Infection
Prosthetic Doll Leg
I blogged earlier about Marina Bychkova‘s doll creations. She sometimes tattoos her porcelain dolls with the most intricate and interesting designs. I’m just posting this, a doll leg painted as a vintage prosthetic, because it’s so cool.
This doll is based on the tragic literary figure Anna Karenina (if she had survived her ultimate suicide attempt with major damages to her body, consequently having to wear an orthopedic corset, arm brace, and prosthetic left leg). Images of the rest of the doll after the cut.
Tags: dolls, marina bychkova, medical-themed, porcelain, prosthetic
“The History of Love”
I love this passage.
“My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will be my heart. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact I direct it elsewhere. My gut for example, or my lungs, which might seize up for a moment but have never yet failed to take another breath.
The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that’s been lost. It’s true that there’s so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised by how much it can take, all I feel is a quick sharp pain and then it’s over. Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney.
I don’t mean to make it sound like I’ve made a science of it. It’s not that well thought out. I take it where it comes. It’s just that I notice certain patterns. When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls before I’m ready, this, for reasons I can’t explain, I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. The field where we used to play, the field in which everything was discovered and everything was possible. (We ran so hard we thought we would spit blood: to me that is the sound of childhood, heavy breathing and shoes scraping the hard earth.) Stiffness of the fingers is the dream of childhood as it’s been returned to me at the end of my life. I have to run them under the hot water, steam clouding the mirror, outside the rustle of pigeons. Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don’t know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine.
Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.”
– from The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Eye-Love [001]
Mona Lisa Is Gone
DevonTags: anja millen, bandages, black and white, geisha-inspired, nick knight
Heaven by Felice Fawn
Two incredible images, titled Heaven and Purgatory, respectively, from Felice Fawn:
Tags: amazing makeup, art nudes, felice fawn, medical-themed, otherworldly photography, religious imagery, virgin mary, white hair
The Inner Kingdom
This is the video for the song “t” from music project iamamiwhoami (Jonna Lee). It reminds me a little of the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. She has the most expressive hands.
“I suppose the crowns…have something to do with autonomy and the inner kingdom.”
- Chris Con Askew, on religious imagery in his artwork
Another awesome music video, from Fever Ray:
Tags: crown, iamamiwhoami, music videos
Injured Children: The Art of Gottfried Helnwein
You probably thought this was a photograph when you first saw it (I definitely did); but it’s not. It’s an amazing painting by the renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein. His paintings are unbelievably photorealistic, and they often feature disturbing and provocative representations of children who are bloodied and injured, bandages wrapped around their heads: an allegory for innocence and trauma, emotional injury, the consequences of violence, abuse, and other scarring forces out in the world.
Dolls by Lena and Katya Popova
Lena and Katya Popova are sisters who make the most amazing art dolls. These are from their “Fashion Moon” doll lamp series.
Tags: dolls, geisha-inspired, victorian
Sil van der Woerd’s Music Videos
Dutch filmmaker Sil Van Der Woerd makes beautiful, surreal, and extremely impressive music videos on unbelievably tiny budgets. These videos contrast industrial, futuristic, black and sterile environments with the soft beauty and grace of the subjects, and historically inspired fashions.
Check out his videos for Lolly Jane Blue’s “Worms” and “White Swan”:
Tags: industrial landscapes, music videos, queens, sil van der woerd, surreal, swan
Poetry: Apocrypha
“Envy tastes like copper filings.
It settles into the stomach wall and plies
its sinuous trade, hawking green-eyed girls
at the tented market of the womb — thin-mattresses
waifs with syringe-scored ribs.
Under fallopian awnings
they turn their chlorinated eyes inward,
lashes slice into the flesh as they blink slowly,
once, twice.Envy sidles into the blood, jangling metals and plastics,
is yearn-swollen fingers all ringed in agates and amethyst–
so fat that knuckles bulge tumescent out of the gold bands.Eel-headed, it stretches and pants, breath filled
with rotted diamonds.
It claws and adores and kisses the edge
without guessing the center, cobbling a
hermetic path, yellow and grey,
down into the rickety basement door
of the second heart–
the secret heart, shut as a reliquary
that whispers sulfuric villanelles into the dark
while storm shutters screen against glass
threatening expulsion from the apple-bled
rooms of the interior.This other heart is a city of wan-faced slattern-beasts,
snouts pressed against frozen windows, bones
howling for hot bread. But it is beautiful there, in the black
aorta, blood pure as grain alcohol.
In these jealous walls the self instructs the self–
the second heart murmurs
its beatific perversions
to the first.”from Apocrypha by Catherynne M. Valente
Tags: apocrypha, catherynne m valente, poetry
Kouichi Kimura’s “House of Vision”
I love this house designed by Kouichi Kimura in 2008, located near Shiga, Japan. It’s so elegant, and I wish I could live in a house just like this. Someone pointed out that it’s a bit “aseptic”-feeling, but in a good way, like they’d feel safe there, and I totally understand their meaning. I think it’s partly due to how sparingly furnished the house is in the pictures, but it really does give an impression of just spacious emptiness. I think it’s beautiful, though. Minimalist yet luxurious at the same time, utterly modern and sleek, interesting all around. It’s one of my dream homes.
Tags: black and white, contemporary architecture, dream houses, kouichi kimura, minimalist
