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.
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.
little electric chairs
From 1964, Andy Warhol would uplift troubling images from newspapers: fatal car crashes, an upturned ambulance. He claimed the more you looked at an image, the less gruesome it is. His series on the electric chair exhibits this depersonalising effect but holds impending terror in its repetition.
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.