This summer, Beautiful/Decay magazine made the leap from the standard magazine model, chocked full of ads, to a new streamlined ad free book format. The new format allows Beautiful/Decay the opportunity to publish extended articles and interviews, while also dedicating upwards to 20 pages of images for the primary featured artists. In addition, Book One, the first of this new format from Beautiful/Decay, comes with a hand drawn cover by LA-based artist Kyle Thomas, special inserts, stickers, and is released in a very limited numbered edition.

In typical B/D fashion, the book is structured around a theme. For Book One, the artists included engage the concept of Supernaturalism though a variety of different media. This edition of Beautiful/Decay contains over 20 featured artists including the photographer Yvonne Todd, who’s work mimics the language of professional portrait photography, yet defies traditional beauty by distorting her models with fake teeth and bejeweled eyes. The result is a 70’s inspired corpse-like model that is both attractive and revolting in the same moment. You can see more of her work at the Ivan Anthony Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand.

Laura Brothers’ work, also featured in Beautiful/Decay’s Book One, reacts to the modern world of CGI with amazingly detailed GIF images, reminiscent of the early 90’s world of computer animation. You can find more of Laura Brothers’ work on her LiveJournal page, where she continually adds new images from her magical world.

If you are interested in purchasing one of the remaining copies of the new Book One: Supernaturalism, visit the B/D website here.

Craig Hawkins work enhances the beauty of the world around us through the expression of a rich and deeply spiritual faith. Mediating on the word of God, Hawkins hones in on elemental truths of the Bible. The artist creates vivid imagery through transcendental compositions, high contrast narratives, and expressive mark making. The result is an intriguingly unique perspective on religious parables.

Hawkins describes his work as, “the evidence of taking truth and imagining it”. Brilliantly honest, his work moves beyond the confines of the canvas to provoke vivacity, challenging the viewer to see with new eyes. The artist uses paint and charcoal to illustrate and unite the dynamic nature of the world around us with specific scriptural references. Using media as a form of conversation, the canvas becomes an open journal to actively demonstrate the work of his hands. Each mark is wholly significant, a means used to thrust the viewer into a matrix of emotion. Through Hawkins integrity in creation, the viewer moves closer to the truth, feelings, and experiences of the body.

Craig Hawkins received his Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree from Valdosta State University in 2001. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Georgia. His work is presently on exhibit at the Mason Murer Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia.

Los Angeles-based photographer, Chris Anthony, creates images based on childhood dreams that manifest into surreal narratives and haunting portraits. Using muted colors and crimson accents, the photos contain a mood that is weightless and ethereal. The images are created from a variety of materials including cheesecloth, paper mache, velvet, doll parts, mannequins and worn down clothes, yet maintain a dreamlike quality that leaves the viewer investigating an open-ended story. The artist was awarded the Grand Prize in American Photo’s Images the Year Competition in 2007. Anthony was born and raised in Stockholm and has exhibited with the Randall Scott Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and Washington D.C., the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Bo Lee Gallery in Bath, UK.

Last weekend, the Scion Installation L.A. gallery played host to the first annual Flux Super 8 exhibition, turning the large 4,500 square foot space over to eight emerging artists working in film, video, music, interactive media and design. Super Flux 8 was conceived by the online arts and design journal, FLUX which serves a global community and collective of creatives. The group, led by founders Jonathan Wells and designer/gallerist Med Wells, was offered the full gallery to use for new projects and site specific installations.

The Super Flux 8 group features an international group of creatives including The Blackheart Gang, Max Erdenberger, Saam Farahmand, Sophie Gateau, Miwa Matreyek, Terri Timely, United Visual Artists, YesYesNo. The exhibition will be on view until September 5th in Culver City.

Currently on view at CoLAB Projects in New Orleans is a solo show of new work by Illinois-based artist S.J. Hart. The exhibition, entitled shining with the secret of it, presents paintings from Hart’s Songbirds series. The scenes depicted, like pages from a children’s book but with a slightly sinister slant, are illustrated to the edges with delicate renderings of flora and fauna in a crisp, retro palette. As if clipped from work by a different artist’s hand, black and white portrait drawings of old-fashioned children or fairy-tale forest animals–or a hybrid thereof–are tucked into each piece, front and center. The artist’s statement reveals her interest in Victorian post-mortem photography, the exploration of which is reflected in the vacuous stares of the young subjects she draws.

S.J. Hart received her MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA and her BFA in Printmaking from The Hartford Art School, West Hartford, CT. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.

Larry Johnson’s first-ever survey exhibition is currently on view at the Hammer Museum. Curated by Russell Ferguson, UCLA’s Art Department Chair, the exhibition follows Johnson career from its infancy in the early ’80s up into the 21st century.

A Californian since birth and a graduate of CalArts–he was privy to the school’s infamous conceptualist think-tank days–Johnson has spent his career merging postmodern headiness with cartoon humor and colliding highbrow with lowbrow. His lighthearted, yet still confrontational, photographs flip the photographic on its head. They don’t even resemble photographs; they resemble drawings or prints, a fact that reflects Johnson’s irreverent process (he scans found imagery and drawings and combines them into one, crisp picture).

An inquisitive and tender essay by Russell Ferguson traces Johnson’s career and appears in the exhibition pamphlet. Also, a film series co-curated by Johnson and artist William E. Jones runs alongside the exhibition, with remaining showings on August 18th and 25th. The exhibition continues through September 6th.

New York-based Ben Needham’s precise paintings render houses and wedges of topography with a graceful application of acrylic, gouache and pencil, though the subject matter is decidedly masculine. Layers of terrain are sliced like cake, shown floating on a page of white or plunged into a rich and swirling jewel-toned sea. Sometimes these geographies are strewn together with what looks like red string drooping into the abyss between each land mass it secures. Needham dissects the elements that we usually don’t give any consideration–sidewalks, sheets of sod, whole plots of land–and seems anxious to find what hides beneath. Ben Needham’s work is included in the current exhibition, Outside the Time Zone, at Camel Art Space in Brooklyn. The show is curated by Christopher Rawson and Julian Calero and also features work by Ben Berlow, Chris Burnside, Tania Cross, Sam Martineau, Sarah McDougald Kohn, Chris McGee, Adam Taye, and Jessica Witkin.

Ben Needham was born in Vietnam and lives and works in New York. He earned his MFA in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and his BS at Skidmore College. He also studied at Parson’s School of Design in Paris. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at ICHYS Gallery, Tokyo; City Museum of Ljubljana, Slovenia; The Lab, San Francisco and Gallery op nord, Stuttgart, Germany.