Nudity as a masquerade

Philosophy and opinions about mankind, the state of the world, the world of today brought me to the idea. The idea of invisible masks therefore to the approaches in a paradigm of “nudity as a masquerade”. How does nudity function as a tool in the service of humanity? How does it work in art, and what are the implicit and explicit meanings of those two words? Nudity and masquerade.

First born naked, naturally born naked, I think then we have costumes in a physical and philosophical ways. For my point of view thinking on nudity, which is the most simple and the neutral way of being, we make a relation with philosophy. (Because we think)
In this point of view I could say that, the viewers watching a nude (we say nude not a body) not only appreciate the naked in an oeuvre but also face the concepts of the metaphoric philosophy; that idea leads me to think that the aesthetic of the nudity sometimes could be a mask. (Kind of an invisible) Therefore the aesthetic of the nature, gestures and the simplicity in an art form is transformed. That’s for me making the simplicity, the complexity. The harmony and the relation between nudity and the art and the life it self is turning to be a complex. That’s why I end-up thinking that the circle of “the notion of being naked” and “being naked” mixes up.

I go on by saying that the traditional aesthetic of beautiful appearances, the spiritual and physical principles is all in as concepts of the creator of the social and physical sculpture: “naked”.

So now the nudity is more based on the conflict where the desire and art form compete. Making those relations maybe I could say that nudity make us imagine on sex, porn, birth, death, etc. On the biological level it happens like a part of every day life but still it’s abnormal to walk around naked even it is so natural. Nudity reminds me a state of birth, the process of (spiritual) transcendence, emotional states. This cycle defers any definitive conclusion. The imaginary fantastic works differently for each of us. What’s taboo for some is usual for another.

If I think that nudity is being under covered of transparency, maybe it could be right to say that the naked has an invisible mask? For me the human figure nakedness’ limitations in time and space recall “the identity” and “the physical idealness”. Those might reflect as self-imposed resistance and creativity in art. I refer to the physical transformation, sexual tension and the culture. Therefore for some the nudity shows it-self as a mask for who wants to revolt against the system of that thinking, of that philosophy and of that imposition (culture, moral and ethics).
I think that in some of the times the mask of nakedness, the naked artist gets lost in the pain of self-abuse. Artist playing in the ground of cultural impositions lost the ways and end up using the nudity, as a masquerade while his/her aim is just the opposite. For me at that point the brutal and the grotesque of the aesthetic are very much touching but also disgusting. The abnormality and the natural non-aesthetic are mixed up that the artist doesn’t know what to say.
The artist using the nakedness empties the meaning of reality by becoming so un-real that, it’s in vein to pay attention to his/her saying. Because by being that un-real artist becomes the fantasy it-self that the work or the act becomes an “unawareness” of the misguide.
That’s exactly at this point that I want to start my researches on my mfa project.
Pınar Beşikçi

No Name better be

It’s a blog called “twoninedotsix”. Nothing else. Everything is photography, nothing more.
On 27 of October surfing on net and watching the latest works of friends I saw “Cologne is well-known for its beer, called Kölsch” photograph series. Then there was this “057” piece, that I like the most. Neither name of the photographers nor the name of the photo was tagged. Just the series’ name would be enough to express some kind of vision. The thought of being “well-known” would just fit the irony. The city of Cologne and it’s well-known ironic ways could suit any drunk in the early morning times just like the time slot when the photo was been shot.
In the corner of the streets there’s a woman or man walking, the face is unseen; before him/her there’s a bicycle, which leans against a street sign. The shadows are long, falloff is strong. Light comes from the low-top left. The lady or the gentleman is well centered in the frame, one step on the road the other is on the pavement. We don’t have any clue about the epoch of the frame. But still we have the entry date.
Anyone could say that that’s an old body, but still the gender is invisible. That invisibility may be the reflection of the non-sense of the gender from the back, with the age or with the viewer. This ambiguity leads to imagination or the judgment. For me it’s an old gentleman. And he’s alone. No any other living being is on the frame. Not on the scene. Just a bicycle, which probably doesn’t belong to him. Or does it? It’s fair to simplify the words till they lose senses. Old, slow, walking, ways, bicycle, action, speed, cold, hat, coat.
Viewer comes with any unconscious codes. With the name of the objects, with words, we have our guilty-pleasured stories for the frame. What is imposed and what is also known biologically, sociologically, culturally end up by conclusions. Old, slow, walking, ways, bicycle, action, speed, cold, hat, coat.
Those words start to make sentences.
So the bicycle becomes not his. It’s a “he” because we don’t commonly see old ladies walking alone, specially with pants. The bicycle is for young people. It’s for action, but the elders are slow. The crossing roads always have a meaning for old people. The life and the death. The invisibility of the face hides the identity, which we may say after certain age it does not matter. Alone and cold are two adjectives usually for “negative” feelings, which in the frame belong to the gentleman.
It’s a touching and emotional work, which I very much appreciate. And I see no harm to be hit by those cliché, because I think “as much as simple, as much strong”. Analyzing, where I stand, I see as well as the tastes should be very common; they could be very personal and lonely too.
I talked with the photographer; he told me that after the day that he was robbed, he woke up and from the hotel window he took this photograph, and he’s not sure about the gender of the model, still he doubts that it could be a lady. And there goes another story to tell…

Pınar Beşikçi

blog.twoninedotsix.com

searching

Seeking To Understand The Pain

Joseph Beuys
Transformer, a documentary of Beuys’ work and life filmed at Guggenheim Museum exhibition, in New York 1979 by John Halpern. Beuys’s philosophy and candid opinions about mankind, ecology and the state of the world are the headlines of this documentary narrated by Beuys himself. During World War II, during which time Beuys was a soldier, Russians shot down his German fighter plane but Beuys was rescued by the Tartars. After this life-changing case he decided to use his life as a tool in the service of humanity. He was noted for his use of unusual materials like fat, felt, pumps, sleds, and honey. The aesthetic of his work is more like a “non-aesthetic” of the aesthetic of the nature, gestures and the simplicity beyond the complexity. Although it’s very hard to explain, this feeling appears like a hypnotic experience after listening his voice and explanations that he gives in the documentary, it’s really easy to see the harmony and the relation that he makes between his art and the life it self.
The complexity and the mathematical side of the physical world, turns back to it self and become the circle of life. So the material choice and the themes of his installations and sculptures also find their places in this circle. Without that relation everything is empty, meaningless. To find the meaning, the viewer is forced to think, about life, about his life and the life of Beuys. There again you see the chain, the circle. Everything is related and everything makes sense if you thing about it all. He discusses his often-arcane concepts in a way that the viewer might find new insight into conceptual art instead of focusing on art’s power to stimulate discussion and change. He recites “… on the psychosocial level, the Theory of Sculpture describes the transformation of everything in the world-thought, language, and action- from a state of utter disorder to one of definition and articulation”. Here again we can see that he can no longer separate any chain circle, every thing is well related by its literal sense. We could say that Beuys’s art is considered therapeutic because the viewers not only appreciate the oeuvre but also face the concepts of the metaphoric philosophy.
Joseph Beuys explains his work Bathtub (1960) “My intention with this work was to recall my point departure and with it the experience and feeling of my childhood. It acts as a kind of autobiographical key: an object from the outer world, as solid material thing invested with energy of a spiritual nature. You could call this substance, and it is the transformation of substance that is my concern in art, rather
than the traditional aesthetic understanding of beautiful appearances. If the creativity relates to the transformation, change, and development of substance, then it can be applied to everything in the world, and is no longer restricted to art…”
He believed that art should be effectively transform people’s everyday life. His usage of the material was systematic iconography and metaphorical protagonist in his performances. On 26 November 1965 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf his head covered in honey and gold leaf, took a dead hare in his arms and quietly carried it round the exhibition of his drawings and painting, ”letting it touch the pictures with its paws”. Then he sat on a stool in dimly lit corner and proceeded to explain the meaning of the works to the dead animal, because he does not really like explaining them to people he said, and since “even in death a hare has more sensitivity and instinctive understanding than some men with their stubborn rationality”.
He’s not the only one suffering from the spirituality and physical principle, as the creator of the social and physical sculpture. On the other hand it’s a bit contrary but also so close with that spirituality, I think Matthew Barney’s creativity is more based on the conflict where the desire and disciple compete. The simplicity of Beuys turns to complex imaginary fantastic.

Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney’s conceptual framework begins like a reading of contemporary American mass culture and geography, expressed as fantastical, image-rich, disjunctive narratives. Barney’s Envelopa: Drawing Restraint 7 (1993), exhibited on a cluster of monitors set high in the centre of a gallery in the Whitney Museum, New York, was a display of his hyper-real imagination, which had more to do with his own fin-de-siecle vision of humans as hybrid concoctions than with any formal exercise in spatial perception. Costumed as cloven-hoofed man-animals conjure a world of sexually charged fairy-tale in series of Cremaster 1-6 (1995-2002).
CREMASTER 1 (1995) is a musical revue performed on the blue Astroturf playing field of Bronco Stadium in Boise, Idaho – Barney’s hometown. White-clothed table, an abstract centerpiece sculpted from Vaseline, green and purple grapes, doubled creature, diagrams that direct the choreographic patterns created by a troupe of dancing girls on the field below. Chorus girls designs shift from parallel lines to the figure of a barbell, from a large circle to an outline of splitting and multiplying cells, and from a horizontally divided field emblem (Barney’s signature motif) to a rendering of an undifferentiated reproductive system (which marks the first six weeks of fetal development).
CREMASTER 2 (1999) is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney’s abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1.
CREMASTER 3  (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character – host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. After a prologue steeped in Celtic mythology, the narrative begins under the foundation of the partially constructed Chrysler Building. The film ends with a coda that links it to Cremaster 4. This is the legend of Fionn MacCumhail, which describes the formation of the Isle of Man, where the next installment of the Cremaster cycle will take place.
CREMASTER 4  (1994) adheres most closely to the project’s biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system’s onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion – three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island’s folklore as well as its more recent incarnation as host to the Tourist Trophy motorcycle race. Gelatinous gonadal forms – undifferentiated internal sex organs – emerge from slots in their uniforms in a migratory quest for directionality.
CREMASTER 5 (1997), it is envisioned as a tragic love story set in the romantic dreamscape of late-nineteenth-Century Budapest. The film is cast in the shape of a lyric opera. Biological metaphors shifted form to inhabit emotional states – longing and despair – that become musical leitmotivs in the orchestral score.
The Cremaster cycle defers any definitive conclusion. (www.cremaster.net)

Barney playing with the transcendence of physical limitations in help with the medium of feature-length films, video installations, sculpture, photography, and drawing, tires to understand and maybe to underestimate the human figure limitations in time and space. His high- art works may be considered like a revolt to the metaphoric and symbolic thoughts of conscious. Therefore in his carrier he strongly creates new world of non-referring whole. By saying non-referring, I direct the usage of his materials and his characters to a language unspoken or forgotten like the Latin or the esoterism. He is so much interested in to conflicts of the systems, sexual division, reproductive system (fetal development), identicalness and division. Recreating the human, the world, the system and the aesthetic, the newborn imaginary fantastic world of Cremaster bases on the fertilization. To born and to born again, the endless birth fertilizes in the series of Cremaster.
The Drawing Restraint series is a project Barney began while an undergraduate at Yale. The central theme of the series is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity. Barney’s theory is that encumbrance can be used to strengthen an artists output, much as resistance is used by athletes to build muscle. In Drawing Restraint 1 – 6 (1987-89) Barney climbs around his studio attempting to create drawings while hindered by obstacles and various physical restraints. These early videos were followed a few years later by Drawing Restraint 7 (1993), a three-channel video installation in which Satyrs grapple in a limousine as it drives through the tunnels of New York City. Drawing Restraint 8 (2003) is a sculptural installation of a series of drawings based on the field emblem. In Drawing Restraint 9, the field emblem appears as the template for a massive sculpture that is cast in vaseline on board a Japanese whaling ship. Drawing Restraint 9 is the centerpiece of the series. Barney began work on Drawing Restraint 9 when he was invited to create a work for an exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, Japan. The film is the result of extensive research into Japanese history and culture, which Barney fuses with his own interests in metamorphosis and indeterminate states. In the film Barney and his real-life paramour Bjork appear as the Occidental Guests. The Drawing Restraint series is rounded out by five additional components created for exhibitions in 2005 and 2006. Drawing Restraint 10 and 11 were created for the Drawing Restraint exhibition in Kanazawa (2005). Drawing Restraint 10 is a video re-staging Drawing Restraint 6, which was never documented. In this video, Barney jumps on a trampoline, which has been set at an angle, attempting to draw two linked field emblems on the ceiling. Drawing Restraint 11 was filmed at the 21st Century Museum and depicts Barney climbing three 40-foot walls to complete a drawing. Drawing Restraint 12 is a similar piece created for the Drawing Restraint exhibition at the Leeum Samsung Museum in South Korea (2005). Drawing Restraint 13 was filmed at Gladstone Gallery in New York shortly before the opening Barney’s Occidental Guest exhibition (2006). The film references two historically significant moments from the late stages of WWII and shows Barney’s continuing interest in dramatic encounters between Westerners and Japan. Drawing Restraint 14 is similar to Drawing Restraint 11 and 12 — a video documenting Barney creating a site-specific drawing in a museum exhibiting other works from the Drawing Restraint series. In this case, Barney (dressed as General MacArthur) creates his drawing high above the stairwell in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (www.cremasterfanatic.com)
In Drawing Restraint 9, shot in Nagasaki Bay on board the Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru. Symbolically tracks the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid vaseline, called “The Field”, the mole falls apart when two occidental guests are being prepared for the wedding. The physical transformation, the moles destruction, sexual tension and the cultural ceremonies are again the system conflicts like we saw in the Cremaster series. The Film tricks on the extra-diegetic knowledge of the Barney&Bjork couple also. American mass culture and the Japanese passion are mixed with that celebrity system. Japanese cultural celebrations are well on the scene of the film beginning.
An other film of Barney is Hoist, Destricted. Destricted is an art-based film where seven directors, including Matthew Barney, Marina Abramovic, Sam Taylor-Wood, Marco Brambilla, Larry Clark, Richard Prince and Gaspar Noe explore modernistic views of sex, sexuality, and pornography in modern film. The film features seven short films all of which are explicit in nature.

Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovic is an artist seeking to understand the ritualized pain of self-abuse. In 1974, in a work entitled Rhythm 0, she permitted a room-full of spectators in Naples Gallery to abuse her at her will for six hours, using instruments of pain and pleasure that had been placed on a table for their convenience. By the third hour, her clothes had been cut from her body with razor blades, her skin slashed; a loaded gun held to her head finally caused a fight between her tormentors, bringing the proceeding to an unnerving halt. This passive aggression between individuals she continued to explore in later works executed with the artist Ulay, who became her collaborator in 1975. Together they explored the pain and the endurance of relationships, between themselves, and between themselves and the public. Inponderabilia (1977) consisted of their two naked bodies, standing facing each other against the frames of a door; the public was obliged to enter the exhibition space through the small gap left between their bodies. Another work, Relation in Movement (1977), consisted of Ulay driving a car for sixteen hours in a small circle, while Marina Abramovic also in the car, announced the number of circles over a loudspeaker.*
In the Balkan Erotic Epic (Destricted) Abramovic observe of old Balkan Rituals. The movie’s narration describes various sexual actions that members of the Balkans. Among these actions is the exposure of the female genitalia into the rain to increase fertility. Other act includes a Balkan man drilling three holes into a small wooden bridge and simulating intercourse with all three holes in an attempt to cure impotency. Other act portrays multiple men lying nude on the ground simulating intercourse with small holes in the soil in an attempt to help fertilize the ground before planting their annual crops. (imdb.com)

Sam Taylor-Wood
Her self-abusing and self-searching reactions based on the gender issue. Being a woman and a human, she searched the ways of playing in the ground of cultural impositions. An other director of the Destricted is Sam Taylor-Wood
In Death Valley  there is appears to be an empty and vast valley located in an unknown location. The camera never moves, but only zooms in and out. A young man appears walking into the middle of the open range. He begins to remove his pants and masturbate. The scene ends with the ending of his masturbation session.
Sam Taylor-Wood’s cinematic installations, room-size moving pictures are as much about creating textured surfaces that envelop audiences as they are about the choreography and structure of film, and it is the overwhelming presence of slow-moving, larger than life-size figures that connects this work to its sense. Brontosaurus (1995) consists a single naked man wildly dancing to his own beat, brings to mind performances of Abramovic.

Sergei Parajanov
Back to the past again, the artists who are influenced by the inner pain to create a meaning over life, we could spell the name of Sergei Parajanov. Sayat Nova (The color of pomegranates) is a biography of the Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova reveals the poet’s life more through his poetry than a conventional narration of impotent events in Sayat Nova’s life. The performances by the actress are like the Cindy Sherman’s works of disguises. The approach is very experimental and modernist while the décor and the props are very folkloric. The great work of Parajanov is in a way very much like Transformation. In terms of explaining and exhibition in the same time.

György Pálfi
Taxidermia is nonetheless a brilliant and symbolically powerful work. The continuously revisited motif, being bestiality and the animal nature in all humans is depicted through many explicit scenes to cause the viewer discomfort. The end result – acknowledgement of the trueness of the film. It trails the lives of three generations of men with no self-respect, no common sense and all living abnormal lives. Though they all meet their end, they all frame themselves in the same negative fashion as the previous one. (imdb.com)
The brutal and the grotesque of the aesthetic is very much touching but also disgusting. Human-animal, the instinct or the savage are very much confused as the abnormality and the natural non-aesthetic. May be the norm of the nature or nature of the norm take place of each other.

Damien Hurst
Neither love nor respect! The Hirst way copy and paste
Young British Artists is the name given to a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based in the United Kingdom, most (though not all) of whom attended Goldsmiths College in London. The term Young British Artists is derived from shows of that name staged at the Saatchi Gallery from 1992 onwards, which brought the artists to fame. It has become a historic term, as most of the YBAs are now in their forties. They are noted for “shock tactics”, use of throwaway materials and wild living, and are (or were) associated with the Hoxton area of East London. They achieved considerable media coverage and dominated British art during the 1990s.
Leading artists of the group are Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Key works by them are, respectively, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine, and My Bed, a disheveled double bed surrounded by detritus. (wikipedia.org)

Damien Hirst’s wide-ranging practice – installations, sculpture, painting and drawing – has sought to challenge the boundaries between art, science and popular culture. His energy and inventiveness, and his consistently visceral, visually arresting work, has made him a leading artist of his generation.
Hirst explores the uncertainty at the core of human experience; love, life, death, loyalty and betrayal through unexpected and unconventional media. Best known for the ‘Natural History’ works, which present animals in vitrines suspended in formaldehyde such as the iconic The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) and Mother and Child Divided (1993), his works recast fundamental questions concerning the meaning of life and the fragility of biological existence. For Hirst, the vitrine functions as both window and barrier, seducing the viewer into the work visually while providing a minimalist geometry to frame, contain and objectify his subject. In many of the sculptures of the 1990s, such as The Acquired Inability to Escape (1991) and The Asthmatic Escaped (1992) a human presence was implied through the inclusion of relic-like objects: clothes, cigarettes, ashtrays, tables and chairs. That implied human presence became explicit in Ways of Seeing (2000), a vitrine sculpture with a figure of a laboratory technician seated at a desk looking through a microscope. The more celebratory work Hymn (2000), a polychrome bronze sculpture, reveals the anatomical musculature and internal organs of the human body on a monumental scale. Hirst is equally renowned for his paintings. These include his ‘Butterfly Paintings’, tableaux of actual butterflies suspended in paint, or in Amazing Revelations (2003), for instance, he arranged thousands of butterfly wings in a mandala-like pattern. His ‘Spin’ series are made with a machine that centrifugally disperses the paint steadily poured onto a shaped canvas surface, while his ‘Spot’ series have a rigorous grid of uniform sized dots. Recently, he has explored photo-realism in the ‘Fact’ paintings.
( http://www.whitecube.com/artists/hirst/ )

The Saatchi Effect. One of the visitors to Freeze was Charles Saatchi, a major contemporary art collector and co-founder of Saatchi and Saatchi, the London advertising agency. Saatchi then visited Gambler in a green Rolls Royce and, according to Freedman, stood open-mouthed with astonishment in front of (and then bought) Hirst’s first major “animal” installation, A Thousand Years, consisting of a large glass case containing maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow’s head. (The installation was later a notable feature of the Sensation exhibition.)
Saatchi became not only Hirst’s main collector, but also the main sponsor for other YBAs–a fact openly acknowledged by Gavin Turk. The contemporary art market in London had dramatically collapsed in mid-1990 due to a major economic recession, and many commercial contemporary galleries had gone out of business. Saatchi had until this time collected mostly American and German contemporary art, some by young artists, but most by already established ones.
His collection was publicly exhibited in a series of shows in a large converted factory building in St John’s Wood, north London. Previous Saatchi Gallery shows had included such major figures as Warhol, Guston, Alex Katz, Serra, Kiefer, Polke, Richter and many more. Now Saatchi turned his attention to the new breed of Young British Artists. There was much concern when Saatchi divested himself of some of his earlier collection, since it had a significant downward effect on the value of some of the artists whose works he sold.
Saatchi invented the name “Young British Artists” for a series of shows called by it, starting in 1992, when a noted exhibit was Damien Hirst’s “shark” (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living), which became the iconic work of British art in th 1990s,[1] and the symbol of Britart worldwide.In addition to (and as a direct result of) Saatchi’s patronage, the Young British Artists benefited from intense media coverage. This was augmented by controversy surrounding the annual Turner Prize, (one of Britain’s few major awards for contemporary artists), which had several of the artists as nominees or winners. Channel 4 had become a sponsor of the competition, leading to television profiles of the artists in prime-time slots.
The Young British Artists re-vitalised (and in some cases spawned) a whole new generation of contemporary commercial galleries such as Karsten Schubert, Sadie Coles, Victoria Miro, Maureen Paley’s Interim Art, Jay Jopling’s White Cube, and Antony Wilkinson Gallery. The spread of interest improved the market for contemporary British art magazines through increased advertising and circulation. Frieze launched in 1991 embraced the YBAs from the start while established publications such as Art Monthly, Art Review, Modern Painters and Contemporary Art were all re-launched with more focus on emerging British Artists. Hirst had become an internationally recognised major artist, with shows in Europe and the USA. (wikipedia.com)
Damien Hirst part shows my intentional approach to him and his work. Thank you.

References & Research:
Books:
Performance Art For Futurism to The Present , Rose Lee Berg, Thames & Hudson world of art, 2001
Art into Ideas, Essays on Conceptual Art, Robert C. Morgan, Cambridge University Press, 1996
Barney / Beuys, All in The Present Must Be Transformed, Guggenheim Museum
Web:
beuysfilm.com
unit.bjork.com
www.cremaster.net
www.cremasterfanatic.com
www.drawingrestraint.net
www.parajanov.com
www.taxidermia.hu
www.whitecube.com
www.imdb.com
www.wikipedia.net
www.woostercollective.com/2007/07/fucking_with_perception_hirsts_for_the_l.html
Films:
Taxidermia (2006), György Pálfi
Destricted (2006):
Marina Abramovic, “Balkan Erotic Epic”
Matthew Barney, “Hoist”
Sam Taylor Wood, “Death Valley”
Sayat Nova (1968), Sergei Parajanov
Trasformer (1979), John Halpern
Matthew Barney: No Restraint (2006), Alison Chernick
The Order, Cremaster 1-5, Matthew Barney

i adore- Miss Van

(magda gallery)

Miss Van started wall-painting in the streets at the age of 18 in the early 1990s, initiating the feminine movement in street art. She is now exhibiting all around the world from NY to LA, Europe (France, Spain, Italy, UK), and Asia. An artist’s impact is truly felt when their work becomes so familiar that it’s hard to remember what the world was like without it. When the Toulouse native and current Barcelona resident MISS VAN’s sultry female characters began to pop up on city center walls in the mid 1990s, they instantly possessed a timeless quality, as if women had always painted such graffiti in the streets. City residents developed relationships with their local MISS VAN characters. While MISS VAN’s work incurred the wrath of some feminists who found them offensive to women, on the whole it has a rare appeal that transcends gender.

iguapop- Catalina Estrada

In 2005 i discovered a gallery in Barcelona.iguapop. They have brilliant, magical and super artists and exhibitions.

One of them is Catalina Estrada. On the website it said that:

Catalina Estrada’s works are like aesthetics heaven and harmony of colors and cultures. She absorbes the ease of mind and the power of folkloric latinamerican colors from her country, Colombia. Since 1999 she lives in Barcelona.

Among her clients:  Coca Cola, Paul Smith, Microsoft, Camper, Sony, Nike, Custo Dalmau, Smart,

nude, naked, masquerade

Nude (disambiguation) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia :
Nude or nudity refers to a state of exposure, being completely or partially without clothing, typically voluntarily.

Naked (disambiguation) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Naked most commonly describes a person in a state of nudity.

Masquerade Meaning and Definition (http://thinkexist.com)
1. To conceal with masks; to disguise.
2. Acting or living under false pretenses; concealment of something by a false or unreal show; pretentious show; disguise.
3. To frolic or disport in disquise; to make a pretentious show of being what one is not.

My proposal – confusion-

I am confused. Between 2 projects.

- nudity as a masquerade

- my designer’s plush book

don’t know which to choose. So I’ll try to do them both as a project. Good luck to me.