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Category: Sculpture & Installations

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Rebekah Bogard’s Fictional Animals

Rebekah Bogard’s cute, pink and white, rabbit-like ceramic sculpture creatures, arranged in installations, explore themes of gender, femininity, and sexuality. As Rebekah says in her artist statement, “I enjoy utilizing animals because they are beautiful and mysterious creatures, vulnerable to relations with humans. This susceptibility gives them a sense of benevolence that is often lacking in human associations….Some pieces look cute, sweet and innocent, but upon closer inspection, one realizes that the piece is conceptually more complicated. They may be read simultaneously as happy-go-lucky as well as melancholic and out of place. I blend the beautiful with the sad, fantasy with reality, idealism with truth as well as the sexual with the innocent.”

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Alex CF’s Mythical and Nightmare Specimens

Alex CF painstakingly creates cryptozoological specimens encased in bell jars and elaborate, gorgeous display cabinets replete with the paraphernalia, notes, and mementos of the scientific ventures that captured these exquisite specimens. He assembles complete miniature scenes around the specimens: there are reliquaries, study cases, vampire slaying kits, portable bio-aetheric animation laboratories, coffers, and sarcophagi. The specimens are drawn from literary works, including Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dante’s Inferno, H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Chthulhu Mythos, as well as folklore and legend. The array of allusions to classical eerie fiction is delightful. He reimagines and renders these cryptic, bizarre, mythical creatures and beings, sirens, faeries, mutants, succubi, devilspawn, atrocities against nature, resulting in specimens that are disturbingly lifelike and alluringly detailed. The displays also come with beautifully drawn illustrations, which are as fascinating as the specimens themselves.

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Sarah Louise Davey’s Grotesque Menagerie

These disturbing and grotesquely beautiful sculptures by Sarah Louise Davey are made of vividly, violently, luridly, fantastically painted ceramic, embodying creatures with bold, tortured, glazed stares, and strange growths either covering their eyes or framing them like sick, rotted petals of flesh carved out around an astonishingly open iris. The effect is unnerving and startling, garish and obscene, yet whimsical and lovely. The pieces appear simultaneously textured and not, curiously both three- and two-dimensional – looking like paintings on porcelain – and the bold, dark lines sketching their features out against the chalky whiteness of the ceramic “flesh” hold a horrific and fascinating quality.

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Tim Lewis’ “Pony”

Tim Lewis’ Pony is a bizarre and uncanny kinetic sculpture that was exhibited at 2009’s Kinetica Art Fair. Unsettling and uber-realistic, Pony looks somewhat like a surreal ostrich-esque creature composed of human arms, pulling a small carriage behind itself; motion-sensitive, appearing to “walk” in a very eerie and delicately articulated fashion, it is another creepy and brilliant intersection of art and technology, and a provoking piece of interactive sculpture. Its title also suggests a veiled commentary on the relationship between humans and domesticated animals.

Tim Lewis – Pony

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Emily Kaelin

Emily Kaelin is a young artist who deals with the theme of repulsion versus 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 boundary-pushing. 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 artwork constantly intersects the descriptors of ugly, strangely beautiful, alluring, repulsive, bizarre, off-putting, intriguing, fleshy, raw, delicate, and otherworldly. It expresses agony incarnate in the body, in its materials of ink and parchment (blood and skin).

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The Gorgeous and Grotesque 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.

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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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