Film Review: The Reflecting Skin
1990′s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, and quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of brilliant. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I loved it. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” quality/aesthetic, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.
Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and desolate, isolated, gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot very impressively and gorgeously), The Reflecting Skin is, sort of, about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow who lives nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unimaginable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and owning a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him not to understand these strange, horrific, traumatic events around him.
The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, and unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played pretty much to perfection by Lindsay Duncan. She should be an iconic figure, in my opinion.
This movie is fascinating, and even if you end up not liking it, you should definitely see it. The cinematography alone is worth it.
The entirety of the film (from the Japanese DVD) is up on YouTube.
Tags: 1950s, abuse, bizarre, children, cryptic, dark, film reviews, fragility, hauntingly beautiful, innocence, innocence/menace, macabre, metaphors, puritanical, religion, sexuality, strange beauty, surreal, surreal horror, trailers, vampires, visceral, witchy
“Black and Blue” by Emily Kaelin
Black and Blue is a sculpture piece by Emily Kaelin, resembling a disembodied clump of long black hair ethereally embedded with bright blue butterfly wings, also severed from their proper owners. It is made of synthetic hair, Morpho butterfly wings, and glitter.
Emily Kaelin is a young artist who constantly deals with repulsion vs. beauty, in installations, mixed-media art, and paintings, mimicking human organic materials that are generally thought to be disgusting, such as flesh, hair, blood, and bone, and creating pieces that are conflicting, visceral, and unlike anything else out there, pushing her art farther and into new territories.
She describes her own art in these words: “push and pull of appealing and repellent, comforting and upsetting, lovely and ugly; inability to look at or render self objectively; impulse and intuition and instinct; emotionality; flesh; hairiness”
Her art constantly intersects the descriptors of ugly, strangely beautiful, alluring, repulsive, bizarre, off-putting, interesting, intriguing, fleshy, raw, delicate, otherworldly, and original. It expresses agony incarnate in the body, in its materials of ink and parchment (blood and skin).
A few more examples of her work below:
Tags: anatomical-themed, bizarre, bodily art, emotive, experimental, expressive, fleshy, hair, installation art, sculptures, textured, visceral, weird sculptures
The Savage Idiot: The Art of Richard Stipl
Richard Stipl’s obscene, gory, and irreverent sculptures and installations are lifelike to the extreme, and revolve around subverted religious imagery and images of corrupted dignity. He also creates mixed media works, such as Pentagram (below).
Tags: bizarre, blood, death/religion/sex, distorted bodies, flour-white face, gory, installation art, realism, red and white, religious imagery, richard stipl, sculptures, unnaturally colored flesh, weird sculptures
MadinSpain Opening Titles
MadinSpain is an annual design and creativity convention in Madrid. This amazing little video is Toch Studio‘s opening titles for this year’s conference, which took place on June 3-4. Sound design by Cypher Audio and typography design by Pablo Abad.
Tags: alien beauty, biological/organic/alien, bizarre, creature, monsteresque, short films, tendrils, typography
Cephalopod Love: The Art of Daikichi Amano
Daikichi Amano is a photographer who creates beautiful, grotesque, and bizarre images involving female human subjects and squids, eels, bugs, and other conventionally “repulsive” creatures, which are a tad reminiscent of tentacle fetishism, and always interesting.
Tags: bizarre, cephalopods, erotic, erotic horror, fetish, monsteresque
Poor Little Dears: The Sinister and Mysterious Childhood Depictions of Hikari Shimoda
Hikari Shimoda‘s creepy paintings of children depict them as sweet, sinister, wounded and abused. The eerie mouths, asymmetrical, strange little faces and one-eyed appearance (often one milky eye, one bruised and bloody-looking) of these alien but painfully familiar little beings, rendered in bright or pastel, almost child-friendly, but also quite subtly mixed and profound, colors, all serve to give a creeping sense of the corruption of innocent childhood, an inversion of the saccharine bliss associated with little children.
As Shimoda explains in her artist’s statement, “Contrasting with my daily cheerful demeanor, my unexpressed emotions accumulate inside of me. I feel like an outsider, isolated, lost, and have a hard time building relationships with others, but I never give up being part of the world. The secret to survival? Observe, feel, and listen to yourself. I stand in front of my canvas and confront it, releasing all the built-up unverbalized emotions, the chaos, and the unnoticeable darkness. Even though I know my contrasting side will be shone in the light with no place to hide, I paint to live and to be connected in this world. I accept and understand myself more through my artistic processes than anything else. As I know myself more, I can see others better.
My motif is mainly children. They are nobody, and yet, they could be somebody. They could be me as a small child, or they could be somebody’s inner child. Children, as ambiguous of an existence as they are, reflect my personal world and the universal problems that society today has.”
Tags: bandages, bizarre, bruises, children, colorful, cute n creepy little creatures, distorted bodies, dollflesh, injuries, innocence/menace, lolita-esque, mute, neo-victorian, pastel, surreal, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, unnaturally colored flesh, wound
Sas + Colin: Colin Christian
Colin Christian makes larger-than-life sculptures of space-girls, aliens, and femme fatale creatures, in a style I dub cyber retro-erotic which takes influence from many different subcultures. Statuesque and cast in fiberglass and silicone, these cartoonishly exaggerated, indomitably perfect figures with piercing, gigantic, pellucid eyes, featuring campy titles such as Adventures on Planet Freud and The Callgirl of Cthulhu, are a sort of oddball mixture of his diverse inspirations, including “old sci-fi movies, pinup girls/supermodels, anime,” and “H. P. Lovecraft.” I find some of his work to be not to my taste, bordering on obscene or downright creepy (not to say disturbing), but these pieces below I do like. Also check out Sas’ art in the previous post.
Tags: alien beauty, bizarre, cartoony, cyber aesthetic, distorted bodies, doll-like, enlarged eyes, erotic, fetish, futuristic, life-sized, lolita-esque, monsteresque, pinup, pop surrealism, realism, retro, sci-fi, sculptures, sinister arts and crafts, space girls, strange beauty
Flora and Fauna: The Craft of Lorenzo Nanni
Lorenzo Nanni makes incredibly intricate, beautiful (often wearable) art, taking inspiration in an amazing way from organic forms and anatomical structures, reflecting a kind of gorgeous hybridization between animal and plant life, often replete with creaturesque tendrils seeming to infest as well as adorn the host. He creates his own breathtaking “lifeforms” from craft materials. I particularly love his Arteries, Veins series, the way that they depict details from anatomy as a textbook would, but in the startlingly tangible materials of his craft: felt, beads, embroidery. They look so visceral, so intricate, but remind us at the same time of their artificial construction, the biological juxtaposed with the inorganic.
Found via Haute Macabre
If you like this, also be sure to check out my post on Mandy Greer.
Tags: anatomical-themed, bizarre, conceptual fashion, flora, monsteresque, needle felting, sinister arts and crafts, visceral, wearable art
“Biojewelry”: Grow Your Own Bone Wedding Rings
Several years ago, Tobie Kerridge and Nikki Stott, design researchers at the Royal College of Art, and Ian Thompson, a bioengineer at King’s College London, teamed up to create wedding bands from bone cells extracted from five volunteer couples.
According to a BBC News article, “The scientists extracted the participants’ wisdom teeth to get at a sliver of bone that attaches them to the jawbone.” After extracting the bone cells for culture, “These are fed with nutrients and grown on a ‘scaffold’ material called bioglass, a special bioactive ceramic which mimics the structure of bone material.” It was a “long and fragile” process, but basically took place in the following steps:
The process
1. Extract bone chips from jaw. Rinse.
2. Place bone cells in ring-shaped bioactive ceramic scaffold.
3. Feed liquid nutrients and culture in a temperature-controlled bioreactor for six weeks.
4. After coral-like bone forms fully around scaffold, pare down to final ring shape and insert silver liner (for engraving).Harriet Harriss, one of the participants, says: “I love the idea that it’s precious only to us because it is, literally, us. It’s almost worthless to anyone else. To take something that is from myself and make it into something precious is a lovely thing and means quite a lot to me.”
Of course, there is more potential for this project than just offbeat wedding rings made from the beloved’s own bone cells. It could eventually be used to grow bone replacements for implantation, so that the bone required to, say, repair a damaged jaw, wouldn’t have to be harvested from a piece of a rib, or elsewhere in the body. “Dr. Thompson says he thinks it will be used in clinical practice, but not in his lifetime.”
via goetia on Tumblr
Tags: anatomical-themed, bioart, biotechnology, bizarre, bones, jewelry, sinister arts and crafts, weird science projects
Gorgeous and Grotesque: The Art-Dolls of Nita Collins
Nita Collins’ doll-sculptures creep me out and exhilarate me. Disturbing, beautiful, verging on the grotesque, delicately crafted, flawlessly executed, melancholically tender, realistic to the point of being unnerving – adorned with puckered scars, ragged holes in chests, and a panoply of peculiar, unique marks on their flesh that seem to have come straight from Nita’s imagination and heart – the tortured, sweetly exquisite bodies and faces of these dolls are a singular, constant mixture of provocative and moving. They are lovingly scarred, divinely imagined, different from any other dolls I’ve seen. Nita Collins has a unique talent manifest in these gorgeous, poignant art-dolls. Check out her blog here.
Tags: bizarre, dark fairy tales, distorted bodies, dollflesh, dolls, emotive, expressive, hauntingly beautiful, nita collins, realism, scars, sculptures, strange beauty, sweet/melancholy, trauma, virtuoso, visceral
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