Ken – Ichi Murata

Written by Marica on . Posted in photography

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 Death & Eros together again in the amazing hand-colored black and white photographs by Ken-Ichi Murata

“When I was ten years old, I came to realize that “the human will die someday”. And I got so afraid of death that I could not get out of my house at all. Since then I got anxiety neurosis and have been living with it. Therefore, this disease has influenced my life. And the consciousness of death which I always have influences my creation a lot. Then I will tell you how they influence my works.
With the action of binding, I can express “Captivity by others” and can also express “Self Captivity in mind”. And those expressions also reflect the condition that all my life was bound to my obsession due to neurosis…

…Repeating those photographic shootings, I gradually got familiar with death and now I got a harmony agreement with it. This may have been due to the fact that I take eros for a primitive religion. So I add a kind of magical story to the models’ eros held in the garret, and fix it on the developing paper, and regard it as my own “Ikon”.
This is my new way of relationship with death because I do not have any religion.”

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John Isaac

Written by Marica on . Posted in art

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 John Isaacs‘ art…

“…Running alongside the seeming directness and simplicity of John Isaacs’ work there is a pervasive current of unease and anxiety that identifies our modern way of life and its thinking as somehow warped, disjunctive and off balance … much of Isaacs’ work seems to suggest that if you scratch at the surface of conventional reality, then a repressed can of worms – a world of ugly and uncomfortable truth – lies just below the thin plastic exterior of our pre-packed modern sanitised world. Playing with the extremities and taboos of the modern day norm, Isaacs’ art reveals a number of uncomfortable truths that, he believes, we are all, to some extent, conscious of.” (read full text here)

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 The Matrix of Amnesia, 1998

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 Other people’s Lives (scapegoat), 2003

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You Said You Would Always Be There (Unicorn’s Head), 2006