dream world

At the Hour of Our Death

Death, like birth, is part of a process. However, the processes of death –- the events leading up to the end of life, the moment of one’s last breath, and the aftermath of death — are often shielded from view. Today in Western society most families leave to a complete stranger the responsibility of preparing a loved one’s body for its final resting place. Traditional mourning practices, which allowed for the creation of Victorian hair jewelry or other memento mori items, have fallen out of fashion. Now the stain of death is quickly removed, and the scene where a death occurs is cleaned and normalized. As Phillipe Aries writes, “Society no longer observes a pause; the disappearance of an individual no longer affects its continuity”. The modern means of dealing with death promises to shield mourners from the most graphic aspects of death, yet the emotional and psychological impact of such loss lingers long after any physical evidence of this process has been erased.

At the age of seventeen I lost a friend to suicide. While visiting his home the day after the tragic news I witnessed a clean up crew steam cleaning the carpet in his bedroom. All physical traces of the past 24 hours had vanished.

At the Hour of Our Death takes as its starting point Aries’s observation that “death’s invisibility enhances its terror”. These large-scale color photographs capture and fully illuminate swatches of bedding, carpet and upholstery marked with the signs of the passing of human life. The fabrics which are first removed by a trauma scene clean up crew, are relocated to a warehouse before being incinerated. It is in the warehouse that I photograph these fragments stained with bodily fluids. I tack each swatch to the wall and use the crew’s floodlights to illuminate the scene. The images are my attempt to slow the moments before and after death to a single frame, to allow what is generally invisible to become visible, and to engage with a process from which we have become disconnected.

-Sarah Sudhoff

creativefodder:

Models for American Gothic.

weird i was just googling this painting to use as a background for a blog i want to make 2 minutes ago

caskette:

Jean Benner, Salomé, 1899

caskette:

Disturbingly beautiful clay/porcelain sculptures by Israeli artist Ronit Baranga

The use of fingers and mouths in my work is full of intent and meaning. The fingers and the mouth are very sensual organs in the human body and are therefore very powerful as separated items from it. The “seamless” combination of these organs in plates or cups, appearing as one, creates, in my opinion, new items that “feel” their environment and respond to it - Ronit (interview with Empty Kingdom)

During November 1970, forty people were photographed at the instant exactly after the photographer said, “You have a beautiful face.” By Douglas Heubler.

Exactitudes »

“…The underlying concept for the [Exactitudes] project remains the same: Versluis and profiler Uyttenbroek arrive in a new place and scan the streets for looks that seem especially entangled with their wearers’ identities. They are not interested in trends, or even really what people wear—but how they wear it: patterns of sweater sag and self-conscious strut.

Eventually they see certain styles repeated, and they ask representatives of those styles to visit their studio. The only requirement is that those invited wear the outfits Versluis and Uyttenbroek spotted them wearing on the street.

During the portrait session, Versluis focuses on both aesthetics and posture, seeking the pose that defines a category. For Milan’s “cool café,” it’s the asymmetrical cock of a shoulder, while for the “bimbos” of mid-’90s Rotterdam it’s a sensual grip of the leg. (A true bimbo in that period embraced that term, he says: Before photographing them, he’d clarify by asking, “Are you a bimbo?”)

The pose must emerge organically during that first photo shoot. He then asks others with a similar look to re-create it.

Ultimately 12 portraits from any given group will make their way into the final edit. These photos are arranged in a grid, de-emphasizing the individuality of each portrait: No matter how peculiar a “teknohippy” looks on her own, her outfit, when placed amid others with similarly neon hair and wildly patterned clothing, becomes as unoriginal as any style that’s more old-fashioned (Limburg’s “Old Boy’s Network,” for instance, which can be seen in the galleryabove.).

This is not criticism, as Versluis and Uyttenbroek see it, simply an attempt to gather anthropological evidence. No matter who we are, how alternative or preppy we seem, we’re all drawing from something bigger than ourselves. No one, it seems, is quite unique.

mlk jr. from rubik’s cubes. by peter fecteau

ventriciaular:

Today, I made business cards because I mean business.

Do you need business cards because you, too, mean business? GET IN TOUCH!

love these! every one should go check out tricia’s jewelry, it’s beautiful.

Walter Robinson - Civics Lesson, 2008

thedailywhat:

Photo Series of the Day: For her photo series Marked, photographer Claire Felicie took three photos each of 20 soldiers between the ages of 18 and 26, before, during, and after their six-month tour of Afghanistan with the the 1st Battalion, 13th infantry company of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps.

You can see the some of the triptychs from Marked here, and the rest on Felicie’s website.