Tomorrow at 7pm, Breath of the Black Muse opens at the Black Vulture Gallery in Fishtown, PA. This celebration of the macabre arts is the first of a series of installations curated by JL Joseph Beaulieu at Black Vulture that will showcase artists whose work is so often admired in the metal/hardcore/blackmetal scenes. This first installation in the quarterly series features artists from around the world, including Belgium artists Kluze Hellion and Patina Vas Diaz, Irish artist Paul McCarroll, Brooklyn’s Karlynn Holland – who also curates the Dreams Were Made for Mortals series, Bianca Olson from California, Seldon Hunt from NYC, Yeshua Hill from Burlington, VT, and many more talented and morbid artists. If you’re in the area tomorrow, we highly recommend that you check out Breath of the Black Muse! Check out some preview pieces and a list of the artists showing after the jump…

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My favorite issues of Juxtapoz have always been the ones that feature dark, weird and disturbing artwork – but there are always a lot of pages I skip through to get to my favorite parts. It turns out, someone has created my perfect magazine, and it’s called Fire Mass. Fire Mass is dedicated to the dark arts and folklores, and features many of the artists we’ve covered on CVLT Nation and many, many more that I have to cover. The issues are in glorious full color, all except the Shadowplay issue, which is in equally glorious black and white, and they are serious eye candy for the appreciator of twisted imagery. They also feature stories, poems, interviews and all kinds of magickal things that you want in your world just to make it a little bit creepier. The next issue of Fire Mass will be released very soon, and for now you can go to their store HERE and purchase hard copies, and you can also get free digital downloads of all their issues, which I am subsisting on right now until I can get the hard copies. The zines are 8.5″ x 11″ and anywhere from 64 to 80 pages, and from the pictures they look like they are beautiful to hold. Check out a few preview pages after the jump, and this is a call for support for Fire Mass – these are the kind of publications that we need to keep around!
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Greetings, i am writing now in a semi sane state after bearing witness to the most abhorrent life forms imaginable. It is with severe relief that I have been told these are only replica of creatures from long dead aeons, and no longer dwell on this planet. But gawd! who knows what is out there!!!

…..screech, hisss!!
I fear my mind has been peered into by these fleshy, amorphous and gibbering masses and such biological revelations were not intended to be studied by the eyes of mere man! I now see them in my dreams, and in my diurnal hours as well. The normal serpent becomes studded with a crustacean exoskeleton, bats have dragon-like heads, and even the fish started to walk on all fours with their gaping horrendous mouths sharing the sight of dripping sickly teeth. Their limbs do not obey the simple laws of physics, and such adaptations do not make logical sense. In what atmosphere would this broken leather winged creature needs so much damage to its wings, or the fish with an exposed ribcage. I care not to think about it. And these fossils, did they originate from after the Cambrian? or is evolution a misconception, these look a lot older, perhaps before the prehistoric era even.I have a feeling the Japanese had something do this with this, I have found photographed specimens of the entire obscure kingdom open to the public! What they do not know they are doing if these reach the eyes of others!
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Amenra have been on the CVLT Nation radar for a while now, with their indescribable sound, but until recently we hadn’t fully explored the artistic side of the band. Amenra’s members are a part of an artist, craftsman and musician collective known as the Church of Ra, creating art as individuals and as a group, working on projects like the Church of Ra book and the Church of Ra DVD, as well as installations. Amenra‘s vocalist is C H van Eeckhout, and his individual creations have deeply inspired us here at CVLT Nation. His ‘Calvary’ sculptures consist of found crows’ carcasses, nailed ceremoniously to wooden crosses Eeckhout bought at a Belgian monastery, and crow claws bound in twisting shapes. There is something so dark and disturbing and yet glorious in these sculptures; they anthropomorphize the animal on a profound level, and to me, the demonstrate the hypocrisy of a religion that would sacrifice both animal and human for a profit. The Church of Ra installation, ‘The banquet of St. Lucas,’ was conceived and directed by van Eeckhout for the Church of Ra DVD, and it was set in the cellar of a Ghent monastery, St. Lucas. The photographs for Amenra’s artwork for live visuals were all taken by van Eeckhout, and they take the viewer into the dark and misty histories that their music evokes. After the jump, see what I’m talking about…

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Michael Aerts is a Belgian artist who makes  minimalist sculpture that ask answerless questions and walk with you in your dreams. All of his sculpture’s evoke death and embrace the feeling of timeless dread, though from the perspective of realization. It is fear revealed and therefore resigned. Fear becomes tangible and accessible and your ally. One aspect of these sculptures that I find fascinating is the conveyance of isolation and confusion. Many artist try to accomplish this and fail grandly, largely because the location in which the medium is presented must not detract from the medium itself, and showing all of these pieces in an open space allows for crushing vastness and titanic silence. Personally the piece entitled BADMAN is my favorite. In it’s crass simplicity it stands as an image of the crucifixion with batwings, evocative of something mysterious and intrinsically terrifying or evil. In addition to sculpting Michael Aerts is also a skilled painter, and i strongly advocate checking out his work but first Stroll through the hall of looming structures after the fall.

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Angela Casserly turns a second into an eternity, freezing one moment in time so that we can live in it forever. This was her goal with her series of clock sculptures, Time Standing Still, where she takes vintage wall clocks and turns them into little worlds, populated by animals, people, cars, soldiers, gravestones and trees. Her clocks communicate the moment they are living in, whether it’s a time of war or a time of birth. Part of her inspiration is from Victorian taxidermy, so her work is heavily populated by animals, frozen in their living movement. What began as Time Standing Still has now progressed into Casserly’s conceptual furniture work. She has created a couple of stunning lamps, one with a base of dinosaurs, which is basically a childhood dream come true of mine. Her crowning achievement, in my eyes anyway, is her insect table, a writhing hoard of critters, climbing over each other up the legs of a table. If crawling things freak you out, you may not like it, but then again, her work is done so beautifully maybe you won’t notice. She last showed her work at Lower Haters Gallery in SF, and I will be looking out for any new shows, maybe in the LA area? After the jump, admire a collection of her works…

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Artifacts From Hell is the evil brainchild of Michael Schulz, a collection of hand-carved and cast jewelry that looks like Satan’s own talismans. He casts his dark arts in solid bronze and aluminum, and creates a texture on the metal’s surface that gives the impression that these pieces were indeed born of hellfire. His amulets are some of the most terrifying and truly evil pieces of jewelry that I have ever seen. True, they are beautifully and delicately carved, with minute details intricately fashioned – the bony wingtips of a demon, the tiny skulls, the placenta of the hellspawn fetus are all carefully rendered. But their beauty is definitely in the eye of the black metal beholder, because these Artifacts From Hell are true to their name, and conjure more nightmares than dreams. This isn’t the kind of shit you are going to find in jewelery stores, so you can pick it up from the artist’s own shop. After the jump, check out a gallery of artifacts stolen from the Underworld…

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Karlynn Holland has made good on her promise to make Dreams Were Made For Mortals into an ongoing series of group shows, and Dreams Were Made For Mortals II is happening this Sunday, September 25th, at St. Vitus Bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Holland is curating this one-day-only group show, inspired by and named after the track “Living Backwards,” from St. Vitus’ fifth album, V, and it will be hosted by David Castillo and Samantha Marble. For those of you who didn’t make it to the first of the series, make sure you head out to this show, because the first one looked like an epic time, and this one features some awesome artists, like Dilek Baykara, Karlynn & Sam themselves, and a bunch of other rad people. This is your chance to support some seriously creative people, who create to stay sane, and not to be some celebrity artist douchebag. There also promises to be rad music and cheap beers. Despite the 80 degree weather and incessant sunshine over here, I envy you New Yorkers who have the chance to be a part of something magical. Do my Cali ass a favor and head over to St. Vitus Bar, 1120 Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222, this weekend…

Dreams, frequently, are broadcast across neural pathways in vibrant color. They are so vivid, the dreams feel more real than waking life. It haunts me. Life feels like the dream, a series of passing moments. As I rise from paralysis, they evaporate from memory. How could something so real fade so quickly? I often find myself asking this question. Explore the dawn hours of your fervent mind with work that exposes our perishable nature and echoes human frailness so often deified by gods of rock and roll.

The Abode of Chaos is a compound building in a small town near Lyon, France. It’s not like an elitist consumer based gallery, but an artwork in itself. It is like a Banksy image come to life. Thierry Ehrmann the sculptor behind this, is like an Andy Warhol with this house of chaos being the Factory. A place that just doesn’t give a fuck with 2,700 international artworks and a free admission. I think this Abode of Chaos is a symbol of resistance against our institutionalized Orwellian art world. But it is of course facing on-going law suit from the local mayor’s office. Like anything different in this world it causes fear.

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Not many artists have the reputation of receiving several court trials and three prison terms for their work. At age seventy-two, Austrian born artist, writer, and composer Hermann Nitsch reigns king of blood-drenched, ritualistic art performance, and has been awing/shocking crowds with his religious, pornographic, and grotesque work since the early 1960s. He has a knack for incorporating slaughtered animals, red fruits, music, dance, and active participants to satirize religious rites. “He is only holding up a mirror to his detractors’ own hang-ups with religion and the weird, antiquated ceremonies inherent to their beliefs.” (Vice) Do not confuse his views on religion, however. In his interview with Vice Magazine he states, “I am fascinated with religion of every era and every culture. I respect them all, without belonging to any of them. I only have religious feelings for life, nature, the cosmos, and eternity.” Provocation has never been his intention, he says. He is simply fascinated with the intensity of it all; the aesthetic process alone gives him an artistic high. Today, it is often discussed that his work may also exemplify cultures’ fascination with violence, as Nitsch is known to have grown up during World War II. Because of this, he despises politics.

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