Marilyn Minter

 GREEN PINK CAVIAR

In Green Pink Caviar Marilyn Minter continues her interest in blurring the boundaries between fine and commercial art. Co-opting advertising genres and related spaces, she takes on a new platform to direct her first video. The eight minute high definition video, Green Pink Caviar (2009) is a lush and sensual voyeuristic hallucination. Filmed with macro lenses, the video was inspired by a photo shoot where Minter directed her models to lick brightly colored candies while she shot photos from underneath a glass plate. The models' tongues mixed the colorful sugar with saliva, slurping and pushing color across the glass surface to simulate painting. Driven by her fascination with the body, Green Pink Caviar sets the stage for chance to happen.

"I was shooting stills of models with long tongues swirling and sucking bakery products from under a pane of glass. I wanted to make enamel paintings along the idea of painting with my tongue. My makeup artist shot some short videos just to see how it would look. The low definition videos looked so good that later we made plans to do a professional high definition video. I have made both billboards and produced a commercial advertising a 1989 painting show so this made sense as a next step. Green Pink Caviar seems to have a life of its own."

Marilyn Minter

Total Cosmetic Freedom?

Scar me to show my personal identity?

Continuing the theme of skin imprints I thought you should also see the work of the Swiss artist Daniele Buetti.  His  pictures of airbrushed beautiful women with scars on their faces are constructed to show emotion and feelings within the work, and also to portray personal identity.

Adriana Page Russell - Skin Tattoos

Ariana Page Russell has a skin condition called dermatographia, where the skin is overly sensitive to minor injuries. Even light scratches will cause it to become red and raised. This is an immune system skin hypersensitivity that releases histamine which is the chemical (neuro-transmitter) your body produces when you’re having an allergic reaction. High levels of histamine cause her blood vessels to dilate and make the vessel walls abnormally permeable and this causes the welts to appear. The welts reportedly last for 30 minutes, giving the artist time to draw various patterns on her body and then take pictures of the drawings.

Inspired by Nicole Tran Ba Vang

Nip/Tuck Campaign.  Dir. Jon Yeo 2005 from Jon Yeo on Vimeo.

UK Promo Campaign for the Season 2 launch on Sky based on the artwork of Nicole Tran Ba Vang.

Get Your Kit Off!

Nicole Tran Va Bang's work is the concept of “skin clothing,” a removable skin that allows her subjects to add, remove, or alter body parts as they wish. She uses this image again and again through photos, paintings, installations, and even video. In some of her paintings, Tran Va Bang uses pop culture icons, models and advertisements as the basis for her paintings on magazine pages. It shows these idealistic body types as all being easily altered, as easily removable as clothing. The commentary behind her artwork questions the accessiblity of cosmetic surgery and contemporary culure's dismorphic desire to appropriate the body image of others.

www.tranbavang.com

No plastic surgery. All you need is tape and scissors.

missloisy.blogspot.com/

Although she also creates self portraits, most of the time Lois Cohen shoots other people, claiming that they are the most interesting creatures to photograph. Getting others in front of my camera, she is able to dress pose her sitters in any postion.  While avoiding links to reality,  the images constructed are like steps into her imagination.  

Let down thy hair my love!

 

Peng! magazine, issue 5

While male dress has appropriated many forms of female decoration, with hair it often stops short at the methods of hair dressing.  Straightening, perming, and the application of pomade or mousse to retain shape and form, male hairdressing often stops short of the use of curlers, pins and hairspray.  The pleasure in seeing these processes of hair styling applied to the male form is immeasurable, perhaps because the images refrain from reducing the masculinity of the sitter.

Alien Dolls and Paco Peregrin

 

Magazine: Avenue Illustrated (www.avenueillustrated.com/ )

Photographer- Paco Peregrín (www.pacoperegrin.com  )
Styling- Kattaca (www.kattaca.com )

Make up artist and Hairdresser- Lewis Amarante

Colour me Beautiful

BG Magazine nº 044 POP
Photographer- Gregorio Triviño (www.myspace.com/grego_trivino )

Make up artist and Hairdresser- Yurema Villa

Paco Peregrin

Photographer and art Direction- Paco Peregrín www.pacoperegrin.com )

Make up artist- Lewis Amarante

Mr Toledano - A New Kind of Beauty

I’m interested in what we define as beauty, when we choose to create it ourselves.

Beauty has always been a currency, and now that we finally have the technological means to mint our own, what choices do we make?

Is beauty informed by contemporary culture? By history? Or is it defined by the surgeon’s hand? Can we identify physical trends that vary from decade to decade, or is beauty timeless?

When we re-make ourselves, are we revealing our true character, or are we stripping away our very identity?

Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?

This is a unique time. While the technology exists to truly re-imagine ourselves, it’s not perfect. And until it is, a new species of human is being created. And not unlike the Neaderthal, they will co-exist with Homo Sapiens for a short while, before disappearing into history.

Mr. Toledano

How far is too far when it comes to making our bodies match with our own conceptions of beauty? Socio-political photographer Phillip Toledano has captured an array of men and women whose bodies are their art, and use plastic surgery to achieve what they feel is their own masterpiece. From facelifts to breast augmentations, Mr. Toledano captures each of his subjects and raises questions about self-perception, societal paragons, and what it means to be beautiful.