breaking down the corpse in art
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all manner of the macabre.
d_composition is an art historical take on the body hereafter. Formed at the intersection of visual culture and death, it’s aimed at those who rubberneck for anything morbidly curious. We welcome the presence lurking in the dark, believing that by talking about ‘it’, we cultivate empathy & understanding.
the thin veil
A Samhain special on Spiritualism, 19th-century mourning and Ben Cauchi’s photograph, The thin veil.
vaporisation
Mexican multi-media and conceptual artist Teresa Margolles employs a coercive method of immersion that prevents the viewer from avoiding death.
still
Jenny Saville attends to the flesh in thick lashings of oil paint. She relishes in the perception of the human body, mainly painting monumental self-portraits, nudes, fleshy women who counter the male gaze. Still is one of few images to render post-mortem flesh in her oeuvre.
the fool
Liyen Chong uses her hair to ‘draw’ on cotton, resulting in this intricately embroidered figure titled The Fool. Taking upward of thirty hours to complete, she stitches herself into an image of the dead with intense discipline.
no seconds
Until 2011, Texas death row inmates were able to request a ‘special meal’ a personalised last supper consisting of almost anything. Fascinated by the mundane and extraordinary, New Zealand photographer Henry Hargreaves created the series No Seconds exploring the last suppers of criminals executed under the American penal system.
this big goth rock
Photographer Vincent Tullo took this image as part of a series about the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This one might strike y’all as a little off-topic, but this big goth rock makes me think about death.
silueta
Part-performance, part-land-art Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series is a collection of ephemeral landscape interventions captured in photographs. She creates imprints of her ‘body’ from earth, blood, flowers, leaves, sticks, stones, fire, gunpowder, fireworks, candles and cloth.
lost content
Jasmine te Hira’s video work, Lost Content speaks of grief in gentle whispers, punctuated by a disarming and silent agony.