PERFECT CHRISTMAS GIFT: Visual Exoticism

They don’t pop out of a cake anymore. They just stay stationary over the holiday period; although some of these trees are little more high maintenance than others……Its visual exoticism that is more than skin deep.In this modern world, body painting has taken its place as one of the trendiest form of artwork. Why the trend? It encompasses tribalism, identity, the deep past and a possible future, as well as a certain form of spiritualism.  It is James Cameron’s avatar on a personal level that is more artistic.Beyond the aesthetic, this “decoration” in fact encodes vital social and cosmological information and multisensory meanings.There is even an annual event to recognise the works of body artists. The World Bodypainting Festival is held on the third week of July in Seeboden, Austria every year.

"Christmas is almost near and obviously you are searching for a Christmas Tree. I think you will be happy if you find such a beautiful body painted Christmas tree. Model painted her whole body like a Christmas tree. Christmas Tree Body Paintings."

…New York City artists, Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector , currently residing in Chiang Mai, Thailand. After receiving permission from museums around the world, the artists look for an elaborate painting that will cover Chadwick’s body. Once the painting begins, the original 19th century painting of a woman, which was painted by a man, is now repainted by a female on a male body in the 21st century. Chadwick admits the 12 to 15 hour process is painful, especially because he has to pose completely still, almost in a meditative trance. The resulting photographs reveal a unification of art combining antiquity, history and technology in a contemporary context.

“Here’s a picture of Emilie Autumn. Emilie was famous in our hometown for a variety of reasons, one of which being that she would do things like, say, dye her skin green and wear Christmas tinsel hair extensions. This isn’t body paint, folks. This is skin dyed green, and over the course of weeks it would gradually fade away, as though Emilie were transforming from Frankenstein monster to human girl.”

"I spent a sizable chunk of my youth locked in Emilie’s room, smoking pot, drinking Thunderbird, eating pot, and making art with her. Music was always playing,..."

Read More:

http://www.designswan.com/archives/visually-confusing-body-painting-from-spector-and-chadwick.html

"This incredibly life-like creature is created using meticulous body painting and prosthetics. These are living characters to blow your Christmas stockings into oblivion. After the transformation is complete, according to your needs, the character then can be used as a statue, standing or lying still or changing poses, or your reindeer can mix & mingle hynotising your guests. Hold onto your mistletoe!"

Read more: http://quazen.com/arts/bodyart/a-collection-of-artistic-female-body-paintings/#ixzz18yDvtu3B

Anthropologists sometimes use the term “the social skin” to refer to the ways in which the skin may be employed by cultures as a kind of map for charting social orders. It is not only social relations which are inscribed on and embodied through the skin, however, but also sensory relations, that , from the experience of native tribes in South America, can provide avenues of communication between the human and divine worlds : A means of integrating sounds and odours in order to ensure a continuing dialogue with the divine.

"represent but one aspect of an intricate and integrated multisensory complex of beliefs and practices. What may appear to be a simple pattern of visual markings designed to make a person more attractive, in fact, encodes and evo

a train of sensory associations which begin in the brain and encompass the cosmos."

In different South American peoples ,such as  the Inca,  body decoration may serve to both symbolically order society – and the cosmos – and symbolically order the senses; The Inca could be said to internalize their values by literally embodying them through their symbolic manifestations, the body artifacts.”  In the same in the West,  within the cultural context, of the body painting sub-culture, body decoration is meant to channel and order both interior and exterior forces, from the sensory to the cosmological as well within a pop culture narrative that lacks that appropriates the religio-social dimension of aborginial symbolism and re-contextualizes within some new set of values; not merely as  representations, but rather as conduits of energy. Without an understanding of the multilayered and synaestheitic (or multisensory) symbolism which informs the complex designs, representations of the body art  becomes merely flat and superficial – as if they were no more than skin deep.

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