New skins and old ceremonies. Its a complex visual language. Body art is not merely “decoration”, but instead, part of a highly patterned cultural universe.The appeal of body painting is a fascinating juxtaposition between the ancient providing avenues of communication between the human and divine worlds. Tribal groups in South America are tangible examples of how body decoration serves to both symbolically order society – and the cosmos – and symbolically order the senses. The designs are, in fact, interrelated with a range of sensory impressions. The phrase “the social skin” refers to the ways in which the skin may be employed by cultures as a kind of map for charting social orders.
click image for more....
It is not only social relations which are inscribed on and embodied through the skin, however, but also sensory relations. Studio Backstage in Montreal is going to be working with Lymari Millot who is teaming up with Alex Hansen. Alex is a former world champion body painter and is currently in the top three in the world. Lymari is a former make-up professional with Mehron and together they seem to understand the relationship their art has with the cosmic, and the extent to which they can blot into another dimension creating some profound visual language.
Click image for more....
Within its cultural context, body decoration is meant to channel and order both interior and exterior forces, from the sensory to the cosmological. The body signs within the art should not be regarded as representations, but rather as conduits of energy. Without an understanding of the multi-layered and multisensory symbolism which informs the designs, representations of the body art of lesser talents become flat and superficial, as if they were no more than skin deep.
Alex, who is from Brasil has always had an intuitively honed understanding of how to make extensive use of color symbolism, both as a representation of material culture and in a broader association of colors with actions and concepts.His use of pop-culture iconography is almost a visual decoy that covers a tapping into emotional veins from a remote time, when power, divine communication and procreation were primordial and not as deeply submerged within our consumerist culture.
In this photo: Lymari Millot (photos), Mehron Ny (photos), Andrea DuBuc O'Donnell. click image for more...
The color symbolism of Lymari and Alex’s work is not purely visual, or aesthetically pleasing. As complex art, it seems integrated into a larger system of sensory symbolism involving temperatures, flavors, odors, sounds and tactilities, that gives rise to a sense of synchronicity that carries a vibratory message, and the choice of colors inevitably evoke a range of other sensory perceptions.
In this photo: Lymari Millot (photos), Sarah Shephard, Alex Hansen (photos), Nick Parry-Photography
The South American tribes tend to believe that all sensory imagery corresponds with sensory codes contained within the brain. The brain, in fact, is sometimes compared to a honeycomb, with each hexagonal compartment containing honey of a different color, odor, flavor and texture, with distinct corresponding moral values. Ideally, each sensation perceived by a person should stimulate the corresponding sensory and moral value within the brain. The great body art is using a similar sensory language within our own cultural contexts. Thus, colorful designs on faces, therefore, represent but one aspect of an intricate and integrated multi-sensory 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 evokes a train of sensory associations which begin in the brain and encompass the cosmos.
er">
Alex Hansen. Kathy Slamen photo. click image for more...
COMMENTS
