This is not your typical shoebox diorama.
Amy Leonard assembles lovely, bizarre little worlds of nature and kitsch under glass.
If you let yourself get drawn in, the details seem to harbor stories; a chaotic yet beautiful atmosphere and flow.
Her subtle lighting effects are brilliant.
Click to enlarge this spectacle of “childhood imagination:”
How they look from afar:
I wish she had a personal website!
Along the lines of my previous Delicately Deadly post are Joe Blow’s Glassworks. I’m a big fan of the “Raygunz.”
If I could order his entire glass raygun collection in miniatures, I’d hang them on my Christmas tree. I think they’d make delightful ornaments.
Sandrine Pelletier is a multimedia delight.
Her clay sculptures evoke the same disquieting feelings that I love in Scott Radke’s marionettes.
Her Angorophobia installation made me chuckle out loud (extra points for the clever word play!).
The Dark Crystal uses lace and beads to replicate a crystal formation. I think it turned out beautifully.
Pelletier also has a number of incredible creations made of latex and lace, such as Nage Macabre:
Click to view in detail…the way she incorporates the lace design is phemonemal:
Cosimo Cavallaro’s Chocolate Jesus came up in conversation recently, prompting me to re-explore Cavallaro’s work.
Here is the illustrious Chocolate Jesus (made safe for work, though a simple google image search calls up many original pictures)
(Incidentally, if anyone ever told me I’d be editing chocolate Jesus private parts…I wouldn’t have believed it)
Cavallaro also has a series of Sweet Saints.
And some rather unnerving installations involving cheese.
(Click the link above for better cheese detail)
His Candy Chair is very well done too.
Cavallaro’s sculptures and photos are well worth a look, starting here.
Oh…my…
I MUST have Emilio Garcia’s Jumping Brain!
I love this thing so much, it’s ridiculous. One day…it will be mine. Oh yes.
There are many more photos in the lapolab Flickr site.
Toby Atticus Fraley designs custom found-object robots (many of which also serve as decorative lighting). I particularly enjoy the sense of *enthusiasm* he conveys with the use of very simple parts.
These robots love life. Probably more than most of the humans you know.
He also does wonderfully retro inspired sculpture and paintings.
Here we have a furniture concept that is best seen, and not sat upon. Lisa Jones has crafted a series of Symbiosis Chairs based on the anatomical illustrations of Leonardo Da Vinci.
As a rabid fan of art pieces that embody contradiction, I can appreciate these…but can’t even imagine the mutiny my spine would stage against me if I attempted to sit in one of these chairs.
Scott Radke has been one of my favorite doll/marionette makers for many years. These are the bastard toys the “nice” kids don’t like to play with, the magnificent outcasts of the puppet community.
His creations are rarely without an air of sorrow, a forlorn sense of hopelessness (as if self conscious of their own mismatched bodies and sickly faces).
And sometimes…they are just chilling.
If he ever made a stop-motion film, or designed props for a motion picture, I’d be ecstatic!
I was that kid who watched documentaries on the Titanic in hopes of seeing the remnants of majestic decor. A broken statue…a clock frozen in time…
It was nearly impossible to choose only a few images from Jason Taylor’s underwater sculpture gallery.
The experience of viewing these IN the water must be phenomenal. The weightlessness of the observer coupled with the gravity of the objects, the kaleidoscopic light filtering down from the surface, the stillness within movement…
My favorite aspect of the underwater sculpture is its organic nature; how it reflects, absorbs and responds to its own environment, ever-changing as it rests in place. The decay adds to the intrigue, the sense of gazing upon a lost relic.
Rarely do we get to see a sculpted snapshot in time evolve and transform in this way.
I was *beyond* excited to view Wim Delvoye’s collection of Gothic anatomical stained glass windows. I have had so many x-rays and scans over the years that I am, most likely, radioactive by now. I always wished to keep my x-ray prints for various art pieces. It’s thrilling to see bones and organs immortalized in this classic fashion.
Click images for better view…
There is romance:
And INTESTINES!
The genius carries over into laser cut steel construction devices:
And a wood carved cement truck:
I can’t link to individual galleries (flash site, perhaps), but they are all worth a look.
SheWalksSoftly 
