Thursday, March 29, 2012

From the blogroll: Two artworks I feel deserve mention

Photography by Lissy Elle, as found on But Does It Float (check it out at the latter site... it's a very compelling collection, with a perfectly minimalist presentation).



A series of women, terrifying in their vulnerability, defying space and narrative, suspended in seizures of contingency. Women without faces -- complete and confrontational in their abstract existence -- facing down their mirror images, artifacts of constraint (walls, cardboard boxes), tokens of arrested grace (the bed, standing en pointe). Photography is the process of freezing the fluctuation of light as a chronological cross-section, and these particular photos attest to the impossibility of this feat, just as the impossibility of levitation, replication, and perfect balance are the roots of the power of grace, eros, and equilibrium.


A skull of books, found on Colossal.


No matter how abstract and enigmatic your thoughts have become, they are still stuck in your head, smushed between cells and confined to your gray matter, always on the verge of becoming completely inert. When the pages in between your ears melt into the soil, they will feed the worms and the soil and become the fibers of the tree that becomes the paper of the manuscript where somebody writes the next manual for web developers. And those words, in turn, will become as useless as the ones that became the paper they're printed on, and if they're lucky, somebody will turn them into something truly durable, like a skull, filled with stagnant language, carved from the pulp compressed between the arms of a vise.

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