My illustrated alphabet book for adults, aptly titled My Alphabet of Anxieties & Desires, is available in soft cover and eBook format. Buy it for yourself or send it to someone you love (or want to) for Christmas. http://blur.by/12n9r1u.
Also available from the Apple store: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/book/id582540445
Paper cutouts used in walking loop.
Rough cut of a “walking loop” I created for my upcoming animated film “Toronto Alice”. Using the classical animation technique of a lightbox + peg-bar, I created 26 separate drawings that were then printed, coloured and cut-out. The sequence was then shot using the frame-capture software Dragonframe, swapping in the different cutouts frame-to-frame. The footage was exported into After Effects, where the background was keyed-out, and the walking looped using time remapping. A moving background will eventually be placed behind the walking character.
While all the preliminary work was time-consuming, the advantage is that the “walking loop” can be played infinitely, for as long as I need it in the scene.
Last month, Narwhal Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto presented the first ever Canadian exhibition of the reputed “Godfather of Japanese Eroticism”, artist Toshio Saeki. The exhibition was comprised of original ink drawings from 1977-1983, and a rare series of fifty letterpress prints from Saeki’s 1972 publication Akai Hako (The Red Box). This exhibition also offered a fascinating glimpse into Saeki’s work process, as detailed in the catalogue essay:
Accessing the traditional Japanese partnership employed by the Ukioy-e woodcut masters, Saeki creates his original works as black and white ink drawings which he then overlays with vellum sheets hand marked with colour plans for the visualized finished image. As an “eshi” (artist) he passes his designs to a “surishi” (printer) and they are developed into the final work. Saeki refers to his method of practice as Chinto printing.
Above are a small sampling of the black and white ink drawings featured at Narwhal Projects. These scenes are representative of Saeki’s bizarre, darkly-erotic fantasy worlds, where a woman can be seduced by a gang of life size Daruma buddhist dolls, or a man’s disembodied head will obligingly perform oral sex on another female protagonist. A motif common throughout Saeki’s work is that of the young child acting as a witness/voyeur to the strange and typically sexual proceedings which, given the artist’s statement that his imagery stems from “…his photographic memory and childhood experiences through imagination and dreams…” gives his scenes a strongly psychosexual, Freudian element. Apart from his obvious technical virtuosity as an artist, it is his ability to fearlessly delve into the unconscious mind and dredge up every taboo and dark desire that I most admire in his work.
Even though he was born in 1945, the art of Toshio Saeki is highly informed by the ero guro style of 1920-30’s Japan. That being said, Japanese art has a long tradition of shunga that combines eroticism with violent and grotesque imagery, a tradition that predates the ero guro style by a significant span of history. Saeki clearly evokes this tradition in his two colour images below (2nd and 3rd from the left), both of which feature octopuses engaged in some interspecies love with humans. The image on the top left, entitled The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (circa 1814), belongs to the celebrated Edo-period artist Katsushika Hokusai, and is a depiction of a famous legend involving the female abalone diver Tamatori (see description below). The Saeki image immediately below Hokusai’s — regrettably, I couldn’t locate a title for that particular piece — clearly riffs off the famous shunga work by Hokusai, even as he introduces a mysterious, faceless man into the scene.
In Hokusai’s most famous shunga, a large octopus performs cunnilingus on a woman abalone diver or ama, and a smaller one, perhaps his offspring, kisses her and fondles one of her nipples with a tentacle. This print is testimony to how our interpretation of an image can be distorted when seen in isolation and without understanding the text. A recent study by Danielle Talerico (2001: 24-42) explains that this image was initially considered by Western collectors and scholars […] to represent a rape scene. Talerico’s study shows that an Edo audience would have associated the image with the story of Tamatori. In the legend, the abalone diver Tamatori sacrifices her life to save the Emperor by cutting open her breast, where she hides the jewel she has stolen from the Sea-Dragon King in his underwater Dragon Palace. The Sea-Dragon King is accompanied by all nature of sea creatures, including octopuses. The dialogues between the two creatures and the diver express mutual sexual enjoyment (see Talerico 2001: 37, for a complete translation). (p. 161 in ‘Japanese Erotic Fantasies’ by C. Uhlenbeck and M. Winkel) — from http://www.akantiek.nl/hokusai%20p1290.htm
Hello, gentle readers. Many apologies for the fact that I haven’t been keeping up with my blog posting lately. As you can read in the previous two posts, I’m currently involved in a new animation project which is commandeering all of my “spare” time. Below is a screen capture from a lovely little write-up I received a couple of months back on the Dangerous Minds blog. I submit this for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/toronto-alice/x/6519608
Spread the word!
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!
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.
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.
Back in July of 2010, I wrote a blog post entitled The Haunted Dollhouse in which I briefly discussed this interesting and unconventional approach to the miniature house. Created by artists and hobbyists alike, the haunted dollhouse can range greatly from the kitschy, Halloween-themed miniature festooned with cotton-batting cobwebs and tiny jack o’ lanterns, to epic, post-apocalyptic landscapes created in miniature scale by a team of artists. Now, before I venture further in my discussion, I should define my use of the word dollhouse and explain that I’m employing it in the broadest possible sense. While the spooky Halloween-themed dollhouse can be more readily defined as a house, the post-apocalyptic landscape — while still miniature in scale — is less traditionally identifiable as such. Both, however, are miniatures that share a common link to the uncanny (see below).
So, with semantics out of the way, let’s continue with a quote taken from my earlier post on the dollhouse that links our enjoyment of the miniature with the experience of the uncanny:
There’s something inherently unnerving about a dollhouse. While we can easily admire and delight in its minuscule detail, this admiration is frequently accompanied by a sense of unease. This simultaneous intermingling of delight-with-unease is a manifestation of the uncanny — a sensation of anxiety experienced when one encounters “something familiar, yet foreign.” The dollhouse, with its miniaturized approximation of reality, recalls the familiar domestic setting of the home. At the same time, it falls short of appearing truly real. It’s the tension that exists within this disconnect — the miniature’s approximation of scaled-down reality with its inevitable failure — that contributes to our experience of the uncanny.
To reiterate, the uncanny is a sense of discomfort within the familiar setting of the home. I would argue that since the dollhouse is already imbued with an element of the uncanny, it’s not a far stretch to imagine and reconfigure the miniature as a nightmarish, dystopic space. This may have been the thought-process behind the Apocalyptic Manhattan (in an Apartment) project created by Swedish artist Magnus Johannson and his team when they designed and constructed the fifty miniature buildings of their mangled landscape. This extraordinarily-detailed, post-apocalyptic Manhattan was later featured in a Swedish music video in which the band members stomp through the model in Godzilla-like fashion.
A post-apocalyptic Manhattan, as envisioned by two artists from Sweden.
My favourite artist working in miniature, however, remains American photographer and diorama-artist Lori Nix. Blending a canny mixture of black humour with dread, she creates such varied post-apocalyptic miniature scenes as a burnt-out, long-abandoned beauty parlor, a subway car that has been gradually reclaimed by the surrounding sandy beach, and the interior of an empty mall which has been invaded by flora. Through her constructed dioramas, Nix “…imagines a human-less world where Mother Nature has reclaimed our cities.” (source).
“Beauty Shop” by Lori Nix. 18″x12″x33″
“Mall” by Lori Dix, 92″x42″x100″.
My full-colour “alphabet book for adults” entitled My Alphabet of Anxieties & Desires is now available as an eBook for your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. All twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet are rendered in original illustrations, all of which address either an “anxiety” or a “desire.” There’s also a preface written by myself, plus a foreword by gender-studies academic and PhD-candidate, Judith Mintz. All this for the princely sum of .99 cents (US).
You can purchase your copy at Blurb. The eBook can also be purchased in the iTunes bookstore: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/book/id582540445
The printed version of the book is available for $29.99 US.
Lady Lazarus 