Dennis Oppenheim

I really like Dennis Oppenheim. His work reminds me of being asleep, but not necessarily the good kind of sleep. He lives in New York.

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Ex de Medici & Del Kathryn Barton

I very much enjoy pleasant yet awkward watercolours by artists with skills closer to the illustration/design side of life. Ex de Medici comes from New South Wales somewhere and works with performance, installation, tattooing, photography, painting and drawing. I am particularly interested in the watercolours. Del Kathryn Barton also makes beautiful watercolour images, usually slightly unnervingly cute portraits. She recently won the Archibald Prize, which I'm sure was just great. They are both obviously suffering from what most of us underachievers would like to call obsessive compulsive disorder. Both have odd symbolism riddling it's way into the otherwise cute images. Both are excellent artist. Following is four Ex de Medici images and then four Del Kathryn Barton images.

Ian Stevenson

I don't have a great deal to say about Ian Stevenson, just that I thought something light hearted would be nice. I first saw his work a few years ago when he made his excellent rubbish drawings. Anyway, this is a series of drawings in public restrooms. I think they are cute, and I wish that pubs around here would allow the existence of this sort of thing, exercised with discretion, I'm sure people would get used to the fact that "so and so is a slut" is not legitimate intelligent discourse. Hint hint Exchange Hotel.

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Joel Peter Witkin

With odd imagery and amazing technical aptitude, Joel Peter Witkin photographs death. As a child he witnessed the decapitation of a young girl, which lead to his future fascinations. Witkin is influenced by a number of surrealist and baroque artists and works with the photography technique Daguerreotype, developed by Louis Daguerre in 1839. It is the process in which an image is exposed onto a polished surface which bears a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. I am sure if I were a photographer I might still have no idea what that means, but it looks fantastic. Along with death, Witkin deals with the typical "freak show" characters of yesteryears; dwarfs, transsexuals, physically deformed persons.

His work often depicts scenes from old religious sequences and also yields a very strong fetish following. I am often quite against work that stands only on the hind legs of shock, but I think Joel Peter Witkin is much more than that. His work is disturbing but perfectly beautiful and is oddly enough, not really that shocking to look at. He has come up in question often about the exploitation of the corpses in question, however, I imagine they gave some form of consent as his work was predominant in the 70s and 80s. It may be naive to believe, but I like to think there are some forms of laws in place to protect one from donating their body to science/public displays of affection towards horses. I'm not entirely sure that anyone could pull this off post Witkin, but, I would strongly consider giving my body up should I somehow precede him in death.

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Nathalia Edenmont

Russian photographer Nathalia Edenmont is noted for killing and stuffing mice, rabbits and cats, among other animals, for the purpose of photographing them adorned with aristocratic collars, mounted perfectly on angelic pedestals or worn as finger puppets. Being described as beautiful, haunting and occasionally kitsch, Edenmont’s work sets itself apart from other art due to the simple shock factor that the subjects are dead. If she feels like cleverly replacing the stamen of a flower with an eyeball, an animal dies. This process might gain her infamy and possible financial stability, but the balance of life is tedious at best, and the fact that the animal world is in no way benefiting from her success, is somewhat deplorable. I imagine that some would enjoy viewing her work anyway, however, I find it much more intelligent if she had made it herself.

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