The following text accompanied the images.

Mannequin
by Nina Arsenault

Since I was a child I’ve been mesmerized by the visual harmony that has been sculpted into the designer faces of life size mannequins.

The tips of their noses reflect the shape in their jutting chins. The curves of their lips are echoed in the elegant arches of their impossibly high eyebrows, as well as the swoops of their almond eyes and the gentle bulging of their cheek bones.

Moreover, their pourless plaster visages are perfectly symmetrical.

Their false eyelashes are permanently attached, and their airbrushed make-up never smudges.

These feminine works of art are supposed to represent women, but they are often too perfect to look like a real female.

Maybe that is why I love them.

Nina Arsenault is a transsexual sex worker, actress and night club personality. She has undergone nearly sixty cosmetic surgeries and procedures.

Hamish Kippen

I knew him as talented, inspired and easy going. He was already making a name for himself, and I was sure he would one day be shooting for glamourous fashion magazines.

In his all-too-short career Hamish Kippen not only displayed to the world his unique vision of beauty but he also developed an exceptional way of communicating with and through his subjects.

image by Kippen and Arsenault, 2007

If you knew Hamish or his work please join us in celebrating Hamish’s incredible life and work at a gallery exhibit of his spectacular photographs. The exhibition will run from October 2 to 31, 2009 (including Nuit Blanche), and will be held at The Great Hall Gallery, 1087 Queen Street West (at Dovercourt), Toronto.

A book featuring his beautiful work will be published this fall by Hamish’s family and friends and will be launched with the exhibition.

Andre Breton

Yesterday, I quoted a piece of Glisaine Wood’s curatorial text at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Surreal Things exhibit. The term ‘convulsive beauty’ was something I wanted to clarify a bit for myself. However, a little research proved that the term is as intangible as Surrealist logic/poetry. Instead of trying to pin convulsive beauty down to a single reductive concrete meaning I offer a reference to it from Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja:

“Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does…The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph…Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”
— André Breton (Nadja)

mannqeuin by Andre Masson

photo by Man Ray

I went to see the Surreal Things exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario (extended until Sept 19th) yesterday.  It brought me back into an old obsession in a totally new way. I’ve been captivated by the beauty of mannequins since I was about five years old. I wanted to share a section of the curatorial text below by Ghislaine Wood (also author of The Surreal Body: Fashion and Fetish) because I found it as fascinating as the art.

The Mannequin
For the Surrealists, the mannequin embodied the contradictions of modern life. It confused the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, human and machine, male and female, sexualized and sexless, and ultimately life and death. It was simultaneously a commodity, a simulacrum, an erotic object and the embodiment of the uncanny.

For Freud, the uncanniest objects were ‘waxwork figures, artifical dolls and automatons.’ In the Freudian uncanny, the mannequin also represented the suppressed primal human being emerging from the unconscious. Andre Breton saw the mannequin as the ultimate representative of what he termed ‘convulsive beauty.’