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This month’s Chem Report takes you on a captivating journey into otherworldly explorations! Embracing the dreamlike and fantastical, we've curated a collection of remarkable artworks that transport you to imaginative and surreal worlds. Step into the realms of fantasy, where escapism, illusion, and irrationality converge, as artists skillfully craft bizarre and otherworldly masterpieces. Join us in exploring the boundless possibilities of the human imagination!


Time Square Arts’ Midnight Moment: MILAGRO|PAYAPA

Created with generative processes and digital simulations, and framed by the stark skyline of a manmade metropolis, MILAGRO | PAYAPA by Victoria Fard teases a surreal utopian landscape in which nature and urban life not only coexist, but thrive in harmony. On view nightly from 11:57pm – 12am in Time Square through the end of July.



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This experiential, multi-sensory museum in Soho invites visitors into a heightened state of contemplative awareness through a sound bath, light installations and aspects of meditation all combined with interactive digital art. Escape on a journey of self-exploration!



Invisible Worlds

Uncover nature’s hidden realms at this interactive exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. Delve into unseen phenomena and

scientific technologies, shedding light on microscopic life, hidden microbes, the electromagnetic spectrum, and other fascinating aspects of the natural world not visible to the naked eye.

Immerse yourself in our funky, weird, and otherworldly playlist, Out of This World! Curated by Chem team members, Oliver Chapoy and Dominique Boccanfuso.

Embrace the dreamlike and fantastical! Featuring artists who create imaginative

and surreal realms through music.

Emily Mae Smith is known for her playful, illusionistic, and deeply intelligent paintings. She cleverly blends symbolism, surrealism, and pop art, using an anthropomorphic broomstick figure as her iconic symbol. Through a feminist lens, Smith addresses timely subjects like

gender, class, and violence, challenging art history's norms and infusing her works with a rich vocabulary of signs and symbols.

Clayton Schiff's visually playful paintings feature anthropomorphic figures in surreal settings. With a touch of humor, he portrays alienation and mystery, creating compelling and unsolvable puzzles in custom-built worlds. His art draws inspiration from mundane occurrences,

comics, dioramas, and Maurice Sendak's illustrations, resulting in paintings that follow their own internal logic, playing with perspective and proportion, and exuding a mysterious power that captivates viewers.

Inka Essenhigh's ethereal and fantastical paintings emerge entirely from her imagination, devoid of outside influence or preparatory drawings.

Her luminous landscapes transport us to a kaleidoscopic world of cascading evergreen forests, flower-like nymphs, and fairies, alongside sensuous, drooping blossoms that seem to leap off the canvas. Drawing on contemporary culture and her immediate surroundings, Essenhigh infuses her works with a dreamlike, surreal sensibility. Everyday events are transformed into grand, humorously epic scenes where cartoon-like figures merge with the canvas's vibrant energy.

a man walking through a gallery with a projection screen on the wall

New York–based Indian artist Rina Banerjee's iridescent sculptural installations and dreamy, exotically colored drawings and paintings of birds, beasts, and demigods, explore fusions of materials and cultures.

Banerjee characterizes her practice as an examination of diasporas and journeys, delving into specific colonial moments that redefine notions of place and identity. Synthesizing mythology, religion, anthropology, and fairy tales, she is equally informed by Western culture and Eastern tradition, particularly Tibetan, Himalayan, and Indian art.

Julia Randall is in love with drawing, and uses her seductive technique to craft images that subtly challenge assumptions about corporeality, desire, and the natural world. She uses drawing to address the basic pleasures and discomforts of being human and the susceptibility of our bodies. Intersecting sensibilities activate her work; images are simultaneously erotic and humorous, beautiful and repulsive. Although she clearly operates in the realm of fantasy, Randall uses observation-based drawing and hyper-realistic technique to create images that are surreal and suggestive.

Eugenia Loli is a California based surrealist collage artist, illustrator, and filmmaker. Her art is a mesmerizing journey into the depths of our subconscious, delving into dystopian realities and meta-dreams we yearn to recapture. With elements of hyperspace and surrealism, she skillfully interprets the nonsensical, creating a psychedelic delirium that you'll never want to leave. She encourages the viewers to use their imagination and interpret the art in their own way.

Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze is a Brooklyn-based artist of Nigerian descent and British upbringing, who specializes in producing mixed media, paper-based drawings and works. Her art delves into hybridity and displacement, crafting nonlinear narratives that feature alien beings inhabiting foreign landscapes. Amanze is captivated by the cross-cultural communicative power of drawing, acknowledging its timeless universality while constantly reinventing itself beyond conventional boundaries. Her drawings create a nameless, self-imagined chimeric universe, incorporating elements like Ada the Alien, windows, and birds. Her artwork constructs a non-narrative and expansive world, influenced by spatial negotiations found in three-dimensional practices like dance, architecture, and design.

Maiko Kikuchi is a Brooklyn-based Japanese multidisciplinary artist working in illustration, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, animation and puppetry/performance. Influenced by her psychoanalyst father, she became interested in the boundary between dreams and reality. When she was little, she started creating based on the idea of making “visible daydreams”.

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are a collaborative artist team who have been working together since the early 1980s. They work primarily in the fields of photography and installation art, specializing in fictitious histories set in the past or future. Their series Mars shows an imagined Mars, its civilization fallen, its buildings abandoned, and its inhabitants struggling to survive. The artists used both actual

photo-mosaics from the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers and scenes from the red-rock deserts of Utah to weave together their ancient and futuristic themes.

Hannah Whitaker, a Brooklyn-based artist and photographer, creates graphic photographs using multiple exposures on large-format film, resembling collages but achieved in-camera. Her work skillfully balances precision and playfulness, exploring the illusory nature of photography's surface. Through silhouetted portraits and still lifes,

she addresses the unease about technology's impact on humanity in the twenty-first century, provoking questions with her visual metaphors.

Simon Hjortek is a Swedish photographer, filmmaker, and artist in love with the beautiful and the bizarre. His art features a strange combination of elements to produce a visual narrative that challenges the viewer’s perception and imagination. With a big love for the bold and unexpected, Hjortek’s style often depicts mundane everyday life draped in the surreal. He’s not afraid to flirt with the nostalgic,  

giving a glimpse of a forgotten era from the past, and revealing hidden layers beyond what meets the eye.

Brice Krummenacker is a self-taught photographer based in France. As part of his work, he uses multiple techniques such as film, 3D and filters, as well as other experimental techniques. Krummenacker enjoys the use of anachronisms in his work, to confront what is present and past, palpable, the fruits of imagination, clichés, codes within our subconscious, and to work with textures in his photos. His art collection, The Ordinary Life of Robert the Alien, and online persona, Robert Maurice Debois, is about a fictional alien character from a far away planet who is here to study planet earth. Krummenacker’s  goal is to discover if a fictitious character can become real, or even loved.

Muhcine Ennou is a Moroccan artist based in Amsterdam, with an  insatiable curiosity. He has delved into various artistic realms, teaching himself photography, CGI, and film. Through his skillful

manipulation of these mediums, he has the remarkable ability to transform the ordinary into an extraordinary encounter, inviting audiences to question and explore the boundaries of their own visual experiences.

Timo Helgert, known as Vacades, is a German artist, best known for his viral virtual installations. His work draws inspiration from classical escapism and draws elements from modern city life. He has worked with brands such as Apple, Balenciaga, Puma, and Zara through his agency "Vacades". Timo is known for creating inspiring, escapist art through the use of new digital techniques, augmented reality, and 3D design. His aim is to create hope and peace in a busy world. Watch his videos on Instagram!

Mauricio, better known as Auro, began his studies in architecture in 2009. He is the founder of Aureus, a studio specializing in 3D architectural visualization and design with a creative, contemporary, and futuristic vision. Auro gained his professional experience across a range of different areas such as the design of structures and concepts as well as architectural visualization. He also worked in set design and

art direction for some time, which gave him the opportunity to forge his own style, achieving architectural designs that are both personal to him and loyal to his artistic vision.

Biljana, known as Indigo, is a digital collage artist based in Serbia. Her creations beautifully blend a quest for perfection with wabi-sabi elements. Indigo's fascination with eternity, embodied by the universe and stars, encounters transience through flowers and people in her works. Her art attempts to immortalize people by putting them into

immortal surroundings and offering a gateway to extraordinary scenes in the hopes of providing an escape from the humdrum of life.

Garret Kane, a Brooklyn-based sculptor and writer, merges biological matter, traditional materials, 3D printing, and more to explore the tension between nature and technology. Inspired by 20th-century art

movements and influenced by science fiction and anime, his work features figurative sculptures of androgynous creatures and abstract landscapes of xeno-vegetation and other-worldly realms.

Kelly Olshan's work delves into the human tendency of endless striving, responding to both idealism and anxiety. Through 3D paintings and site-responsive installations, she constructs imagined landscapes that challenge the viewer to navigate towards an unattainable space. Abstracted and incongruous staircases defy spatial logic, leading to false pathways and an inaccessible ambition. In this other-worldly

spatial logic, her art weaves through imagined skyscapes, waterscapes, and distant horizons that remain perpetually out of reach, creating an illusory labyrinth within a nonsensical world.

Matthew Ronay creates hybrid forms that exist between a primordial and futuristic state, which seek to explore ritualistic habits and the relationship between human bodies and the world we inhabit. His hand-crafted, colorful configurations embody our corporeal struggle, reminding us of the power of objects beyond material culture and mass production. Drawing on traditions of folk and pre-avant-garde art, as

well as surrealism, mythology, and psychedelia, Ronay has developed a distinct artistic style that draws viewers in with its playfulness and then unveils a deeper, more multidimensional reality.

In substantial sculptural works that are both meticulously naturalistic and materially alien, Monica Cook incorporates hand-blown glass, mirrors, found objects, and plant and animal life into mysterious, metamorphic organic objects. Cook’s experimental sculptures revitalize discarded or scavenged objects through her transcendent use of materials, creating imaginative anatomies with power and empathy.

Valery Oisteanu is the East Village’s resident Dada surrealist. A Russian poet, writer, and artist of the avant-garde, his art is visual poetry with narratives that unfold over time, combining elements from futurism, Dadaism, and surrealism, creating harmonious compositions from fragments of memory. In his collection, In The Blink Of A Third Eye, poetry, prose, and collage converge in a ‘surrealist frenzy.’ Oisteanu demonstrates his “patented ability to erase the border between the interior and the exterior worlds…geographic and psychic boundaries expand, contract, invert, explode on themselves, disappear and re-emerge in humbled abasement.” - George Wallace

Last month we had the pleasure of designing some activations at Essence Festival 2023! We created a custom photo-moment and

an interactive polling system using data visualization for Global Black Economic Forum; a fashion display, meditation corner, and LED-tunnel for Afropunk’s BLKtopia; and finally a dope mural made in collaboration with @beeapples and a photo gallery installation made of stacking milk crates for their Wine Village! Head over to our Instagram for more photos and behind-the-scenes videos!