I have my very first solo photography exhibition running this month at the North York Central Library, 5120 Yonge St. entitled SLOW DOWN, LOOK CLOSER. Please check it out if you’re in the area and see Willowdale from a “bee’s eye view”.
Details over at http://slowdownlookcloser.chrisnolan.ca/
Photography student Hannah Price was first catcalled shortly after moving to Philadelphia in 2009 and was thrown off guard. She reacted by taking the portraits of the men who were doing the cat calling and has put together a gallery exhibit entitled “City of Brotherly Love”.
NPR’s Codeswitch as an interview with her titled A Photographer Turns Her Lens On Men Who Catcall, and the Morning News as a piece titled My Harassers.
A video with the photographer done for her exhibit at the Stockton Art Gallery is worth viewing as well.
Tatyana Fazlalizadeh took her displeasure of having to suffer this behaviour nearly daily to the streets themselves. She began a series of posters she put up around her Brooklyn neighbourhood as her way of speaking back to her harassers and this has spawned the Stop Telling Women to Smile project. After a successful Kickstarter campaign last month, she is taking the posters on the road. You can also buy some posters to put up in your neighbourhood too.
There are stories all over the web from women who do not appreciate this behaviour: a project last year simply called Catcalled collects the experiences of a set of women over a set period of time, and blogger Nic has a well articulated article on her experiences.
Have you been catcalled or wolf whistled? How did it make you feel? What is an acceptable form of compliment in your opinion? On the flip side, men, do you wolf whistle and if so, why?
In 2005 artist Ana Álvarez-Errecalde responded to a recurring dream she was having and decided to take self portraits of herself, and her newborn daughter. The resulting images she has titled “Birth of My Daughter (or El Nacimiento de Mi Hija)”
Ana Alvarez-Errecalde on the birth of her daughter says: “I open, I transform, I bleed, I scream and I smile”
I am moved to share her photos because I feel birth is a monumentally inexplicable alteration of reality and in our culture it is too rarely revealed as such. If you are having a child, please explore your options of how your family can truly experience the beauty of birth.
If you are curious about the origin of the images, please watch the short documentary “Umbilical Self-portrait” by MiNuShu.
To see some of Ava Álvarez-Errecalde current work, where she has created bodysuits representing nude forms (called the More Store), review this article at Empty Kingdom and this piece at Elephant Journal.
Visitors to the “More Store” try on different body images.
Thanks to Brooke @ Violicious for bring my attention to Bauhauswife’s post sharing her thoughts on the work.
ana álvarez-errecalde’s Simbiosis
I came across the above image posted at Babes at the Museum, and they were requesting to identify the people in the photo as of February 2012. I decided to go on a bit of a hunt.
My conclusion is that the photo is the work of Charlotte Duberry, Nessa Norich, Jessica Hinds, and Marina Lazzarotto and is an outtake shot during the rehearsal of commissioned performances at the Louvre, in front of Regnault’s The Three Graces (“Les Trois Grâces”) on a Tuesday sometime in 2010. An applicable title is “Mimesis in the Louvre”.
Now to document some of my search for those curious.
I started out using TinEye, as if it was an ‘official’ photo it was good chance it would be registered over there (and I was curious if it would trigger on the painting in the background). It returned 12 images, best guess being this post, but nothing official. I found a post over at blended.fr that claimed the photo was part of lingerie company La fille d’O‘s advertising but couldn’t find anything corroborating that. I found a blog post by Jim Harris over at Huffington Post about Facebook’s censorship of the image (what is art, vs what is porn? and many nice things said about the image), but again, no source information.
Next up was using Google Image Search. This led me to the trove that is tumblr. Its best guess was a post by Mr. Harris Tweed which he named “The Four Graces”, but then I was determined to try to find the first occurrence of the picture online. Via this line of inquiry I found a nice article here asking where the line between classical beauty is and just plain sexy. Using the date searches, leading back to the beginning of May 2011, I narrowed it down to this post at contraindicaciones which was the first I found listing some names of the participants: “Nessa Norich, Jessica Hinds, Charlotte Duberry, Marina Lazzarotto, Sofia Senna” (also this post at Girls Who Like Porno). The earliest dated post I found was Feb 18, 2011 at murdermetonymy‘s tumblr, but again no source. Having some names in hand, and the location known due to the background image (though many attributed it to Rubens or Rapheal instead of Regnault, and one even named it as the Graces from Botticelli’s Primavera) I tried to confirm things.
I found a website for Nessa Norich which listed in her ‘Devised Works’ section a project called “The Three Graces”. There are images of a dance performed by three women in front of the painting. It is still difficult to confirm the faces of the participants though. Over on Marina Benitez Lazzarotto’s resume she too lists a theatre performance at the Louvre, so this connected four of the names I found from the other sites to the image’s location.
Finally I emailed my suspicions and received confirmation from Ms Benitez Lazzarotto that it was in fact a photo taken on her camera after hours while they were rehearsing for their respective shows.
“The girls in the photo from left to right are: Charlotte Dubery, Nessa Norich, Jessica Hinds and me. The picture was taken with my camera which i put on a timer. It was taken on a tuesday when the museum was closed and the three girls and i were rehearsing for Les Nocturnes du Louvre.” – Marina
So, there is a brief history of this meme.
And keeping it all current, if you like the talent Marina showed in creating this image, perhaps you’ll want to help her out making a movie? Crowdsource her over at IndieGoGo for her film project FLASH.
Today I was introduced to the realm of ‘Hyper Realistic Sculpture’. Demilked recently shared a new sculpture by Ron Mueck, which led me to look at a bunch of his previous works. Doing that led me to the human-animal hybrids of Patricia Piccinini, which reminded me of some of the characters in Jeff Lemire‘s Sweet Tooth. I’ve since looked at a bunch of other works by artists such as Evan Penny, Carole A. Feuerman and more. If you have some time, browse around some of this work, and if you are lucky enough find some on exhibit near you.
What is still sticking with me about the Ron Mueck work, is the different scales. He has very large ones, and very small ones too. Wow. To see more of the way he works, check out the site of photographer Gautier Deblonde who works with the artist in documenting his process and his installations.
An interesting observation I made: we were barefoot (as we have been for months now), but instead of getting strange looks from people, instead many people thought that they too should shed their shoes while playing. Goes to show you what preconceptions can do.
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