double take

the minute, intricate details pull you in first. curiosity causes you to lean in to take a closer look. and then when the secret is revealed, attraction and repulsion make you do a strange new dance of lurching forward and shrinking back.

it is all part of the plan for laura splan (which i read as laura’s plan when i glanced at her website address). splan draws blood. or more accurately, she draws in blood. using blood from her fingertips as ink to draw pictures of neurons and nerve bundles, splan explores the relationship between the image and the medium used to render the image. this body of work is meant to make you squirm and struggle with the notions of pain and pleasure, comfort and discomfort, beauty and horror, perception and reality. the human condition. the human as a condition. and more…

“I try to create work that evokes a dichotomous experience with formal imagery that upon closer inspection reveals some uncomfortable truth about our cultural and biological conditions. My work attempts to challenge our constructed responses to these images by triggering a double take in which the viewer re-evaluates their initial perceptions. ”

thought that might wake you up this monday morning…