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Category: Visual Art

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Poor Little Dears: The Sinister and Mysterious Childhood Depictions of Hikari Shimoda

Hikari Shimoda’s creepy paintings of children are simultaneously sweet and uncanny. 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 delicate, colors, all serve to give an unsettling sense of the corruption of innocence, an inversion of the saccharine bliss associated with little children.

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Flowers of Sickness: Marcel van der Vlugt’s “A New Day”

These lovely images are from Marcel van der Vlugt’s medically inspired series A New Day. They depict “flowers of illness,” featuring the subjects in hospital regalia (bandages, oxygen masks, bound limbs), among medical equipment, upon the operating and examining table, but simultaneously intertwined with, wearing, sprouting flowers, seeming somehow strong at the same time that they represent fragility and trauma, and suggesting that they are reborn, given new life in the midst of sickness and sterility.

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