabbed my attention and I became curious. It was like nothing I have ever seen before, so I had to take a closer look. As I approached the trunk, I was intrigued by the massive bulges in the bark, the deep crevases and it's bluish-grey color. My imagination took hold and I felt as if I was standing in another world. I had to take the shot.

Mythology is a continual source of inspiration for my creative work; my imagery explores the archetypes of myth and dream.

Celtic myth gives us female characters in inspirational roles and inspired my series of photographs THE DIVINE FEMININE. Lover. Queen. Warrior. Sorceress. Rebel. Shape-shifter. Shaman. In this new millennium, it seemed delightfully appropriate to spotlight these female role models from the previous millennium. As characters, they have a dramatic stature, a theatrical, larger-than-life presence, both mysterious and forbidding yet sensuous and approachable. As subjects, they speak to The Divine Feminine archetype as a threshold between eras, linking our past and future, birthing the re-emergence of women in our own era.

I often shoot with black & white infra-red film; for me, it suits the ethereal, other-worldly quality of myth and helps convey a hidden dimension, the unseen energy or spirit of a place - its genus loci. Recording a part of the spectrum not visible to the eye, there is always an element of unpredictability and surprise when using it.

Photography has always seemed a magical process to me; ultimately, my job as an artist is to create magic through my photography.

The Glass Door is a metaphor much like 'The Glass Ceiling." The woman at the front is possibly a leader or just has the courage to push through The rest will follow. They crowd around, are anonymous.... each one an "everywoman." Women that are brave enough to go where no woman has gone before. They continue their quest.

Helle Rask Crawford
www.helleraskcrawford.dk

Bronze, Magical Realism.
This sculpture began in Italy, when a rhinoceros beetle flew into the bulb above a table and spent half an hour recovering on the white tablecloth in a dark, warm Tuscan night.
I sculpted the beetle fascinated by its beautiful and perfect form. Then came the surfing boy (my son William). The scene is inspired by the Dune novels by Frank Herbert, where Paul Muad´Dib and the Fremen rides the giant sandworms.

A fascination with the myths and lore behind Sorcery, Alchemy, and Fantasy inspired my imagination in this quest to create visual scenes of a fictitious world. Paradoxical images were combined, without obvious or rational explanations. The Legend of the Unicorn incorporates the myths of using purity and innocence to attract fabled beings.

The original pictures used for my digital montages include slides, photographs, and found pictures. The images were scanned into the computer and then manipulated, color adjusted, and combined into artworks. My camera and my computer are mediums that I use to combine and exploit the images, producing collages that speak to the spectator. Viewers are invited to blend their own imagination with the illusions I present.

Rooted in simplicity, my sculpture varies from the realistic to the abstract, evolving from renewal and rebirth. Some pieces have a dream-like ethereal quality, others are expressively life-like. My greatest influences are the forces of nature and the art and culture of the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa and Italy where I have traveled extensively.

My Sculpture, Just Hanging Out, was inspired by a safari trip I took to Southern Africa. Every morning, while traveling along the Zambezi River, I'd observe a group of magnificent hippopotami, apparently relaxing and just hanging out. Occasionally a bird would appear and perch on one of them.

Ghost Bottles is a still-life photograph based upon substance abuse and the need for healing. In this image the liquor bottles seem to become figures in a family-like grouping with a ladder in their center. They are wrapped in bandage fabric that is tea stained and held together with pins. The background is painted with mica chips embedded in the surface. This surface suggests the party room in an 18th century hacienda in Taos. This is my first image exploring the subject, the second being “Bottles and Bones.” This subject is of personal interest to me but more importantly, these images are in direct reaction to a car-less month of walking the northern New Mexico roadsides and finding so many liquor bottles everywhere. The combination of these relics of cultural pain mixed with the unbelievable beauty of the place never left me.

Riddle plays with illusion of scale and context. The Flycatcher bird is paper and perched upon a tiny chair. The background is made of many pages of religious text from a small gold gilded book of prayer. This image hopes to astonish and delight the viewer and pose more questions than answers.

Surrealist artists and Italian painter Giorgio Morandi inform my color pallet and composition. My photographic artwork is related to collage through my interest in stream of conscious associations. When combining images and objects, I look for combinations that relate on a subconscious level rather than with a more rational or linear connection. My work urges the viewer to participate in the process of making visual and contextual connections. Most images are photographed as you see them with very little manipulation in Photoshop software. I combine objects and subjects that “speak” to me to be photographed. All of my photographic subjects suggest a narrative of sorts. These images combine the old with the newest technology and the discarded with precious objects. Most images are based upon landscape and natural history and are deeply rooted in my mid-western farm background

Formerly an abstract painter, my paintings and drawings are now elements in complex collages and animations that merge fantasy and reality—a kind of digital alchemy.

Some of my images document the continuing vision quests of a Paleo-Postmodern migratory clan, the Painted People. Former Barbies and Kens were transformed in my studio, stripped of their 20th century identities and painted in abstract expressionist drips. Called "iridescent" by art critic Dan Bischoff, the clan treks across the face of an earth that becomes more alive, more revelatory of its underlying forces as they pass. Cities become strange night places where streets are fluid streams, skies morph into oceans and buildings dissolve into fantastic life-forms.

In the Night in the City series, the imagery is formed of layers of my photography and artwork via Photoshop and Corel Painter. Night in the City 7 (Freewheelin’) was inspired by the iconic images of James Dean and subsequently Bob Dylan (and friend) on his Freewheelin’ album cover, where they were shown striding down the cobblestones of lower Manhattan. My image features Stan (a former GI Joe) on Mr. Blue the Toad, along with one of the clan’s babies. Now with more offspring and many more animal companions, the clan continues to traverse a world of strange activities and premonitions, environmental change (apocalypse?) and natural magic.