Shain Erin - Artist Review*

Sorceress - Female Nude

*and genuine mystery... but I'll get to that later.

Shain Erin's Morbid Art dolls.  Where do I even begin on how amazing these are?

Since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA, Erin has used his sculpture skills to create terrifying figures that have been displayed in art shows around the world.  His collections have ranged from pale ghosts reminiscent of Victorian poppets, to small withered mummies swaddled tightly in their fetishistic bindings.  Erin boldly delves into grotequerie and monster-making, pushing the boundaries of what a "doll" is and can be.

In the bio from Erin's wordpress site, he states that these toys are not meant to be comforting.  Rather, they are "disturbing and enchanting, irrational and frightening, beautiful and sad."  And discomforting they are.  Some of the dolls are immediately spooky: the kind of thing a 13-year-old lingering outside a Hot Topic would enjoy.  Very quickly, though, his work veers into the horror of severe disfigurement and mutation.  Mouths gape with a snarl of huge, malformed teeth.  Extra eyes, uncomfortable goiters, unreasonable cleft palates, and swollen skulls grace these figures delicately sculpted in paperclay.  Eventually, the dolls, like those in the Fallen series, are reduced to vaguely humanoid lumps of scabrous flesh.

Christina

But, Erin is not in the business of making mere scary dolls.  His work is deeply rooted in world art and mythology.  As such, his works often aim to excavate and explore a personal mythology, creating "artifacts that never were."  In this vein, we see his series of mummies, reminiscent of real-life tiny  mummies or shrunken heads.  Instead of being dressed in child-like nightgowns, these mummies are given crude shifts and bead necklaces- or are tightly bound like a witch-doctor's doll.

When not riffing on the traditions of Western or international art, Erin subverts the human form to make monsters.  Some are genuinely bizarre like the Whispering Roots Woman, while others seem carefully constructed to inspire the most fear.  They'd fit right in to a Guillermo del Toro movie.  Erin will swap out heads for animal parts, tinker with misplaced anatomy, and distort the proportions of his dolls until they are perfect.

The Seer - Journeys of the Soul

The best place to view Erin's work outside of a Google image search is his deviantart gallery.  His blogs (on blogspot and wordpress), are still up as of this article's publication, but don't display as much of his work.  However, this does bring us nicely to the Mystery of Shain Erin!

If you thought you liked this guy because of his talent, craftsmanship, and twisted imagination, I've got one more course of dessert to put in front of you.

Shain Erin has completely disappeared.

As I dug into this artist, to gather information about how they produce their work, their background, and what themes they intend to play with, I found dead end after dead end.  Erin used to have an Etsy storefront where he sold his dolls.  It's not longer in service.  The domain name that he links to from his blogs as his official website (www.shainerin.com) is up for sale.  His still-standing blogs haven't been updated for four and a half years.  His facebook page hasn't shown any activity since October 1, 2011.  In fact, the facebook upload of a photo seems to be his last known communication with the rest of the world.

There's even a sad trail of recent messages on Erin's deviantart page asking where he's gone and hoping that he's okay.  Aside from the two blogs and the deviantart account, Shane Erin isn't on the internet anymore.  Despite the continued attention that his work receives, Erin hasn't come out of the woodwork to display more dolls at art shows, or sell any of his creations.

I'm not sure the question will ever be answered, but it must be asked: What happened to Shane Erin?

-Joanna

Genu Recurvatum and the brief story of Ella Harper

Upside-down people, spider-crawls, twisted limbs.  Body-horror is one of the mainstays of the genre.

However, for the 1 individual in 100,000 born with the rare disorder genu recurvatum, walking on all fours could be a matter of everyday life.

Genu recurvatum, which loosely translates to "backward bending-knee", and also known as congenital dislocation of the knee (CDK, an acronym I'll use here on out), is a condition wherein the subject's knee joints are capable of hyper-extension.  There are other facets to the disorder, including the permanent dislocation of the patella, as well as subluxation (dislocation and rearrangement) of the tibia (shinbone) on the femur (thighbone).  There's also a slew of comorbidities which present with the condition.

In mild cases, the knee is capable of a greater range of motion, and might need extra support.  In severe cases, the knee may bend backwards entirely, creating a bird or insect-like appearance.  Individuals with severe CDK are often seen moving about on all fours as that is the easier way to get around.

So what causes this?!  Sadly, we're not sure exactly what causes CDK, but there are several factors that doctors believe contribute to the condition. It is broadly associated with breech births, and occurs in women more than men.  It is also said to occur in people where ligamentous laxity (loose ligaments) runs in the family.  There have also been a few cases of multi-generational families featuring the condition being passed down, but this is not the norm.  Usually CDK is isolated.

These days CDK is diagnosed early, and there are a variety of treatment options including serial casting, skeletal traction, and surgery.  For a disease that is rare in the first place, it is even more exceptional that a CDK case is allowed to develop without treatment to the severity which we see in individuals such as Ella Harper.

In the Victorian era, CDK was virtually unknown to medicine, with only a handful of cases being reported prior to 1880.  Diagnosis of the disorder increased after 1900, but by then Ella Harper had quit her career in showbiz, and hopefully settled down to a lovely family life.

Sadly, little is known about Ella Harper, but here are all the facts I could find (graciously curated by J. Tithonus Pernaud of The Human Marvels).

Ella Harper was born approximately around 1870, in Hendersonville, Tennessee.  By the age of 16, in 1886, Ella was the star of W. H. Harris's Nickel Plate Circus (a name so amazingly Victorian I can barely handle it).  She toured with the circus making fat stacks of $200 a week and getting featured in the papers of each town she visited.  When Ella performed, she would often be accompanied by an actual camel, because circuses aren't particularly subtle.

Her pitch card stated on the back that:

"I am called the camel girl because my knees turn backward.  I can walk best on my hands and feet as you see me in the picture.  I have traveled considerably in the show business for the past four years and now, this is 1886 and I intend to quit the show business and go to school and fit myself for another occupation."

You go, Ella Harper!  Hell yeah.

It seems like she made good on her word too, because after 1886, nothing more is heard of Ella Harper.  There is some evidence that she got married.  The name Ella Harper appears on a marriage certificate with a Robert L. Savely in Sumner County, Tennessee, in 1905.  The name appears again on a death certificate dated 1921.  However, we're not certain that this is the same Ella Harper of Camel Girl fame.  But I hope it is.  I hope she had a nice life.

In conclusion, so often horror movies use reversed joints to scare us.  I think the horror is based on how "wrong" most people consider backward-bending knees on an instinctive level.  However, I daresay this might be born out of a lack of exposure.

Useless anecdote time!  One day I was hanging out at a wedding reception, and we were talking about the wildest ideas that would change everyday life.  One guy said "What if all our knees bent backwards?!  Chairs and all our furniture would be completely different!"  I didn't know how to point out that backward bending knees weren't actually science fiction, that they actually happened already, but then I'm also clever enough to know that congenital birth defects and side-shows don't make for polite wedding reception banter.  Also, I didn't want to miss the couple with my fist-full of birdseed.  So I just let him ramble on about what pants would look like, and made a joke about Ikea, I think.

What I mean to say is that Ella Harper, like almost anyone from a "freak show", sounds like a really cool girl!  I would have loved to have had tea with her.  And as such, after all this research, I'm honestly wondering whether backwards joints will freak me out the next time I see them.

The more you know!

-Joanna

Tree-Man Syndrome

This is Dede Koswara, and, sadly, this photograph is entirely real.  It is not some set of make-up effects from a Stan Winston School dropout.  It's the result of an extremely rare genetic disorder known as Epidermodysplasia verruciformis, a.k.a. Tree-Man Syndrome.

Individuals with this disorder are extremely susceptible to Human Papillomaviruses (HPV) on the skin.  Once HPV infects the person, their bodies are incapable of fending off the virus, and it multiplies out of control.  This produces layers of scaly macules (changes in color), and papules (fluidless bumps), usually concentrated around the hands, feet, face, and genitals.  More benign cases only suffer from flat, wart-like lesions over the body.  More malignant cases, like that of Dede Koswara, produce carcinomas and polymorphic legions.

In essence, individuals with this disorder cut or scrape themselves (usually during adolescence), breaking the skin.  At that point, they are infected by HPV, and soon their skin begins to grow into hard, scaly, rootlike structures.  It overwhelms their fingers and features, making it difficult or impossible to eat and continue everyday life.

Treatments include surgeries to remove the growths, but this is a temporary coping mechanism rather than a cure.  Various drugs and supplements are currently being tested with mixed results.

Photographs of Dede Koswara first appeared on the internet in late 2007.  As one of the most severe cases of Tree-Man Syndrome to date, he was quickly picked up by a number of American tv shows on the Discovery Channel, TLC, and ABC.  They chronicled the story of how his life fell apart once his growths became overwhelming.

When he was 10 years old, Dede was playing in the forest near his home in Java and cut his knee.  Soon warts began appearing around the cut.  They spread.  It took years, but the growths eventually crept over Koswara's body.  Though they didn't hurt or itch, they smelled terrible.  He got married and had two children.  But by the time he was 28, the growths had completely covered his hands, rendering them totally useless.  He was no longer able to do his job as a construction worker.  His wife left him.  Without the ability to work, Koswara joined a travelling freakshow to support his kids.
It was during this time that pictures of him surfaced, attracting the attention of documentary-makers.
During 2008, Dede received experimental surgery to remove some of the growths from his extremities.  It was successful, and allowed him the use of his hands for the first time in 10 years (he was 34 at the time).  At the same time, doctors gave him chemotherapy to bring the HPV under control.  Unfortunately, the treatment was cut short when his liver began to fail.

In a turn of international drama, before the treatment could be completed by an American dermatologist named Gaspari, the Javanese government became involved.  They kicked Gaspari out of Java on suspicion of taking blood and tissue samples abroad for commercial purposes.

Since the treatment, Koswara's warts have begun to grow back.  He's had to return to his parents house where they clean him and feed him; dress him in his specially zippered shirts.

I'll leave you with a quote from Koswara himself:

"They say I'm not human.  Whatever they want to say, that's fine.  I guess I am a Tree-Man...  My body has again betrayed me, but what can I do?"

-Joanna

Rika Ezaki

The world is harmful
Rika Ezaki

Eyes, fingers, band-aids, bondage.  Rika Ezaki's art combines otherworldly repetitions with lush details to create images at once striking, eerie, and disturbing.  Gentle, faded color schemes and delicately curving lines impart a refinement that matches the considered composition and content of Ezaki's art.  It's fascinating.  It's beautiful.  And in its beauty it is seductive and dreadful.

Ezaki's nightmare pictures frequently echo the traditions of Japanese erotica and the Japanese expression of the grotesque.  Schoolboys are caught lounging, glancing out at the audience with heavy-lidded eyes, sometimes entangled with lascivious monsters.  Schoolgirls are bound like pin-ups, harassed by demons, or skewered on mega-pencils like St. Sebastian.  

While I wouldn't call this art Safe For Work, it isn't as graphic as you might imagine.  There are no exposed genitals or blood.  But this modesty is exactly what makes the erotic subtext of Ezaki's work so deeply disturbing to me.  Mind you, the subtext is extremely clear.  Themes of abuse, bondage, and all manner of emotionally twisted relationships are on display.  Oftentimes, they're softened to seem appealing, even romantic.  For example, in Your Gold Lotus, a youth is surrounded with slender female legs.  On the surface it seems like a classic foot-fetish image.  It is only upon closer inspection that one sees all the shoes are far too tiny, and that all the feet have been bound down into body-horror nubs inside those cute little boots.

Of course, there are two other areas that Ezaki explores exquisitely: lonesome ghost-stories, and super-kawaii, super-monstrous sticker sheets (And OMG I NEED SOME OF THOSE).  

Attempted Double Suicide shows a long-haired maiden clutching a skeleton in the moonlight.  It suggests a classic folktale, complete with kimono and moths.  There are kitsune priests and black flames and filters that would make you utterly certain you're looking at a blockprint on silk.  Other works include a schoolgirl whose hair is levitating.  It's an understated bit of insinuation that reminds me simultaneously of Alfred Gorey and Rene Magritte.

Then, Ezaki swings far into Western horror imagery with angels, horned devils, crosses, and goat legs.  And then there are the sticker-sheets.  You'll just have to see them to believe them.

In short, I think Ezaki is marvelous.  With a gorgeous style and strange ideas, Ezaki makes things for gazing, things for delving deep into mysterious nightmare worlds.  

I highly suggest you give the website some traffic, and perhaps even contact the artist if you see something you like!  Despite being in Japanese, don't fear: click on Pix, then the blue link, and you can wander through a complete album of Rika Ezaki's work.

http://kizetz.com/

Sweet Dreams!

-Joanna