Blue Moon magazine - Issue 11

"Materiality as a conduit to the immaterial is a long-standing conundrum. We look at a flower, and see the face of God. We scrawl our names on a wall to remind ourselves we were here for a fleeting moment. Pressing the keys of an organ can transport us into ineffable realms. In this issue, we discover how the featured artists use their concrete mediums to impart meaning, love, and transcendence. Our cover artist, Steven Shearer, uses immaculate technique in his oil paintings, merging past, present, and future. One can make out a reference in a painting from the canon of the art historical past, but his portraits seem to come from a timeless location, brought into the world by the now. We see love and devotion through the writing of Francesca Lia Block and the paintings by Joanna van Son. We see a reverential adoration of nature in Brian Merriam’s sculptures, and iris yirei hu’s paintings. Kali Malone, Molly Nilsson, and Joy Crookes take us through their production of perhaps the most direct channel into the mystical realm: music. Pablo Jomaron and Ryosuke Tanzawa lead us through the labyrinth of city infrastructure, traversing through tunnels and skyscrapers. Lastly, there is the work of the late Noah Purifoy, whose allegiance lay with the discarded. The detritus of human creation, material ‘junk’. Purifoy repurposed scraps of metal in the desolate landscape of Joshua Tree, forming monuments to the sun. I am reminded of the ancient Egyptian sun god Aten, a glowing disc, hands reaching down to the earth. Under the ruling Pharaoh Akhenaten, it was thought one only needed to venerate the sun to achieve divine union. The convergence in subject matter here inspires an upwards gaze. Perhaps we are searching for nourishment through the ground to make it into the sky, travelling slowly through our traces left behind, ascending towards the sacred."