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Jessica Harrison’s “Breaking” Series

In this series of ceramic sculptures, artist Jessica Harrison undermines and perverts the kitschy sentimentality of porcelain figurines by “breaking” them, casting a macabre twist on the familiar decorative art form. 19th-century ladies with vacantly blithe expressions hold their own severed, gory-edged head in their lap, gaily dangle their bloody eyeballs above them, and with fleshless, skeletal face recline daintily on a chaise longue. I would love to have these doll-sculptures in my home, they are such clever miniature subversions of prim and happy porcelain figurines, having a dimension of interest that the traditional harmlessly sweet figurines never possess.

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Swan Bones: The Art of Kelly Louise Judd

Kelly Louise Judd creates creepy, Victorian-inspired, dark-fairy-tale-like paintings and sketches. Thin frail little figures with spindly limbs and dolorous faces peer out at us through the dull dust of age, perfectly framed in their strange, uncanny little portraits and frozen in time. They are entangled in their own massive coils of braided hair, floating in dark staged spaces, watering the mournful desolate landscape with widow’s tears, and lying fallen upon the earthen floor of enchanted or haunted woods. Figures with deer’s heads are either their handmaidens or eerie guardians. Crows, wolves, rabbits, owls, swans, and other creatures also have their places. Reminiscent of children’s illustrations for a bygone era, these dark, austere, compact works have a quiet sense of yesteryear’s tragedy, melodrama, malevolence, and strange, lovely otherworldliness.

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Film Review: Enter the Void

2009’s Enter the Void is the third film I’ve seen by Argentine director Gaspar Noé, the other two being Irreversible and I Stand Alone. It’s my favorite of the three. This post is long overdue, as I saw, and was blown away by, it several months ago.

From the very beginning, with its blaringly colorful, garishly flashy, epileptic seizure-inducing opening titles, Enter the Void is obviously striving to do something visually very different and impactive, aiming for sensory overload and trippy, mind-bending experiences. And it succeeds. Destined for controversy and plenty of hate due to its graphic sexual content and themes, I think few people would deny that visually it’s fascinating and innovative.

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Portrait of a Criminal

These “photographs of commitment” from the archive of the Sydney Justice and Police Museum are peculiarly expressive and charming. The vintage mug shots are full of the individuality and personalities of a various array of people who passed through Australia’s criminal justice system back in the early part of the 20th century – creating unintentional art – offering up to these fringe subjects a sliver of timelessness.

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