Gothic nightmares
Just got back from a trip away and a stopover in London.
Went to see the new exhibition at the Tate Britain - "Gothic Nightmares" - [Link]
The horror ...
Gothic Nightmares explores the work of Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) and William Blake (1757–1827) in the context of the Gothic – the taste for fantastic and supernatural themes which dominated British culture from around 1770 to 1830.
Featuring over 120 works by these artists and their contemporaries, the exhibition creates a vivid image of a period of cultural turmoil and daring artistic invention.
The central exhibit is Henry Fuseli’s famous The Nightmare 1781. Ever since it was first exhibited to the public in 1782, this picture has been an icon of horror. Showing a woman supine in her boudoir, oppressed by a foul imp while a ferocious-looking horse glares on, the painting draws on folklore and popular culture, medicine, concepts of imagination, and classical art to create a new kind of highly charged horror image.
What has this got to do with us and our project in SecondLife?
Everything.
Our project - LifeSquared - is all about revisiting pasts that come back to haunt you, reworking themselves into your psyche, into your immediate present, and threatening your future (sanity) through those forms and characters so beloved of the Gothic - doppelgangers, the dead who refuse to rest in peace, monsters of our own creation, such as Frankenstein's creature.
We face the dread of incarceration in the prisonhouse of society and culture, trapped in our corporeal, abject selves.
And even fairies can lead you astray.
Lynn's work is full of these fears.
This is why I love Henrik's dolls - [Link]
More characters ...