My short animated video Domestikia, Chapter 3: La Petite Mort has been selected to screen at the Boston Underground Film Festival 2014. Tentative screening date is Thursday, March 27th (check the festival web site after March 11th to confirm dates & times). If you’re in the Boston/Cambridge area, check it out!
Dollhouse enthusiasts are frequently known for their slavish devotion to detail. Countless hours will be spent in replicating a miniature world, whether idealized or dystopian, in exacting detail. The nineteen dollhouse rooms created by Frances Glessner Lee, however, take this attention to detail to startling — and brilliantly macabre — heights.
Frances Glessner Lee was a Chicago heiress with a curious obsession. During the 1940’s, Lee was a volunteer police officer with a honorary captain’s rank, and she possessed a passion for forensic science. At her New Hampshire estate, she installed a workshop to fashion crime scene dioramas, which she dubbed her “Nutshells”. These dollhouse-sized rooms were designed as classroom tools to instruct detectives in crime scene investigation. Lee founded Harvard’s department of legal medicine, the first program in the nation for forensic pathology.
According to a New York Times article on Lee, the Nutshells now reside in the office of the Maryland state examiner in Baltimore, where they are still used in seminars. Each diorama is packed with small-scale clues such as blood-splatters, a pillowcase smeared with lipstick, and a bullet embedded in a wall.
Corinne May Botz published a book of photographs entitled The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, that beautifully capture the details of Lee’s crime scene “nutshells”. Below are some images from Botz’s book.
My installation The Disobedient Dollhouse will be featured in the curated group show Blueprints at Hamilton’s Centre 3 for Print and Media Arts. This exhibition will also screen my two recent animated videos Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery and Domestikia, Chapter 3, La Petite Mort. Show runs from January 17 – March 1, 2014. The opening reception will take place Friday, February 14 at 7 – 10 p.m.
Was Jayne Mansfield a satanist? That, amongst other burning questions, is what drove the most traffic to my blog over 2013. View all the details in the 2013 annual report for this blog.
[For those of you not familiar with my blog, I don’t typically write on such heady topics as “was Jayne Mansfield a satanist?”. My blog features examples of my artwork from the past several years, as well as my musings about visual art and horror cinema, with a focus on art and film that evokes the bizarre, macabre and/or uncanny.]
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 47,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 17 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Merry Fuckin’ Christmas, from this cat.
Just in time for Christmas: My Alphabet Of Anxieties & Desires depicts all twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet in original, highly-rendered illustrations. While based on the format of a child’s alphabet book, this book is most assuredly for adults. If you prefer a book that you can actually touch, then you’ll appreciate the high-quality paper and printing. Ships directly to your doorstep, no matter where you are. Sweet.
The book is 40 full-colour pages, printed on a premium matte paper with a perfect-bound softcover. There’s a short preface written by myself, and a thought-provoking foreword by Judith Mintz.
An animated logo for my brand, Papercut Pictures. The logo emphasizes my low-fi, anti-realist and “anti-slick” aesthetic and approach to both paper cutouts and stop-motion animation. I also wanted to stress the vintage style that my films often possess. The butterfly, one of my repeating motifs, makes a brief appearance.
Somehow, I completely forgot to post the interview I had back in August 2013 with the UK-based magazine Dolls House & Miniature Scene. Here’s a scan of the layout and the article. The interview was focused on my earlier project, The Disobedient Dollhouse. Click on the images below to get a larger (and much more legible) article.
I found it amusing how the editor kept insisting on changing the title of my work to conform to the British usage of the term “dollshouse” with the plural, rather than my North American-derived term “dollhouse”. Whatever.
Myself dressed as “Death the Bride”. Halloween 2013.
My Hallowe’en costume this year is channelling the melancholic romanticism of a tragic, Edgar Allan Poe heroine*. On October 31st, I shall fall into a despair that leads to madness, succumbing to a death-like trance. This will prompt my bereaved loved ones to prematurely bury me in the family crypt. Afterwards, my restless ghost shall arise for revenge, and chocolate.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
*my costume is also channelling the morbid romanticism of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Thomas Cooper Gotch — a morbidity best captured by his 1895 painting entitled (as you may have guessed) Death the Bride.
“Death the Bride” by Thomas Cooper Gotch. 1895. Oil on canvas
Lady Lazarus 