It takes a lot of guts to do a powerful self-portrait. After the jump, my 5 favorites du jour, starting with:

Ali Mahdavi

“A Louis XIV confection or occasional Nancy Sinatra-esque chanteur/chanteuse in gold glitter boots with world-class vocal talent. No lip-syncing for Mr. Quale, who is a true artist and transforms himself Klaus Nomi style once he graces the stage. Nina Hagen would be proud, as would Diamanda Galas.” – Roy Rogers Oldenkamp for WeHoNews.com

I’m surprised to have wated taken this long to mention the luminous Prince Poppycock. I’ve been amused, enamored and confused by this marvelous creature ever since the pleasure of sharing the stage with him last spring in La Belle Époque.

Part randy dandy, part rock star, part drunken courtesan, Poppycock instantly owns the audience with but a glance and a wiggle of bedazzled pantaloons, and that’s just the beginning. His operatic prowess, glamourous costumes and ostentatious prose leave not a heart unstirred. A masterpiece of self-transformation, the Prince is also recording artist John Quale, but I’m secretly hoping Poppycock will take over completely one day, to reign supreme in a glittery victory of feathers and gold spandex.

• Official Myspace of His Royal Fanciness
• Buy Prince Poppycock merch
• Prince in Paper Mag
• Watch the Prince in action as he opens for the Dresden Dolls

The type of imagery that Chris Anthony is known for – vintage-style processing and antique elements coupled with horror themes – has become quite common in alt photography in recent years. However, viagra few images of this sort that I’ve seen crop up recently resonate with the depth and storytelling that Anthony is capable of. A good example of this is his “Victims & Avengers” series. The images create a ghostly narrative about domestic violence, a subject with which Anthony has a personal history. The subjects of these musty panoramas, primarily children and women, create a haunted landscape populated by victims of abuse and the revenge they take.

On his site, Chris Anthony offers a limited-edition portfolio of Victims & Avengers (though there is no information on how to buy it). The presentation is fascinating; the panoramas are printed on cotton rags and stored in a handmade wooden box upholstered with dyed Japanese book cloth. Each box contains “additional legal documents”: Divorce Order, Restraining Order and a Last Will and Testament, as well as a Checklist for Victims of Domestic Violence.

If you’re in LA, check out Chris Anthony’s new solo exhibition at the Corey Halford Gallery, entitled “I’m the Most Normal Person I Know.” Thanks, Beth, for the tip!

Two-Faced Portrait (1996) © Colette Calascione

The women of NY-based painter Colette Calascione‘s world are the most luscious and enigmatic lot you’re likely to encounter in modern classical painting. Inspired by Victorian portraiture and Surrealism, Calascione is gifted with an Old Master’s hand for technique, a fevered imagination, a wicked sense of humor and a reverence for the feminine form rivaling that of Vargas himself. The resulting work is whimsical, provocative and elegant in turns. Demure masked nudes entice viewers with smoldering eye contact and slight, come-hither smiles. Grand dames of the parlour consort with beastly Ernstian suitors. The rosy aura of myth and allegory that surrounds these ladies is a fetching as their silken lingerie… maybe more so.

Scrupulous attention is paid to everything, and the color and contrast she imbues in each form — powdery decolletage, folds of drapery, the riotously rococo backgrounds — is exceptional.

Truly, Calascione knows that Goddess is in the details.

Illumination (2003)

More images and links under the cut.

Thanks to everyone for your responses to the Mix Tape Post. We’ve received some incredible submissions of mix tapes for the print magazine so far – keep them coming! Here’s a great example of what we’re looking for: The Yellow Tape, cialis sale sent by Mishel Cobb. During her first year of college, Michel had a long-distance relationship with an art student from Texas; they sent each other letters, packages and mix tapes by mail. “He’d make them in colours. Each tape had a theme based on that colour, and the music on it suited the colour – at least, in his mind. Even the tape itself would be painted.” Here is The Yellow Tape from this series.

For publication in the magazine, send us scans of tapes with interesting themes, interesting artwork or a story to tell. The deadline for having your tapes in the print magazine is January 20th. The email address to send submissions to is [email protected].

Artist Brian Dettmer carves up books to reveal their essence in sculptural form. Under his surgery, sales an anatomical reference book becomes a shadowbox of elegant bones; the overwhelming complexity of an encyclopedia manifests itself as a busy, diagrammatic universe of multi-tiered images and words. The book content, sliced into intersecting overlays, begins to resemble a busy highway as seen from above. Relationships between different parts of the book become exposed in an ever-circulating pattern. These sculptures amplify the sensuality of holding a book a hundred times over. This idea of paper-fetish ties in strongly with why we feel the need to publish Coilhouse in printed form. Clicking on blogs is fun, but nothing beats the feeling of turning a crisp page. [via ashiikankwe]

• Brian Dettmer book images at Centripetal Notion blog
• Brian Dettmer at the Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago – more images

Anke Merzbach is a German artist with a fetching name specializing in stark otherworldly photography. Her website, Bildmacherin, contains six galleries filled with beautiful color, tangles of hair, and mysterious expressions. Every image seems enchanted, with its characters just paused for a moment amidst an unfolding fantasy.

Unfortunately my German knowledge is non-existent so there isn’t much more I can offer here. A bit of brief research lead me to Anke’s flickr account as well as a few other bits of web presence but nothing with so much as a bio in English. I almost prefer it – perhaps she’s as mysterious as her images. Enjoy a small selection of my favorites below, and the rest on Anke Merzbach’s official site.

Artist Soomi Park from Seoul has created a set of LED eyelashes that light up in the dark. In an interview with We Make Money Not Art, Park describes the motivation behind her design:

I tried to project Korean’s obsession to big eyes, and how this fetishism is interpreted into excessive plastic surgery done on the eyes among Korean women. I really thought the obsession with big eyes can be represented through media design, because both yearning for bigger eyes and projecting the look through lights can be done by distorting the representation and creating new images. The LED Eyelashes have a mercury sensor that controls the light on the face. When wearing the LED eyelashes, you look embellished as if you were wearing a piece of fashion jewelry.

Politicized wearable art that invokes cybernetic technology? Marry me! In truth, you had me at “light-up lashes.” Read the article for more about the eyelashes and about Park’s compelling Digital Veil projet. The article mistakenly refers to Soomi as a boy, but she corrects the misconception in the comments. The interview is excellent nonetheless.

Related:

• 5 Ways to Feel Like a Replicant
• May Your Nights be Aglow with Cats

I came across this image from Julie Heffernan’s new series, called Booty, in the new (very NSFW) blog of Trevor “don’t click it, mom” Brown:

Self Portrait as Post Script by Julie Heffernan

What is there to say, really? Trevor Brown writes the following:

while wasting countless hours and days lazily surfing the net (the cause of konomi’s beleaguering), stumbling upon amazing work like the above by julie heffernan only further reinforces feelings of inadequacy – while i’m “busy” right clicking and saving, konomi rants on, with incisive perception, artists must work like hell while they are young – skills improve until around the age of fifty – then, after building up momentum, it’s just blithely regurgitating the same old shit for the rest of your life – only craftsmen continue to improve in their old age – artists are too “me! me! me!” – smug

Last week, via Allison, I found a calculator that shows you Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age. I tormented myself with this thing for a good 45 minutes: at 25, Orson Welles had coscripted, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane! T.S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he was 23! Damn them, damn them all to hell.

Thinking that Julie Heffernan was another hot young artist who would only add to the complex about under-achievement ignited by the calculator, with Brown’s words fresh in my mind, I masochistically clicked on her bio to make an ecstatic discovery: Julie Heffernan, who completed the series above this year, was born in 1956! And then, of course, more research followed: Picasso completed his masterpiece, Guernica, when he was 55; Daniel Defoe wrote his first novel, “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” when he was 59.

Every accomplished person has another accomplished person that makes them feel like a slacker; catching a glimpse of that is somehow inspiring.

Bob Carlos Clarke, why did you jump in front of a moving train last year and end your life? You were one of the greatest fetish photographers that ever lived, and it’s not the same without you.

What passes for fetish photography these days is a joke, and you were one of the only people who got it: you understood that it was more about clothes staying on than taking them off, that it was all about contour and personality. The girls in your pictures didn’t make stupid faces while holding their boobs, and you could bring sexuality to any object you photographed, even if it was a stone or a fork.

Wish you were still with us.

• Bob Carlos Clarke Official Site
• “Shooting Sex” and “Love Dolls Never Die” – His books, now collector’s items.