Featured Art

Mirror of Madness 3 by Edward Michael Supranowicz

Curator’s Note

This collection centers on loss and the intersections of memory, absence, and the visual language of grief. In curating the visual work for this issue, I gathered pieces that embodied these themes and explored narratives through design and collaborative storytelling.

Ashton Daniels, Art Curator for the Barely South Review

Counting Stars

A vibrant field of orange flowers with stylized cacti under a starry night sky, depicting a surreal landscape.

Cat DM is an artist and illustrator born and raised in Medellin, Colombia. Now residing in North Carolina, Cat seeks to inspire curiosity and exploration through her unique photography and digital illustration mix. Working from her Durham-based studio, Starstruck Creative, she mixes architecture, science, and sustainability to invite viewers to connect with the greater world around them. Cat has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in various art galleries, art centers and commercial spaces around the US and UK. Her artwork has been published in several literary journals such as Red Cedar Review, Lumina Journal and Phoebe Journal. In 2024, she won the 1.5C Purchase Award from the Orange County Office of Sustainability. 

Currently, eighty-three percent of the world’s population lives under light-polluted skies. In her illustration series “Counting Stars,” Cat DM transforms her photography to explore the impact of light pollution on our lives. She vividly depicts beloved cities and landscapes worldwide as they would appear under clear, bright skies. Through her art, Cat seeks to ignite our awareness of the vital importance of preserving our skies—not only for historical, cultural, and scientific reasons but also for our well-being and our connection to the vast universe beyond.

Digital illustration of a person walking on a bridge under a starry sky, with neon pink bridge supports and vibrant green foliage on either side.
An artistic illustration of a person standing in a vibrant red poppy field under a starry night sky, with the Milky Way visible and mountains in the background.

Colors

This image entitled “AI” was a Nikon shot in Las Vegas Nevada, in a piece of commercial architecture mid-city as part of a series of 87 pictures. It was changed first using Adobe Photoshop and then various channel manipulations added to focus exaggeration and pixel inflation. It’s a statement about the hidden humanity in upcoming AI, both good and yet wildly mysterious.

A pixelated digital illustration of a person standing on a balcony surrounded by spiraled railings, with a bright sky in the background.
A vibrant, abstract image featuring a stylized flower with colorful outlines against a dark background, evoking a sense of transformation and creativity.

“1967” image was a Nikon shot in the desert of Valley of Fire Nevada, within sight of the death location used for the Star Trek movie GENERATIONS. Strange groups of odd, dried flowers on a rainbow rock deposit were manipulated by compressing/removing layers and moving channels around. It’s an homage to 1967, a time when the creator was alive and having my very first memories.

Lance Mazmanian is a word and visual artist supported by Random House distributed with Harlan Ellison, got a coffee as payment. Mazmanian appears in the 2025 London Writers’ Salon, Fiction On the Web UK, Poetries In English Magazine (Los Angeles) and more. He is a 2026 Pushcart nominee. Leonard Cohen (RIP) wanted a chapbook with Mazmanian ’til the Scrapbook File imploded.

Pentimenti

The “Pentimenti” series, is so named since it began with the act of painting over existing canvases where the circular geometry was a part of older works. Pentimenti, by definition means, “a visible trace of an earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas.” In essence these paintings are picking up from an earlier series, but with a renewed interest in surface and scale and that includes a fuller color palette. Previous works were much more reductive, and the use of color was intentionally restricted. The grid still exists, as a hint, at the intersection of the circles on the canvas plane when the circles are cropped off and continues now within the composition of the elongation of circular forms into “lozenges.”

Jean Wolff is an American artist born in Detroit, Michigan. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor after attending the Center of Creative Studies during high school in Detroit. She moved to New York to attend Hunter College, CUNY in New York, graduating with an MFA in painting and printmaking. Jean has presented solo exhibitions at Traeger Pinto Gallery (Mexico City, Mexico), Simon Gallery (Morristown, NJ) and Robert Steele Gallery (New York, NY), along with many other group exhibitions. Collections include the Arkansas Arts Center (Little Rock, AR); The Simons Foundation (New York, NY); Pfizer (New York, NY); State Street Bank (Boston, MA) and Winston and Strawn (New York, NY and Chicago, IL) among others. She has received grants from the Elizabeth Foundation among others. Her work has been published in various journals such as New American Paintings, Bombay Gin Magazine, Lumina, Phoebe, Burningword, Packingtown Review, and Map Literary Magazine to list a few. Jean lives and works in New York City since attending graduate school and is now part of the artistic community of Westbeth in Manhattan. For complete exhibition list and bibliography please visit artist website at http://www.jeanwolff.com

Photography

Leaf

AV Rasmussen is an avid teacher, writer, backpacker and photographer. Their photography has previously appeared in Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga, Unearthed, and Analogies and Allegories Literary Magazine, among others. They were the featured photographer for the Winter 2022 issue of Susurrus, where their work was nominated for Best of the Web.

Hypnosis

Y. Hope Osborn is an author, photographer, digital artist, and editor residing in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA. Her published writing includes ecological experiences that educate and entertain and personal traumas that encourage survivors and expose victimization.  She documents space and time of natural color environments and historic, often dilapidated black and white built, weaving in history and her-story of how she/we think, feel, believe, connect, and care.

Into Water

As a fine arts photographer, Sarah E N Kohrs contributes to Foundation for Photo/Art in Hospitals. Her artwork is in CALYX, Culinary Origami, Litro, Progenitor, The Sun, Quibble, Voices de la Luna, and more. Sarah has a BA from College of Wooster and Virginia teaching license in Latin and Visual Arts. https://senkohrs.com.

The Clown

Kale Hensley is a poet and visual artist from West Virginia. Find more of her work at kalehens.com.

Ashton Daniels is a junior at Old Dominion University studying for a B.A. in Visual Studies, with minors in Art History and Japanese. She aspires to a future in art direction and curation. Having experienced loss in many forms from time, energy, friends, family, and former selves Ashton is drawn to the ways absence can open space for what’s new, not only from asking questions, but to gain perspective. What inspired her for this issue is the belief that both the good and the difficult can be shaped into something meaningful and true.