I will link a video at the end of this post. It is about an artist who fuses animal pelts with human facial features. I’m putting it at the end because if taxidermy/using animal skins makes you uncomfortable, you can avoid seeing the video. It also may be uncomfortable seeing a human face in an animal context, (I find it both alarming and enthralling.)
In my last post, The Traveling Eye, part 2, I commented on retraining the eye out of habitual visual depths, in order to freshen both your awareness as well as creative vision. (And possibly to benefit your physical vision.) I watched this video recently and it has me thinking in a tangental direction. Instead of having a perception filter that reduces what we see into something familiar, and therefore less apt for acute attention, what happens when we explore with a filter that details our own image/self onto what we see? Does it become endearing, because we see ourselves in it? Is it revered? Or does it unsettle? How much of ourselves are we willing to see, in the world around us?
A quick perusal of art, architecture and crafts shows how we love to see our image portrayed through and onto almost any medium. And literature abounds with anthropomorphized fauna, flora and objects, to our delight and entertainment. But when the human image, merged with other aspects of nature, gets a little too real, some discomfort arises. The image becomes unnatural. And our reactions to that unnatural image are what I find exciting to explore. Who am I when I’m in the middle of an emotional reaction to a simple image?
It doesn’t even take a full-on human face applied to an animal form to summon that reactive revelation. There are two books of primate photos I recommend, to evoke reaction. One is “James and Other Apes” by James Mollison (its cover is the chimp photo below) and the other is “Monkey Portraits,” by Jill Greenberg.
I want to clarify, I am not advocating exposure to extreme types of things just to feel horror, or be grossed out (or actually, to feel anything). Main stream culture and media have that covered all too well. I am talking about reactions to things that are not so obvious. For example, in the “James” book, when I pay attention to myself as I see its images, why would I feel such vulnerability, or fear, or awe, by a simple close-up view of a primate face? Why would I be moved to tears? Why would I want to give a particular ape a hug? Apes are that gray space between the human image and an animal image, it’s an easy segue and easy to relate to. But why would I be feeling what I feel when there’s more contrast in the paired images?
In time, I’ll continue my thoughts on this. For now, here’s the video. And, I accidentally deleted some photos that documented my steps in creating a Taxidermy Needle-Felted Dodo, but I’ll include what I have in the next post.
