Flickr user, EYE-talian, has a wonderful photostream of hundreds of masks collected from around the world. EYE-talian says, “I’ve been collecting masks since 1989 when I first purchased a mask in Cancun, Mexico. I was intrigued by the weird hallucinogenic Mexican masks because they looked similar to the oddball sketches I was doing at the time.

On subsequent visits I purchased additional masks, usually buying the most unusual masks I could find and/or what my budget and baggage limits would allow. In the meantime, I stumbled upon some very cool German paper mache, and starched buckram Halloween masks at antique shows around Cincinnati and picked those up as well. I never had any intention of amassing a formal “collection” but one thing lead to another and then…. Holy Shit… Ebay!

Besides Ebay, a few of the masks were given to me by fellow collectors and a handful were purchased at local import shops. Yes I have way too many, and unfortunately don’t have room to display them all. I began taking photos of them a few years ago as a record of what I had, and eventually ran across Flickr and decided to post them there.”
 
Visit Eye-talian’s The Maskatorium
 
EYE-talian ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO USE AUTHORIZED WITHOUT PERMISSION.

 
The twin suicides of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan a few years back was the closing chapter to a story that somehow managed to combine all the darker elements of Hollywood, Scientology and the New York art world:

Duncan and Blake formed a popular couple on the downtown New York and Venice, Calif., art scenes.  She was one of the first video game designers for girls, and his “digital paintings”—kaleidoscopic images shown on plasma screens—established him as a rising star on the circuit.  The couple descended into a paranoid spiral when the artists developed a consuming belief that government and religious organizations were conspiring against them.  She killed herself in 2007.  Blake found her body on the floor of their bedroom, and walked into the Atlantic Ocean a week later, ending his life.

Well, according to today’s Variety, Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis are now teaming up to give that story, naturally, a screenplay.  For source material, Van Sant (Milk) and Ellis (Less Than Zero) plan on using The Golden Suicides, Vanity Fair’s posthumous profile of Blake and Duncan.

It’s a moving portrait of two people very much in love—as well as a harrowing depiction of how draining and hermetic the pair found the creative process.  That their spiral downward came at a time when they were both poised for greater career success makes their twin suicides as tragic as it is haunting.

For abundant evidence of Duncan’s smarts and style, you can check out her still maintained website: TheWitOfTheStaircase.  Blake is probably best known for his cover art on Beck’s Sea Change, and the “colorful undulations” used during the opening credits of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love.

But Blake himself was also a filmmaker.  His Winchester trilogy, inspired by the story of Sarah Winchester and her family’s “Mystery House,” was shown at the San Francisco MOMA in ‘05.  Century 21, the trilogy’s final installment, attempts to “explore the sickness—and the sexiness—of American violence.” 

Thanks to Ubu, you can watch it below:

In Variety: Scribes Make Suicide Pact

In The Guardian: Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis Join Forces On Film

In Vanity Fair: The Golden Suicides

Here’s a creepy image of a 3-D anime girl if she were human. I have no other information on how this photo came to be. Just go with it.
 
(via Danny Choo)

“Brokeback Island” by Dave MacDowell
 

“Fat Kenickie” by Danielle Rizzolo
 
Here’s an amusing look at a Kevin Smith-themed art show held at Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight in Los Angeles. More paintings here.
 
(via Nerdcore)

My dear friend and collaborator Scott Treleaven (who contributed an excellent essay on a life lived with magick to my anthology Generation Hex) has an upcoming solo exhibition from Oct 31 - Dec 5 at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago. Not to be missed if you live in the area (or don’t)!

From the site:

Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present our third solo exhibition of new work by Canadian, Paris-based artist, Scott Treleaven.

Treleaven’s current exhibit memorializes the beautiful delirium of the 19th-century psychocultural impetus to capture the ephemeral - that which throbs just beneath the scrim of consciousness or skin, via travelogue, spirit photography, or film paraphernalia. Viewers engage with uncanny dioramas of spirit and corpus that unveil the foreignness of landscapes inner and outer. Refusing the smug muscularity of traditional self/other, artist/muse epistemologies, the exhibit creates illumination through obliquity, while agency becomes an illusion of static-free perceptual transparency. Its images reveal the poignant fetishism that converts bone, severed organ, or shard into a saintly relic suggesting a beloved whole that only ever flowers elsewhere; ways in which we all transform the meager specimen into Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.

Uncovering the secret multivalence of European cities, constructed as much by projections of transients as by phantasmatic legacies of their own cultural histories, Treleaven’s ink and collage drawing of the Palais Royal’s urban gardens are nightscapes that yield tenuous epiphanies, shadow plays of pleasure and/or peril. The Arrangement, a table-top vitrine filled with photos, drawings and handmade books, invokes curiosity cabinets, naturalist’s and traveler’s diaries, embossed photographs, the embalming arc of museum glass. Hinting at Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, its incantations are no less magical than those of The Passenger’s grimoire. Sitting as part of an installation triptych, its aesthetic of fragmentation via collage of stock and personal “footage” reveals the fault lines of memory, projection, and fetishism, mapping ambiguous journeys, occult communion, and liaisons. A rabbit emerges from a top hat floating between watercolour blood red curtains and abattoir-stage, questioning agency as magical acts erupt of their own volition.

The exhibit also features a moving video installation of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge done by Treleaven.

(Scott Treleaven: Your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you)

 
Etsy seller lovedtodeath:

This is a OOAK piece of anthropomorphic taxidermy art. It is made with genuine taxidermy squirrel parts that have been professionally preserved. She is in a custom made wooden box with beautifully gold and red flocked Victorian decorated walls. She is clutching her golden heart (genuine preserved squirrel heart in 24K gold gilding), “Her Hearts Best Treasure”. Her dress is trimmed in fur and she is wearing a ruby heart pendant on a gold chain necklace. Atop her head is her rhinestone crown. On the wall hangs a framed painting of her beloved family. The floor is rich black velvet and the ceiling is painted gold with black Victorian accents.

 
Squirrel Queen Victoria can be yours for $495.00.

 
I know the LED false eyelash craze is sorta old news. However, I’ve never seen the video of the eyelashes in action.

LED Eyelash is a clever product that speaks to many Asian women?

 

 

 

 
Korean artist and photographer Gwon Osang builds his lightweight sculptures by taking hundreds of photographs of his subjects. Gwon Osang discusses his sculptures:

I began with photographs to make lightweight sculpture. I first made a chisel for wood and then stone. Following that I finished a work titled An Obsessive Report on Power (p. ), which consisted of an arm to symbolize material and the power to control it. I had created these because they were elements that I felt I lacked. Though I linked sculpture to photography, I think I was more interested in photography at the time.

In fact, it was people in photography who first responded to my work and at the time photography was more influential. I took full advantage of photography’s merits, not least of which was the ease of changing the object’s size. And I was fascinated by the commonality between film negatives and the plaster mold. This has helped me make the human body in all its different and often distorted forms.

Gwon Osang
 
(via accidental mysteries)

 

 
Andy Diaz Hope’s artwork entitled Morning After Portraits are made by using gel capsules. Andy says, ?

 

 
From photographer Alan Jaras (or Reciprocity on Flickr):

These are light refraction patterns or ‘caustics’ formed by a white light beam passing through shaped and textured transparent forms. The pattern is captured directly on to 35mm film by removing the camera lens and putting the transparent object(s) in its place. Colours are introduced by placing complex coloured optical filters directly in the light beam.

The processed film is digitally scanned for uploading. Please note these are not computer generated images but a true analogue of the way light is refracted by the objects I create.

Reciprocity’s photostream
 
(via Neatorama)