Fictional Café is pleased to showcase the creative work of up-and-coming Shanghai artist Qinrui Chen. We believe her education in neuroscience adds a quite a unique perspective to her art. Artist’s Statement – “We can’t talk about surrealism without mentioning realism as a reference, like Godzilla and sci-fi – its distinct character is its ‘size of a building’ and fixation on the deconstruction of ‘office space.’ What makes it surreal but still manages to be meaningful is it brings us to reflect on questions of realism: how do we deal with the inner monster, how to seek the individual dream of a powerful superego in a suppressive social-political environment per Godzilla, or strangely per A Hundred Years of Solitude too (to some extent). “So I find the most realism I can: the medical image of…
A Suspension of Disbelief: Lydia Kinney’s Art
Lydia Kinney lives and works in Greenfield, Massachusetts. She graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2014 with a BFA in Painting. Lydia’s work focuses on spatial abstractions, forming tensions of interior/exterior environments. Subjects include windows and pillars into other planes, disintegrating color fields, formally ambiguous confetti, and plays of texture. The Artist’s Statement “My paintings function with haphazard visual structure and a focus on material. The composition is pivoted on stained substrates and poured surfaces. I push the compositions to balance a suspension of disbelief and a tangible acknowledgment of a made object. The dichotomy of drawn and painted treatments takes advantage of the depth and atmosphere implied by wet, amorphous forms and planes. “Rigid lines and shapes encounter these surfaces, holding up, constraining, destabilizing, and contradicting their preceding natural flow. The…
We Would Love To Hear From YOU!
Dear FC Coffee Club members and visitors to our ‘zine, For many years, we weren’t able to permit unfettered comments from you, our members, because the gate to the Comments section was wide open to spam – and boy, did we get it. With the new version of WordPress software, this is no longer the problem it was. Where before you had to have a WordPress account, login and password, now you don’t. We would love to hear from you! All you have to do is drop down to Leave a Reply and type away in the Comments box below. (Don’t forget to click the Post Comment box.) We’ve been testing it, and it works great. The only thing that would make it better is the involvement of our treasured Coffee Club members. So don’t…
Kay Hartung’s Microbial Visions of An Unseen World
With the advancement of science and the ability to view organisms never before seen, Kay Hartung thinks about the great power that such minute things may hold. She contemplates the potential impact of cellular activity on the visible universe and the human species. Over the past two years, she has continued to pursue this interest in her art. I create my own vision of cells, proteins and viruses that don’t actually exist, but are an artistic evolution from familiar forms. I create colonies of cellular shapes that migrate, flow and multiply. The process of painting with encaustic* builds layer upon layer of biomorphic forms, suggesting growth, development and movement. I construct environments for these forms, landscapes in which they can interact. In many of my works you will see that pattern is a predominant characteristic:…
The Ghostly Art of Stephen Pavlovic
Artist’s Statement: My work explores my anxieties. I work to externalize those anxieties in a visually interesting way. The image of a Hungry Ghost (in Buddhism, a person doomed to wander the earth, unable to satisfy their overwhelming desires) has always been a recurrent theme in my work, but in the last two years it has taken a more central role. Who knew there were so many of them? I find the image of the Hungry Ghost useful in explaining to myself the current political state of things and at the same time externalizing my emotions to reduce the angst I feel. In some Buddhist cosmology, a person can be reborn as either a human being, into the realm of the Gods, or as a Hungry Ghost; Hungry Ghost being the worst rebirth. I find…