About plastic surgery

Marie-Lou Desmeules is an artist who uses pure pigment to transform living models into bizarre sculptures of surreal celebrity lookalikes. Her work refers in particular to plastic surgery which often for some reason or another, didn’t exactly go as anticipated. We can read in her work a veiled complaint to reality television, which imposed this kind of beauty.

The art of glitches by Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar, is an artist from Canada. She uses images from encyclopedias, biology textbooks, featuring sexy pinups, children, politician-on-TV subject matters, but each gives off an air of american antiquity. Then search the glitch effect she wants by using a scanner; moving the image while that is being scanned, the results are distorted figures. “By mashing up these two technologies, I want to highlight the obsolescence of the old one and the future obsolescence of the new one”. She thinks that the most stylish pictures are the kitchest ones.

Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar

The beauty of diversity

Michelle Marshall is a french photographer. During her career she decided to document the incidence of the MC1R gene mutation responsible for red hair and freckles, particularly amongst black/mixed raced individuals of all ages. The gene is recessive, which means both parents need to have it, in order for the child to receive it. Marshall wanted to show the stereotype of the redhead is not representative for all people who enjoy their red strands. Her work is really interesting.

Christian Richter shows the beauty in ruins

“When I was young, I fell in love with abandoned buildings. After I got a camera as a present, I started photographing the beauty there. I mostly photograph empty buildings with great staircases or interiors.”

“I simply adore old decaying architecture, their patterns and textures – they remind me that everything is impermanent. Abandoned architecture photography is my ongoing project and I often travel around Europe looking for abandoned buildings.”

[http://www.boredpanda.com/abandoned-buildings-urban-decay-photography-christian-richter/]

Nancy Davidson’s sculptures challenge absurd body ideals

Nancy Davidson creates massive inflatable sculptures that resemble an unbridled body, ballooned and bulging. Combining pop culture kitsch with a feminist spirit and carnivalesque sense of humor, the artist specializes in a visceral language of bellies, bumps and lovely lady lumps, harnessing the bodily force of the human form in a minimalist range of colors and shapes.

Many of the sculptures begin with a weather balloon that the artist blows up with a nozzle. Then she goes to work, squeezing and binding and smushing the round orbs into various bodacious configurations.

For example, “Blue Moon” (below) resembles a belly and butt bursting from a corset trying desperately to restrain them, while another recalls fishnet stockings winding their way up impossibly long legs. Through abstraction, Davidson creates images so physical you may find yourself needing to swallow, as sometimes perusing erotic materials makes one forget to breathe.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/feminist-artist-brings-minimalist-sculpture-to-bootylicious-new-heights_us_5748ad57e4b03ede4414d77a?utm_hp_ref=female-artists]

The photographer who normalizes women’s imperfect bodies

After a slew of instagram hate following her body positive imagery depicting women’s body hair went viral, it would have been easy for Seattle based photographer Ashley Armitage to take a step back from her bare-all approach to photography. But this online hate didn’t deter her from portraying a realistic, photoshop free depiction of the female form. Instead of bowing to the trolls, Armitage decided to push the boundaries of beauty standards further, shooting stretch marks, scars, spots and more.

Ashley Armitage bodies

Ashley Armitage bodies

Ashley Armitage

“I create images of the female body because historically these images have been controlled by men. We were always the painted and not the painters. I’m trying to take back what’s ours and explore what it means to have a body that has always been defined by a male hand”– Ashley Armitage

[http://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/29017/1/the-photographer-normalising-our-imperfect-bodies]

The strange beauty of pollution

The Gowanus Canal is a Brooklyn waterway that, during the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century and beyond, served as a receptacle of waste for the various companies that fueled the way.

Specifically, the canal served as a dumping ground for coal tar, a thick, black liquid containing benzene, naphthalene, phenols, aniline and a bunch of other hazardous chemical compounds. After it was no longer needed, the canal was left to fester, and the tar substance seeped underground, floated to the surface, and interspersed itself throughout the fetid body of water, yielding a virulent stench and strangely stunning visuals.

Today, the Gowanus Canal is one of the most polluted bodies of water in the country, and was declared a Superfund site in 2010. In 2013, a dolphin even died in its toxic grip.

When photographer Steven Hirsch, a Brooklyn native, saw the channel for the first time in 2010, he was enthralled. During his initial visit, an eruption of oil started bubbling and erupting on the water’s surface with a bizarre cocktail of centuries-old pollutants. Hirsch pulled out his camera and braved the nauseating smell to capture the strange visual effect, like a metallic Impressionist artwork.

The images are at once haunting and oddly hypnotic, illuminating the disastrous results of unchecked contamination left out to rot, and the strange visual complexity that arises from such hazardous destruction. In the images, emerald green, metallic gold and electric aquamarine dance in abstract patterns that seem brewed from the imagination. It’s hard to believe these organic-looking shapes are the result of human waste and carelessness.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mesmerizing-photos-of-the-gowanus-canal-capture-the-dark-reality-and-strange-beauty-of-pollution_us_56e2fb6ae4b065e2e3d5c056?utm_hp_ref=photography]

Play- Doh portraits by Jose Cardoso

Jose Cardoso’s work looks scary but surely it is really interesting.

“There’s a lot of theories about identity loss nowadays, about how social networks can help you fake your real identity, why do people use photoshop in order to hide imperfections but never use that tool to enhance deficiencies?”

This work could be refered also to how easy is to get plastic surgery to your face like it was made of Play-Doh.

These photos are open to a variety of interpretations.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/play-doh-portraits-jose-cardoso_us_5734e23fe4b08f96c18294c4?utm_hp_ref=photography]

Photosculptures by Brno del Zou

Brno del Zou is an artist and a photographer who uses an interesting fragment style which highlights all parts of a human face. In his “photosculptures” series, Brno Del Zou uses the fragmentation of the body in order to better understand it. The body and the faces are revisited and their volumes are highlighted in order to create installations of multiple scales. These “photosculptures” suggest a clear aesthetic preference which does not hide the chaotic side of our minds.

Photo series by Sheila Pree morphs real women with Barbie

We’ve seen what a Barbie doll would look like if modeled after the average 19-year-old woman. But when you juxtapose a doll’s facial features with a real woman’s, the results are startling.

That’s what photographer Sheila Pree Bright did in her 2003 series “Plastic Bodies,” which is currently part of the traveling art show “Posing Beauty in African American Culture.” Pree Bright’s work focuses mostly on women of color, exploring their complex relationships to white beauty standards by combining images of real women’s bodies and faces with those of dolls.

“American concepts of the “perfect female body” are clearly exemplified through commercialism, portraying “image as everything” and introducing trends that many spend hundreds of dollars to imitate. It is more common than ever that women are enlarging breasts with silicone, making short hair longer with synthetic hair weaves, covering natural nails with acrylic fill-ins, or perhaps replacing natural eyes with contacts.

Even on magazine covers, graphic artists are airbrushing and manipulating photographs in software programs, making the image of a small waist and clear skin flawless. As a result, the female body becomes a replica of a doll, and the essence of natural beauty in popular American culture is replaced by fantasy.”

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/plastic-bodies-sheila-pree-bright-beauty-identity_n_4324403.html]

Awesome Split Personality Portraits Through Clever Styling

For a recent assignment, Sydney-based photographer Toby Dixon created these two awesome split personality portraits not with fancy Photoshop but with the help of two talented friends. Monique Moynihan, who was in charge of styling and Budi, who handled make-up, transformed a man and a woman each into two distinct halves.

Similar to a mullet, “business in the front, party in the back,” these side by side characters couldn’t be more different. While the studious, bow-tie and pearls-wearing side seems more than a little serious, the tattoo-sporting, red lipstick-wearing party side is all about letting loose.

Dixon proudly states about this project, “No cutting, no comping, no Photoshop trickery.”

[http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/toby-dixon-split-personality-portraits]

Going over perfection’s idea

The korean Seung-Hwan Oh is a photographer and a microbiologist who suceed to combine these fields of work. In his serie Impermanence, he cultivates fungus that he applies to his film before he puts it into his camera. It consists in a serie of portraits which wants to go over the perfect and idealized pictures we see everywhere nowadays.

Distorted Scotch Tape Portraits by Wes Naman

One year ago, a New Mexico-based photographer Wes Naman was wrapping Christmas gifts with his assistant and started goofing around with the scotch tape. The artist immediately had an idea that after a year developed into the“Scotch Tape” portrait series, where volunteers put the tape around their faces to create terrifying and just absolutely hilarious expressions. Noses and lips get bent, and Wes also likes to stretch people’s eyebrows to make the eyes pop out – the final results are so bizarre that hardly any retouching is needed!

[http://www.boredpanda.com/scotch-tape-portraits-wes-naman/]

Ashkan Honarvar’s War Faces

The fact that the wounds on these men’s faces are made of candy and ice cream makes them oddly unsettling. Utrecth-based artist, Ashkan Honarvar’s Facesseries seems to beautify what is inherently absent from fatal or horribly disfiguring wounds inflicted by soldiers during war.

Ashkan says his work, “constitutes a search for a universal representation of the evil latent in every human, providing an opportunity for reflection. His aesthetic dissection has an intriguing macabre nature, which opens the images to interpretation.

[http://streetanatomy.com/2012/06/16/ashkan-honarvars-war-faces/]

Ashkan Honarvar Faces 5 (4)

Ashkan Honarvar Faces 5 (1)

Ashkan Honarvar Faces 5 (3)

 

Sue Hotchkis’s use of Wabi-Sabi doctrine

“…my work is texture and surface, strongly influenced by the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi. I seek out imperfection, in the insignificant and the overlooked, using a camera to freeze a moment in time, recording marks and surfaces that are in the process of breaking down, ephemeral, in a state of flux. ”

[http://www.artandartdeadlines.com/2016/02/artist-of-the-day-sue-hotchkis/]

What Wabi-Sabi is? This word represents  a Japanese world view centered on the acceptiance of transience and imperfection.

Imperfect 3D printed ceramics by Steffen Hartwig

Using a self-designed ceramic 3D printer, extruder, and software system, Steffen Hartwig’s 3D printed pieces are imbued with intentional imperfections, resulting in ambiguous yet alluring artifacts that carry the trace of ceramic’s handcrafted roots.  While many advances in ceramic 3D printing today are focused on creating stronger, more technically precise objects than what was previously possible to make by hand, Hartwig’s work stands apart.

To create these kind of ceramics, Hartwig began with parametric design, an algorithmic process used in engineering.

“Aesthetically, I am driven by the beauty and new things that emerge from imperfections, errors or randomness”.

Tattoos Over Scars

Scars are part of our lives, but when it’s too hard to live with them, the solution of tattoos over scars can help people to feel better. Recently, great progress has been made in plastic surgery thanks to tattoo art. Breast cancer survivors with mastectomy surgery scars are now able to reclaim their femininity with lovely tattoos, as well as burnt persons, with re-pigmentation. People with surgery, accident and self-harm scars, as well as stretch marks, often call on tattoo artists’ services to help them. It is a process full of emotions, which requires tact and experience. Each scar has got its solution, but also its difficulties. So, if you want to cover a scar with a tattoo, please find the time to make your researches and choose a tattoo artists with a solid experience in tattooing scars. If your tattoo artists is not enough experienced, the lines could blow or look quirky. If it is possible to insert ink in scar tissues, the result won’t look the same as in the rest of the tattoo. Also, if you had nerve damages, the tattoo can be more painful than expected.

Chiara Barbera

It’s not easy… it’s never easy.

Giusy Versace is a well-known Italy’s champion para-athlete : She lost her legs in an accident, but she kept her persistance and determination.

Giusy Versace – www.giusyversace.it – Maurizio pighizzini

“It’s hard to confront yourself with the daily physical pain. Prosthetics, after all, aren’t your legs. So you wake up with a biting pain in different parts of your body,” the 30-something Italian says, pointing at her tummy and hips, “You can’t walk exactly like you walked yesterday. It’s different, every day.”

 

GIUSY VERSACE – WWW.GIUSYVERSACE.IT – Mjriam bon

 

Other Sources Gulf Times

 Giada Semeraro

Up&Up

Coldplay has released a bizarre new video for their third single titled Up&Up,from their current album, A Head Full of Dreams : I thought I’d post it because it shows everything beautiful around us,each part of the world and its opposite, so the imperfects of the world in all its greatness. But up is down, down is up, normally large concepts have been miniaturized and nothing is the same.  With the help of directors Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia, the Biritsh band turned seemingly ordinary activities and images into the extraordinary:

While its overall tone is quirky, dreamlike and playful, it also makes some serious political points, with imagery including boats overcrowded with people, a beach with a huge concrete wall blocking the sea and children in a war-torn landscape.

Heymann and Muggia commented in a statement that they were “inspired by many collage artists, past and present. Hopefully the images do the rest of the talking.”

sources
Creativity-online
Indiana Times

 

Giada Semeraro