A Word From the Editor
What does love look like in 2026? For this issue, we’ve pulled some of our favorite stories from the archive to inspire anyone considering a submission to our May exhibition, Modern Love: Reflections on Intimacy and Eros (apply below).
Revisit an early First Fridays Exhibition where D. H. Lawrence’s seminal 1920 novel, Women in Love, finds new urgency amid modern existential threats, like AI takeover and nuclear annihilation. Keep reading and find stories on Amy Reidel’s glitter-bathed mother-monsters, Marc Alain’s kitchsy heart collages, Michelle Luke’s smoke-veiled photo series, Jamie Rose’s critique of corporate sloganeering, and The Stars Collector’s digital collection of cosmic ache.
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Open Call
Open Call for Artists: Modern Love: Reflections on Intimacy and Eros
NOT REAL ART is calling for submissions to Modern Love: Reflections on Intimacy and Eros, a spring exhibition curated by Kirsten Bengtson-Lykoudis and open to all artists for the first time. The show is after bold, honest takes on desire, heartbreak, and connection. Submit up to four works by April 1 for a shot at features, interviews, and a place in the online show opening May 1.
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First Friday Exhibitions
Women in Love: Intimacy at the End of History
By turns bitter, dreamy, funny, obscene, and erotic, the work in our second-ever First Friday Exhibition builds on the anxiety and uncertainty surrounding grand romantic narratives in D. H. Lawrence’s eponymous 1920 novel. Now living under the shadow of increased existential threat—AI takeover, nuclear annihilation, a new cold war—we return to the idea of love in all its complexity, now situated at the cusp of an increasingly unsettled future.
notrealart.com“Lawrence is careful to establish love as a many-splendored thing that roots itself in same-sex romance, spirituality, friendship, and familial bonds alike. As both a cliché and a philosophical necessity, love, at least in Lawrence’s view, poses more questions than answers.” — Morgan Laurens, curator
Q+Art Interview
Amy Reidel Confronts the Monster of Love with Glitter and Blood
By bathing her monstrous figures in rainbow colors and sparkles, Amy Reidel reimagines our syrupy obsession with happy endings. Hunkered down in the conservative heartland, the multidisciplinary artist creates glittery paintings, drawings, and sculptures that belie the bloody and often brutal business of being a mother.
notrealart.com"[Amy Reidel] shows us the underbelly of care, and the mess of loving another human…to love is to straddle a line between sorrow and joy, and she walks this line with precision, balancing the wide-eyed struggle of her figures with colorful, dazzling, sparkly hope." — Erika Hess, host of I Like Your Work podcast
Installation
Jamie Rose Implores Us to Worship at the Altar of Love
Jamie Rose’s work illuminates superficial applications of love—corporate slogans, emotional manipulation, or just plain overuse—that skew our understanding of its depth. Avoiding literal interpretation, Jamie explores our perception of love through visual metaphor, crafting seductive works that grow more artificial the longer you look.
notrealart.com“Love, or a lack thereof, is a difficult topic to discuss. The word itself has been so misused, watered down so greatly, that it has lost much of its power.” — Jamie Rose
Collage
Exuberant Collage Works From Marc Alain Find Joy in the Natural World
Collage artist Marc Alain creates kaleidoscopic landscapes that reveal his love of nature and appear Photoshopped on first glance. Fascinated by notions of romance, kitsch, and pop culture, Marc saturates his work with all three, savoring the bounty of color, texture, and narrative that results from his analog experiments.
notrealart.com“As the world becomes more digital, I find myself doing the opposite. The hand is vital to the process, adding intuition through cutting, arranging, and gluing pieces.” — Marc Alain
Mixed Media
Jacqueline Baerwald Embraces the Tender Passions of the Heart
Michigan artist Jacqueline Baerwald discusses The EmBRAce Project, a series of photo collages that explore identity, femininity, and vulnerability. A deeply personal series, The EmBRAce Project languished on Jacqueline’s hard drive for the better part of two years before she found the courage to share it publicly.
notrealart.com“It’s personal and unpredictable to open my heart, find myself, and just be. Many layers of baggage and damage had to surface out of my heart. Not all of it is pretty—some pitiful, some painful, some passionate—but all is pertinent. If I were to find my own voice, first I had to allow my heart to speak.” — Jacqueline Baerwald
Photography
Michelle Luke Captures the Agony and Ecstasy of Romantic Love
The agony. The ecstasy. The anticipation. The tension climbs, tightens, crescendos, until a cigarette arrives to whisk the pain away, if only temporarily. In her Isolated Lovers series, Montana-based photographer Michelle Luke captures the exquisite anguish of waiting for a lover, their presence unassured, their affections infinitely capricious.
notrealart.com“My theme is always lovers. Love is sacred. And the intimate relationship shared by lovers is distinct. It provides the most transformative interaction humans can experience.” — Michelle Luke
Digital Art
Experience a Heart-Stopping Celestial Romance From The Stars Collector
Argentinean collage artist Dolores Nemi Caldentey—known publicly as The Stars Collector and colloquially as “Lo”—creates her digital works under a thin veil of anonymity, sharing her legal name and nickname, but never her unobstructed face. Shrouded in mystery, Lo’s public persona only intensifies the heart-stopping romance at the heart of her celestial works. Often capturing moments of intense yearning and melancholy, the digital artist acknowledges the breadth of human emotion.
notrealart.com"I want to create a universe where people can feel understood. To reach people's souls, to express their emotions, to help them heal.” — Dolores Nemi Caldentey, aka the Stars Collector