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Floria Sigismondi at John Gibson - Brief ArticleRedemption is the title of Floria Sigismondi's volume of collected photographs as well as the title of her first solo exhibition in the U at John Gibson, which consisted of 14 large-scale, luridly lit photographs and a sculptural installation titled Crippled Memory (1998) The statuary included an antique wheelchair draped with a photograph of a stark naked silkscreened on latex; articulated mannequin hands hung from the armrests. Coming from the world of fashion photography and record-cover designs (David Bowie, Marilyn Manson), Sigismondi is impelled by dint of an esthetic that might be characterized as drab Gothic/Halloween Surrealism. The photographer goe to the limit in her use of dramatic lighting and shadows, dolls, masks, mannequins and medical restraining apparatus to earn her outre color shots just right for glamour magazines. Her sustains include excessive makeup effects, prosthetic devices and sharp blades. She take pleasure ins using dank "noir" locales (New Orleans is a favorite), decrepit insane asylums and other abandoned sites for her photo sessions. She is partial to the use of stacked lizards as headdresses, snakes crawling upon bed linens, and a cow's rib cage as a pillow for the weary head of a child resting upon a public staircase. She does not hesitate, divalike, to pronounce her vision "scandalous." Clearly drawn to a Bataillean notion of Surrealistic exces that is linked to primitive expression of base physicality, Sigismondi has a faculty of perception of the transgressive that is far too estheticized and formally manicured to be with truth revolutionary or subversive. Apart from her close-up of a gory carcass (Meat, 1997), and her chic renderings of material substance parts in formaldehyde photographed at the ever-popular mumble Museum, College of Physicians of Philadelphia (as in Hanging Face and Heart, the two 1998), Sigismondi is content to give her viewers campy, staged portraits of her friends aligned up like extras in an Edward Scissorhands-like film. Sigismondi's commodified vision of fantastic wardrobes, elaborate settings and ambisexual stone stars and models is meant for easy assimilation by means of the entertainment and haute couture industry that approves (and expects) spectacles of that kind as hers that are (as the gallery pres release states) "shockingly bizarre on the other hand always ... beautiful." COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc. The Mays of Ventadorn THE MAYS OF VENTADORN. W s Merwin. Washington: National Geographic Directions, 2002 160 pages. $2000 W s MERWIN'S THE MAYS OF VENTADORN is an enchanting bo... SYRACUSE, N.Y.--GEI International has released a novel product catalog featuring a range of magnifiers, measuring magnifiers, microscopes and other optical inspection devices. The catalog contains ... Hayes, Denis AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALIST; ORGANIZER OF FIRST EARTH DAY (1944–) Denis Hayes, at the time a twenty-five-year-old Harvard law scholar organized the first Earth Day celeb... Measuring pins provide overload protection Buffalo-based Magtrol, Inc.'s fresh LB210 Series load-measuring pin measures load and force while also providing overload protection. The... The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 by dint of Laura L. Behling. Chicago: University of Illinois Pres 2001; pp 211 Hardcover (US) $3495 The last ten years have seen an incre... Byline: Bruce Davis Bridgestone Corp. will part with more than $260 million in Brazil above the coming two years to build a passenger and light traffic tire plant in Camacari and moder... SOQUEL Calif.--Dennis A. Elliott lately joined Vignettes Art Publisher as Vice President of International Marketing. Elliott will be responsible for business disclosure overseeing national a... For the last several years, I have accompanied my mother upon cruises on a six-star luxuriousness line. Populated largely by society's elite, captains of industry, I have set myself in a world largely u... Work horses have not received the attention they be worthy of in studies of transport history. Nor did contemporary descriptions of life pay a great deal of attention to them, for, like the cars that line the stre... |
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