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littlefreya · 3 years

Note

Which character would throw his girl over his shoulder when she’s being a brat and spank her as he carries her to the bedroom?

Summary: you were caught snooping around in Sherlock’s study and he is all but done with your behaviour.

Pairing: Sherlock x female reader (no mention of ethnicity or body type)

Words: 757

Warnings: 18th century patriarchy, hinted smut, possessive behaviour, slight spanking, slight fingering, hinted loss of virginity, abuse of power, punishment, bratty behaviour, hinted age-gap but reader is not a minor.

* I give no permission to copy, repost or translate my work.

A/N: did not mean for this to be this long, I thought of doing several characters thing but I got carried away 👀 Not beta’d, I’d die on my mistakes like Charles Brandon kicking the bucket from Syphilis (probably)

Crime and Punishment

It wouldn’t be the first time he caught you snooping around in his secret lab. At this point, Mr Holmes believed that you wanted him to find and punish you for this unruly behaviour.

Smoothing his thumb over the golden hook of his cane, he took a long, laboured breath and groaned.

“I have warned you a thousand times, have I not?”

Almost too sweetly, your teeth grazed your lip, and your lashes fluttered like two large butterflies in the act of coitus. Though you knew a false visage of innocence would rescue you not.

“I was bored. Do you expect me to sit in my room and brush my hair all day long?” You spat back, “I am a woman! Not a porcelain doll for you to keep behind a vitrine.”

Sherlock took a sharp inhale; a low - almost unheard growl followed from his throat, yet it was loud enough to prickle all the hair on your body. Perching his cane against the wall, he discarded himself of his coat, and then elegantly rolled up his sleeves.

“You are very right, my sweet ward,” he began and took a single stride forward.

Adamant to your courage, you balled your fists and frowned. Was he about to spank you? You feared him not.

“I am not afraid of you! The nuns at the orphanage have spanked me plenty! So do your worse, Sherlock!”

A dry chuckle rolled through his lips as he took another step forward, now close enough for the rich scent of his cologne to waft over you as an alluring mist of poison. Soon you were drowning in it, in a fragrance of smoked cigars, brandy and something you couldn’t quite detect, but you knew one thing: it made your head faint and your knees wobbly.

“Indeed, you are a woman, my sweet little dove. And furthermore, I suppose you want to be treated like one, am I correct?” He asked, attempting to close the distance between the two of you.

“I… yes?”

You haven’t even realise that you were stepping away from his intimidating stride until your back collided with the library. With a small quake, a book that sat loosely missed your shoulder by mere inches and fell to the ground.

A gasp left you then, as if it was an ancient vaze you have broken. Eyes widened, you gawked at the sprawled book abandoned on the floor and nearly lost breath once Sherlock’s clean leather boot stepped into your sight.

Your own reflection peered back at you through the black shine - a girl dwarfed by the whims of a powerful man. Trembling, you allowed your eyes to climb up again, slowly so, carefully.

Yet no careful enough...

It took a moment to realise the hiss of air that echoed through the large chamber was yours. Your mind far too dizzy with fear as you noticed the large bulge in his groin.

“I believe the time has come to show you how a woman should be treated,” Sherlock declared.

A brief moment of silence was sliced by a shriek as he grabbed your forearm and howled you over his shoulder as if you were weightless. Shocked by his barbaric ministrations, you kicked your legs in a failed attempt to escape him, which did nothing but cause more books to fall to their wreckage.

“Enough! We will have none of that!” Sherlock rebuked and with a groan suddenly smacked your rear and squeezed at the cheek as if you were no more than a slice of raw meat.

“Let me go, you brute!!!” You whined, “Adler was right about you, you are no gentleman, you are yet another wolf in sheep’s clothing!”

This merely earned you another smack, harder this time, and though you shivered with the fright of a virgin, another unfamiliar sensation cleaved itself into your core. It was a terrible need, inexplicably burning! In your hysteria, you half-believed that the only cure would be to yield yourself to be a vessel to all his darkest desires.

Sherlock must have sensed it, for his fingers now slid from your rump to examine the swelling lushness of your lips through the fabrics of your gown.

Forgoing your sense of propriety, you moaned and pushed back into his touch. Had you any words left to speak, you would only beg for more. Not only he would turn you into a woman but to a harlot as well, and feeble as you were, you cared for nothing more than being his whore.

“Sherlock... please.... make me whatever you want!” You begged.

“Oh, I will make a woman of you indeed; the entire of the estate will hear of your becoming!”

With that promise, he marched out of the lab and straight to his bedroom. The servants never batted an eyelash as they heard the door slam behind him.

It was hardly the first time.

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Disclaimer: I don’t own Sherlock Holmes, I don’t own Enola Holmes.

#henry cavill #Sherlock Holmes #Enola Holmes #Sherlock Holmes x reader #Henry cavill x reader

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bat-burrito · 3 years

Text

Elder Gremlin

Bit of crack for @cruelfeline and @soranis-sunshadow, who want nothing more than for Entrapta to be older than Hordak, and by God, they deserve to have it.

Prrrrobably a bit OOC, but just roll with it!

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Hordak was busy reprogramming one of the drones previously belonging to Horde Prime when Entrapta plopped herself on his desk, legs crossed and leaning back. He turned his gaze to her without hesitation, giving her a warm smile. “Hello, dear,” he said as he took in her expression. She was grinning at him with dancing eyes and practically vibrating with energy. It was infectious and he felt his own smile widen, choosing to put down his tools to show her that she had his full attention.

“Guess. What. I. FOUND!!” She waved a piece of paper in the air with unbridled excitement.

Entrapta did not give him the opportunity to guess. She thrust the paper at Hordak, who took it from her as she gripped the edge of the desk, as though her joy would lift her off the ground. Hordak quickly scanned it, but failed to see what the cause for Entrapta’s excitement was about. “Apologies Entrapta, but I do not believe I understand the significance. This is a clone decanting log; we have seen many of these.” The two of them, along with the archer boy and a team of interested volunteers from the Etherian guilds of Makers and Science, had spent many weeks salvaging Horde Prime’s equipment and data after the war was won. The logs were nothing new.

“But this one is special! It includes your decanting date!” Entrapta jabbed at a line of text on the paper with her hair, nearly puncturing the page in her enthusiasm. “We finally know your birthday! Isn’t it amazing?” She had hopped off the desk by this point, unable to sit still, and had lifted herself up and upside down with her hair.

Hordak read over the paper again for confirmation of her words, finding that it did indeed appear she was correct - not that he was surprised, she almost always was. While combing through data on the Velvet Glove, they had discovered despite Horde Prime’s insistence to keep his brothers completely unidentifiable as individuals, he had kept dated records of all batches of clones.

“Well, I’m not sure which of these lines is you specifically,” Entrapta continued, now seated on her hair at Hordak’s eye-level, “but based on your memories, this is when your group of clones was born!”

It was a process with errors, but once the Hive Mind had been disconnected, they had figured out they could hack into a clone’s repressed memories via their spinal ports - with consent, of course. Entrapta had discovered this to a degree during her time with Kadroh on Krytis. While they had a few volunteers, most of the clones were understandably not interested in having their memories restored in this manner. Entrapta had suggested that once the numbing effects of Prime’s amniotic fluid had worn off and the clones began to adjust to life outside the Hive Mind and received proper care, they could possibly start recalling their memories on their own. Hordak hoped that this was not the case. His brothers deserved new and better memories, and thankfully many Etherians were working with them to make this happen.

Entrapta was now laying on her stomach in her throne of hair, staring into Hordak’s red eyes. “And,” she continued, gently poking him affectionately on his nasal ridge, “guess what else!”

“Do I get to guess this time, or would you like to just tell me again?” Hordak asked her with a teasing lilt, brushing a loose strand of his partner’s hair behind her ear.

“I’m older than you!” she squealed, squishing his cheeks with her hands.

Hordak barked out a laugh, looking at the paper in his hand once more. “I am certain you are mistaken.”

She maneuvered behind him on her hair, wrapping her arms around his neck and resting her head against his cheek as she peered over his shoulder. “This is definitely your batch, and I am definitely older than you,” she insisted. “You were decanted roughly 3 weeks after I was born!”

“This hardly counts! I emerged at full maturity, not as a pitiful little thing who could not support the weight of their own head.” Hordak tried to sound serious, but couldn’t keep the amused tone out of his voice.

“Hmmm…” Entrapta was perched in front of him again, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “Do you think that drone is older than you too?”

Hordak rolled his eyes and turned back to his drone. “You are completely ridiculous, my dear,” he said, but his voice was rich with affection.

“Hey now,” Entrapta frowned, voice suddenly serious as she lowered herself to the ground. Hordak turned back to her immediately, fearing she had taken offense. She wagged her finger at him as she approached, backing him up against the desk. “That is no way to speak to your elder, young man!”

He scoffed, smirking down at her. “My apologies. Are you, in all your aged wisdom, planning to let me get back to work today?”

“Okay, okay, fine,” she said with a sigh, “but one last question.”

“Hmmm?”

“Did you ever think you would end up with an older woman?”

Hordak tried and failed miserably to mask a snort. “Are you quite done?”

“Not yet! You know,” she continued, “there’s actually a phrase for this! Some people would say I ‘robbed the cradle’. Or in this case, I suppose I robbed the vitrine.”

“My word,” Hordak chuckled, shaking his head at her with a bemused grin as he glanced up at the dimming sky through the rooflight they had installed. He was ready to admit defeat and let her claim this silly victory. “It will be dark soon,” he said, wrapping an arm around Entrapta’s waist. “I believe it’s around this time that senior citizens are meant to go to bed.” And with that, he tossed the delightfully cackling scientist over his shoulder and headed out the door.

#entrapdak #my oc #entrapdak shitpost #long post

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distopea · 2 years

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@regensia

He over thought this, he was fairly certain. But it was too late now, waiting for Mika to return from his day out by throwing himself at his work in his office. Vital was doing his best to remain nonchalant as usual despite leaving a small gift bag (snacks) and a large wrapped box (definitely not edible) upon the kitchen table along with some flowers that were sure to catch Mika's attention. Sunflowers and red pixie lilies with and eucalyptus to accent. None of it matched the dark blue surprise he wore beneath his slacks, button-down, and sweater though. Was he... nervous? It was just another Valentine's Day. Regardless he practically flew to his feet when hearing at last the door open, leaning in the doorway of the office to greet the other. "Welcome home."

He was sincerely tossed and exhausted, but truly delighted to head home after such a long day back at his regular training. Even if today was a particular day for a lot of couples, Mika wanted to mark the occasion as well. In his sports bag, there was a wrapped little package with a velvet box, a gift he had planned to offer to Vital as soon as he had peered at these earrings inside the vitrine of the jewelry shop. Made of silver gold, the two small hoops were carved with “V” and “M” letters. Mika also brought a pastry box with three different varieties of Vital’s favorite flavors, with an amount of sugar honestly high enough to kill a simple man. There was also another hidden gift for later in the evening; not as extravagant as what he had bought a year ago, but Mika was wearing a see-through black boxer, quite refined and definitely expensive.

“I’m home!” He greeted his boyfriend as he abandoned his sockers in the hallway and headed directly to the office, which was honestly Vital’s second home. He offered his best smile, truly happy to see Vital after such a long day, and before he could even sense the slightest anxiety coming from the man of his life, he directly stepped forward to drag him right against his chest. “Here you are.” He kissed his forehead and nose with gentle peeps, always so cheerful whenever he was close to him, and after a while, he tenderly circled his cheeks and pressed his lips on his.

“Happy Valentine’s Day.” He whispered before he parted, the pad of his thumbs softly caressing his jawline. Mika smiled once more, before he frowned, ready to scold his boyfriend. “There’s no way you’re staying around the office right now. Tonight is about us! Some get your ass out of here!” He intertwined his fingers with his and began to drag him away, heading to the kitchen. He eventually froze when he noticed the gift bag and the flowers. “Oh!” He looked aside to catch Vital’s face, a sly smirk curling the corner of his lips. “What’s this?”

#; regensia #⌇ask ( 𝙈𝙞𝙠𝙖 )#⌇solar smile ( 𝙈𝙞𝙠𝙖 | IC )#⌇the correct timeline ( 𝙈𝙞𝙠𝙖 | modern reincarnation verse )#⌇bittersweet lips ( 𝙈𝙞𝙠𝙖 / 𝙑𝙞𝙩𝙖𝙡 )#; hahaha can't wait for them to unwrap more than their gifts tonight XDD #; laughing in the bedroom is always a good thing after all 👀#; okay it's not V day yet but fuck it #; it was too cute i needed to answer it

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softjeon · 4 years

Text

In love with your dark side | Final

• Pairing: Beauty!Taehyung x Beast!Yoongi • Genre: Fluff, bit of Angst | Rating: Teen and Up | Beautyandthebeast!AU / Fairytale!AU • Words: 4,5k | AO3 | Gifset Trailer • Disclaimer: anxiety, mentioning of a curse

written with @cassiavioletblue

↳ Yoongi had tried not to think about what would happen if someone saw him but his mind had wandered through all of their possible reactions anyway: screaming, laughing, shock… he’s had so many horrible encounters in his mind and yet the boy in front of him didn’t react like in any of his thoughts.

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His gaze wandered around slowly, holding onto his folder tightly as he leaned over a glass vitrine to see a few pieces and information on the exhibition inside. He always loved the quiet of the museum and even here in midst of the entrance, he felt more home than he’d ever felt anywhere before. Taehyung couldn’t describe that feeling, but today it mixed with the anxiety of the reason why he was here. Instinctively he held on a little tighter to his folder, pressing it against his chest. A curious rustling came from behind him and Taehyung turned, when he saw an old lady peering out at him from behind the counter that he hadn’t seen before.

“Oh, my…,” Taehyung clasped a hand to his chest and the woman laughed. She was clearly a museum volunteer, working late to close out the gift shop. Or maybe she was just tidying up after a busy day.

“Hello, Miss…do you happen to know where Mr. Kang is?” Taehyung asked, looking down to his watch. His meeting with him had been about five minutes ago but the owner of the museum hadn’t been showing up. Ever since he had promised Yoongi to take him out, Taehyung had been almost manic to find a museum, big or small to accept his art and photography.

Until now, he had only cancellations. And this right now seemed awfully like one of them.

“Oh, he has been out a while ago. He made me cancel all other applications. Didn’t I call you?” The woman was asking, and Taehyung sighed deeply, smiling at her even though everything in him just wanted to scream. He had dressed up, sorted his stuff anew and even came up with a new tactic to finally wrap them around his fingers.

And there it was again: the secretary telling him that they already found someone else. Someone that suited them better.

Taehyung was out of ideas when he opened up his shop later that day, not wanting to tell Yoongi again that he hadn’t been able to make it. Maybe this was just an awful way of the universe telling him that he wasn’t it. Putting the folder onto his desk, Taehyung lit up the little sign that said ‘open’ and sat down with a pout on his lips.

A woman came in with so much force that the little bells above the door were ringing like they were caught in a storm. Everything about her seemed bright; her red costume, her lips, her eyes as if her whole form demanded attention.

“Kim Taehyung?” She asked without so much as a greeting, looking like she was in a hurry. She wore high heels that were so dangerously high that for a moment Taehyung was scared she might fall and hurt herself with how fast she was coming towards him, but she was so steady as if it were totally normal for her to run around on high heels. “Why aren’t you at the museum?”

“Why…am I what?” Taehyung was so out of depth as she looked at him as if she knew exactly who he was while he had absolutely no clue. He got around his desk and motioned to the back, where he usually took the pictures for job applications that were a regular business. “Do you need me to take pictures for you? I’m sorry…I didn’t get your name when you came in.” He gave her a friendly smile and reached out his hand as if he had simply misheard her question about the museum. Maybe he was going crazy already.

“We don’t have time for that now.” She waved a hand hectically as if she was scaring of some flies and then turned towards him with a frown. “The museum was waiting for you! You had an appointment there! Today!” She spoke overly clear as if she was trying to get Tae out of his daydreams. “They were expecting your pictures about three hours ago. An exhibition isn’t going to make itself! Now hurry up! Tell me which pictures you wanted to take, and we’ll get them out into the van. You can dress up later, nobody expects a suit for artists anyways nowadays, let the art speak for itself!”

“I was at the museum today, but my appointment got cancelled. Mr. Kang already found someone else, didn’t he told you?” He felt awful as if someone was rubbing his failures into his face one more time.

She walked past him while talking, as if it wasn’t a big deal. “Your appointment didn’t get cancelled - the selection process had been cancelled. Because they saw your pictures before and decided to take them so no other applications were needed.”

“M-my pictures? It can’t be…wait, are you even talking about the national gallery?” He got pushed into the direction of his atelier and when he didn’t move, the woman just simply walked ahead and grabbed a few of folders and looked through them, then nodded and put them under her arm. “Move!” She ordered again and Taehyung absently minded walked ahead. Taehyung gave a few more folders to her, where he had safely put in his photography that was printed in all different kind of sizes, before unlocking the door to his atelier, revealing even more of the things he had never shown anyone. “I…I have a few paintings as well, they aren’t…good, but…maybe.” Taehyung was still not sure what this was about, but she looked rather pleased. “I have some photography on canvas as well there.” He pointed into one corner, hurrying over to get the stuff for her.

“Ah, yes, perfect!” The canvases were a lot big and heavier than his folders so for a moment Taehyung wondered how she would carry them with the folders still in her arms, but she walked past them, opened the door and whistled loudly. In came two men dressed all in black and if their faces hadn’t been that plainly visible they could have passed for burglars, right down to their black leather gloves. “Those ones, boys.” She ordered them and with a curt nod towards Tae they picked up his canvases. All of them.

Taehyung was just running back and forth with them until his whole room was emptied and no art piece was left inside his shop. He stood a little frozen in the atelier, not being able to believe anything that was happening when the woman grabbed him by his arm and took him along, mumbling something about how they should just take him with them in the van so he would be punctual. Only then when Taehyung stood at the museum again did he put the pieces together. His art would be hung in a museum. A real museum. With shaking hands, he took out his phone and called Yoongi’s office. He knew the other was still asleep, so he didn't mind it when the mailbox went on.

"You won't believe what just happened." He raked a hand through his hair as he tried to process how the men were bringing his art in. "It's starting in a few hours. It was last minute and I… I can't believe this, Yoongi. I wish you were here." He took a deep breath before he added quickly, "Let me take you out, please. I'll ask the owner if we can visit at night. The opening starts in a couple of hours." Taehyung felt out of breath from all the excitement, "I need to hurry, they are calling for me." With that he put his phone away again and hurried inside, following the women to where his paintings and photography would be hung when he froze completely. It wasn't just a single wall he would get, but a whole floor. Just for him. Taehyung could feel the tears burning behind his eyes as the thought of his dreams coming true hit him full force. "This is all mine?"

“No, of course it’s not yours, don’t be silly. It’s just leased. You can hang your pictures up and then you have to take them off in a few weeks.” Came the curt answer who didn’t leave room for someone who had just found out that his dream had come true. “Now, come on, we need to know your preferred placements of the pieces you brought. After you’ve decided on the sequence and general order you can go down into the cafeteria to get a coffee or a piece of cake while we do the lighting and talk about the advertisement and then you can come up again and look at the finished exhibition.” Taehyung looked still so dumbfounded that she placed her hand on his shoulder for a few seconds. “Don’t worry, we can exchange pictures or add more spots if something doesn’t feel right or needs more light. You’re the artist and we’ll make sure that everything is exactly how you envisioned it.”

“How...I envisioned it.” It was almost like he had gotten thrown into a different dimension, another world, maybe he had been falling asleep at his desk and was just dreaming? He quickly got whipped out of his thoughts again, when the woman pulled him along and Taehyung shook himself out of it. He needed to focus. He had definitely envisioned this moment a million times, so he rolled his shoulders back and began directing everyone, discussing positions with the curator as they walked through the still empty halls that were slowly filled with his art.

“Can we maybe let piano music play in the background...I’d always thought that it’s fun if there’s an instrument right in the middle of an exhibition for people to play but...I know it’s short term so?” Taehyung asked shyly, but what the other answered had him frozen in shock. “We can order a piano and put it right here if you want?” The other turned on his heel, noting something down on his clipboard before he was already calling someone and leaving Taehyung alone with his thoughts. Slowly, he strolled back around, watching how they were hanging his pictures up, listening to the clicking of the heels of the woman that was ordering people to go more left or right and it was making him smile. How the hell was this to be real. It could only be a dream.

In the cafeteria, Taehyung gotten himself some hot chocolate to relax. When he looked up from his empty cup, he could see people outside putting up the banners for the exhibition with loads of names he already knew, when it fell onto something familiar. “No, no...wait…,” Taehyung ran outside in his haste not caring about bringing his cup back to the counter and stood completely in awe, when the men had finished bringing up the new advertisement. And there was his name. His name. Right next to the one’s he admired so much himself.

It felt like hours that he stood outside in the cold, just watching his name wave with the wind before someone stepped beside him. “Here, I figured you might need this.” Jimin’s voice got him out of his thoughts and he hugged his friend tightly, taking the beret from him before putting it on. “Now you look like an artist.” Jimin smiled up at his best friend, who held up a bag with more clothes that he had brought him after Taehyung had whined about not wanting to be in his work clothes tonight, so they quickly hid in the bathroom to change.

“They just came in?” Jimin asked and Taehyung hummed in response. “Took all of my art. All of it, can you believe it? I have a whole floor! All of it...like four rooms, Jiminie!” His best friends arms hugged around his waist and Taehyung couldn’t help but laugh, “And I asked for a piano and they just said: no problem. I’m not sure if they made it though. It was all a bit last minute actually.” Taehyung felt a lot more relaxed with Jimin by his side and yet, when he stepped into the exhibition that was now filled with people waiting to be let into the new art exposition, reading upon him and his work in little folded up papers. Still, Taehyung couldn’t help but look around and search for someone.

He knew it was kind of stupid to hope that Yoongi would come. Maybe he had heard his mailbox message, but would wait for a midnight date, sometime when they can be alone, and Taehyung would make sure that it would happen. And still, it made his heart beat a little faster at the thought of Yoongi coming here. But there were too many people, too many eyes that could see him. Taehyung startled when the people all around him clapped enthusiastically and then went off to either get a glass of champagne or finally visit the art pieces. The young artist held Jimin by his wrist and showed him around, telling him all about his photography, making Jimin startle when he found a few pieces of himself on the wall. “Oh gosh, Taehyungie!” He blushed vividly, but Taehyung just chuckled.

“Excuse me, but...I couldn’t help but notice the similarity could it be that it’s you?” A man had stepped beside him, tall with blonde hair and Jimin gulped up at him. “Oh, it’s hideous. I’m so sorry. Taehyung should’ve used someone better...my posture looks awful in this one.” Taehyung couldn’t help but roll his eyes, when Jimin wasn’t even realizing that the man was obviously flirting with him, not caring about his posture but just about the aesthetics of the photography. He always loved photographing Jimin while he was dancing. It was like art in motion. He smiled, stepping away from the two, when something made his ears perk up. “I’ll buy the series.”

“Wh-what?” It came from both of them simultaneously as they blinked at the stranger, who was smiling at them so sweetly that it turned his eyes into half-moons. “I’d like to offer you a price. Let your manager call me, please and reserve those for me.” He handed Taehyung a card, before returning his attention to Jimin. “My Manager,” Taehyung mumbled, thinking about how he never even thought about having one. “Ah, you sold something. Amazing!” The woman in the red-heels took out some stickers, placing them below the art piece, spelling ‘reserved’ right underneath it’s description. She patted his shoulders in encouragement, before leaving Taehyung as fast as she came.

It didn’t happen to be the last picture he sold, because Taehyung found those little stickers under a few of his photography already and he was eager to see who those people were. Apparently the lady in red was really good at selling. So, Taehyung kept to his part: shaking hands, discussing the art, meeting new people and collecting more cards of important and potential customers. He had long lost Jimin, who was busy talking to the tall stranger, or flirting as he could tell by their giggles.

Standing in midst of all those people, Taehyung felt unsure for a moment. It was too much happening at once, people patting his back, congratulating him, telling him how amazing he was, when all his life people only rejected his art. What did change? Did they really like it? He looked down at the cards in his hand and then back up, trying to take a deep breath. He didn’t want to let his insecurities destroy this magical moment. Closing his eyes, Taehyung took a few more deep breaths, when he could hear a soft tune playing and it immediately brought a smile onto his lips. In midst of it all, Taehyung hadn’t realized that they really fulfill his wish of music playing in the background. He hadn’t noticed it before. When he opened his eyes, Taehyung searched for where it came from, but when he saw the boxes in the corner of the room, he quickly realized that they were silent, and the music was coming from a different place. His heart was starting to race, and his breath hitched.

…

Being up during the day felt strange, but he had to if he wanted to be at Taehyung’s exhibition opening. He could only imagine how stunned and happy the younger must be when he came to the museum, trying to get the spot and then they would tell him that they already hired him. Except that apparently there was a misunderstanding and when the museum called that Taehyung hadn’t showed up he couldn’t believe it.

Turned out he was right, because Taehyung had been there but apparently no one had told him that he was hired just that no one could apply because the spot was already taken. He would have very much liked to jell at someone but as they were doing him a favor by taking Taehyung he just ended the call politely and then send his quickest manager over. She would handle everything so that the exhibition could still open in time. By the time the pictures were hanging properly he had already received a circular email advertising the new exhibition, had heard a note on the radios art program and had been sent a picture of the banners that had been hung up at and close to the museum. Yoongi was more than pleased. Only when he got a call about Taehyung wanting a piano did he start to panic a little. Taehyung really went all out there - but he had promised him the exhibition of his dreams and he would definitely keep his promise. So, a little while later he had organized a white piano with a pattern of colorful paint splashes and was sitting in the van where it was transported. His heart was beating into overdrive even though technically he had the safest cover: He wore a suit, white gloves and a white mask and no one would try to talk to him when he was playing the piano. It would be like serving drinks or food; no one would take notice of him; he would just fade into the background of the exhibition.

Only that one person did notice.

“Yoongi?” Taehyung’s heart stopped, when he noticed the familiar back right away, the way his fingers were gliding over the keys so smoothly as if he was simply dancing – just with his fingertips. He knew the melody inside out, had heard it a million times before and watched Yoongi play while he had leaned onto him at night. His heart was beating fast, when he walked further into the room, people all around him but Taehyung didn’t care about it anymore. His eyes were focused on Yoongi and him alone. He came. Solely for him to support him, to be with him on this important night, despite the people around.

“You’re here,” Taehyung whispered and sat down next to Yoongi, who kept playing until the tune slowly faded out. When he turned to him, his almost blackish eyes looking up at him, Taehyung found himself smiling. Even brighter than before. “Why are you here? There’s people… I thought you didn’t want to…”

“I didn’t think anyone would notice me when I’m in charge of the music and not a visitor. But of course, you noticed me. You’re more perceptive than you should be.” The mask covered his smile, but his eyes and the tone of his voice gave it away anyways. “Are you happy about your exhibition? I told you that you would make it. Also, it seems I’ll have to hurry to get a picture or else everything will be reserved before I have a chance to look at them all.”

Taehyung nodded softly, not wanting to cry tears of joy again, so he bit his lip. “I’m even happier now that you’re here.” He took Yoongi’s hand in his, wanting to intertwine their hands when he noticed the gloves. “I’d like to show you everything, just like I promised you. Do you trust me?” Taehyung held onto his hand softly, soothing over the fabric.

“Could we... maybe wait till the other visitors are gone? I talked to the custodian of the museum on the phone and we have green light to stay a little longer if we want. If I get up you won’t have piano music.” While what he said was true he was simply scared. If Taehyung went to show him around people would start talking about a visitor in a mask. As piano player he was safe but as Min Yoongi he was utterly vulnerable right now.

Taehyung reached out, soothing over Yoongi’s arm softly. “I love you, Yoongi, the way you are, and no one can tell me how to see you. I know you are afraid, but I won’t let anyone hurt you.” His heart jumped at his own confession, but it was true. He had fallen in love for his stubborn boss somewhere along the way. He took Yoongi’s hand in his and slowly removed one glove, keeping his hand in his so no one else could see, hiding his smaller hands between his own. “It will be okay. I won’t let it slip.”

His breath was taken away by the younger’s word. He had given up on hope and that Taehyung, the person he liked most told him he loved him so easily was making his heart ache in a good way. Maybe he did have a chance at happiness and love after all. Nonetheless his first instinct was to withdraw his hand because he was still scared - but then he kept it where it was. He trusted Taehyung fully. And if it would make the other happy to hold his hand then he would swallow down the fear and be there for him instead.

Because for the first time in a long, long while someone else was more important to him than himself.

“You okay?” Taehyung asked shyly, noticing how nervous Yoongi was. “You’ll be okay. I promise.” He leaned in, placing a kiss on his cheek softly. He kept there, hovering over Yoongi’s lips (or where they would be hidden behind the mask) as he spoke. “Just squeeze my hand if it gets too much.” Taehyung got up and pulled Yoongi up with him, when the other had given his consent to move. He kept his hand close in his as he moved along, wanting to show Yoongi his favorite art first. No one turned their heads towards them, all of them too immersed in either socializing or discussing the art itself. Barely any of them even knew Taehyung was the artist.

It was easier walking with Tae than walking alone and he found himself so concentrated on Taehyung and his art that for a few moments he forgot why he was scared. The younger’s eyes lit up as he talked about the day he took the picture they were standing in front of; a beautiful landscape filled with flowery meadows and a beautiful cloudy sky. Listening to Taehyung took him to that place where Tae had hidden from the rain that day as he had been on his way to visit his grandma and the rain had surprised him. And just when he had thought that the rain would never stopped the sky had opened and let the sun through and he had taken the picture that now hung on the wall. Yoongi smiled fondly at Taehyung, thinking that the boy was more beautiful than every piece of art could ever be and with a sudden clarity he realized that he was just in love with Taehyung as it was the other way round.

“What are you thinking about?” Taehyung’s question shook him out of his thoughts, and he met the younger’s gaze. “Do you like it? It’s pretty basic, I guess. A simple shot of the sun but…it was a beautiful symbolism, right? There’s so much more than the simple visitor can see.” He bit his lip shyly, fumbling around with Yoongi’s hand, not wanting to ramble on. He had bored many with his deep conversations before.

“Yes, it is beautiful. You’re amazing, Tae. Though what I was actually thinking about was that I love you too. And that if you’re okay with it I’d like to kiss you.” He could just put the mask a little up so no one could see but his love for Tae right now was greater than his caution.

Taehyung gulped, eyes wide when Yoongi confessed and asked him something that he really wanted to do for so long. “Y-yes, of course, I…I want you to.” He didn’t know what to do, holding onto Yoongi’s hand so tightly as he was feeling more nervous than he had before the exhibition had been opened. He could feel his cheeks blushing and feeling hot.

Carefully Yoongi tipped the mask upwards until his mouth was free and then leaned in to gently cover Taehyung’s lips with his own. It was a delicate kiss, careful and fragile as if he wasn’t sure that this wasn’t a dream and if he wasn’t cautious it would shatter into a million pieces. But Taehyung’s lips were warm and steady, and his mouth tasted so sweet that Yoongi couldn’t help it, he moved closer, his hand wandering to the boy’s waist as he held him against his own body, kissing him again, more daringly so.

The mask slipped off.

“Yoongi!” Taehyung gasped against his lips, when he had opened his eyes just for a second but what he saw made him stop and stare.

He couldn’t believe it.

“Y-you’re…” He blinked, still holding close onto Yoongi as he watched how the veins started to fade out, the black ink seemingly unraveling until they wasn’t seen anymore and instead it was only his brown eyes staring back at Taehyung. He was gleaming and Taehyung cupped his cheeks to look at him thoroughly, before hastily taking his hand in his and watching how the black streaks were simply fading away. In his haste to see if this was real, he took the Yoongi’s other hand, pulled off the glove. “W-what…what is happening?”

Tae’s shock hit him right in the heart and he quickly tried to cover his face with his hands - but to his surprise his palms weren’t black anymore. He slowly let them sink in a daze, turning them over and over to check if they were really just skin. “Tae, do you... do you see this?” Suddenly the other’s expression made sense and he hurriedly turned towards the next picture that was securely sealed behind glass. In his reflection a normal face stared back. His face. He touched his cheek, patting it lightly to make sure that he wasn’t dreaming. But the reflection mimicked him, and he didn’t wake up. A tear spilled over, sudden and hot, running down his cheek when he realized that this was true.

The curse had been broken. And he had Tae to thank for that.

The younger had seen him; broke right through his defenses with his love and kind heartedness to the very core of him. He loved him despite what he looked like, breaking the curse when Yoongi had realized he loved someone too, more than himself and trusted Taehyung with his life. He didn’t mind if others would see him because he wasn’t alone anymore. As long as he was with Taehyung, he was safe.

And with him he felt beautiful, no matter how he looked like on the outside.

Taehyung had seen all his flaws and decided to love him, because he let his heart chose him, not his head. Even if it still made no sense to the younger, Yoongi couldn’t help but pull a stunned Taehyung in and kiss him until they both felt breathless.

He could explain everything later.

Because they had all the time in the world together.

A/N: And here our lovely little beauty and the beast au is finished. We hope you enjoyed this little fic of ours and are excited to our (for now) last fairytale au which will be next: Alice in Wonderland! Thank you for reading and all your lovely comments!

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beecreativeink · 4 years

Photo

PR 4-1 Movie Concept A common theme throughout these posters I will be exploring for my design are typeface and balance.

1. Booksmart (2019) United Artists Releasing I like the simplicity of this poster. There aren’t that many details, so it draws more attention to the small bits of text around the poster. Having the two lead actresses take up the majority of the design leads to a balanced composition. The typeface used is similar to what I would want to include in my poster.

2.Dope (2015) Open Road Films The palm trees and actor placement creates a dynamic perspective by drawing my eyes to the center. The arrangement of the title and tagline works considering where my eyes are drawn to in this poster. The weight of this poster is also equally balanced on the top and bottom. The yellow bits added throughout the text are an interesting method I am exploring for my design.

3. Lady Bird (2017) A24 Similar to the Booksmart poster, I like how the lead actress is the main focus of the poster. The blurred background further enforces the focus remains on what the designer wants you to see. The blurred background prevents us from seeing the individual people and instead highlights how different Lady Bird is from her peers.

4.The Way He Looks (2014) Vitrine Films This poster is inspiring me to mix both realistic and illustration in my design. It gives a very homemade/drawn feel that would complement my low budget idea well.

5. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) Sony Pictures Classic I like the hand drawn look of this poster because it emphasizes the diary part of the movie.The text is balanced well and almost looks like an hourglass from its placement.

8.Eight Grade (2018) A24 This poster is very text heavy which I enjoy. It doesn’t overwhelm the poster with small details and lets the viewer imagine what the movie would be about.

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stellabarak · 5 years

Text

The art of the muse: Dora Maar and Paris exhibition at Centre Pompidou

In July, I visited Paris. The perfect place for wasting time, flanerie and walking in over-crowded city centres. The city and place of inspiring and surreal artists, and Surrealism itself, Paris attracts artists and writers today.

Contemporary art would have never really existed as we know it, had it not been for the era of Andre Breton and Man Ray. But strangely, as has been the case with many female artists of that era, forgotten, lurking in the background of art history.

Not this time. The long overdue Dora Maar exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is finally paying homage to the woman as well as others, of that famous circle of friends.

It is Friday, late afternoon. Outside the museum walls, the city has been blazing with heat and ongoing transport upgrades. The metro line four I took to get to Centre Pompidou had broken down earlier, and I walked instead. The Gallery on the sixth floor is packed. Older as well as younger people. All peering curiously into the vitrines, straining to see the physical postcards, photographs and other details of her life. On the wall, a digital projection unfurls the life of an incredible woman, a pioneer photographer. A female artist and photographer.

Dora Maar: the woman otherwise known as the “muse and mistress of Picasso.”

I get slightly angry also with myself, for allowing me to think that women like her could simply be known as “muses” and nothing more. I think back into to my university teachers – mostly male – who taught me Surrealism and never dared venture beyond Man Ray, Andre Breton, Eluard, Bataille… sigh.

The first two exhibition rooms are dedicated to her early years and that of fashion photography and collaboration with designer Kefer. I am simply blown away by the audacity and capriciousness of her photography: nothing escapes her discerning eye. Female nudes pose in a way that is unobtrusive and inoffensive. She is interested in showcasing the unexpected, the candid as well as the formal, staged. I am struck by the photographs for the Dolfar campaign from 1936, one of the earliest advertisements for hair curling irons. Amongst the tests and commercial photographs, a striking series of positive prints as well as the actual photographic negative, of a model with a coral in her hands. Perfect curls and light tests with models.

But her work wasn’t only fashion. In her “Sans titre [Main-coquillage]” (Untitled [Hand-Shell] 1934, we can see the early influences of surrealism at work. The photo-montaged hand appearing as if coming out of a shell, rivals even a contemporary digital one. The dream sequence made visible, examples of early photo-montages are proof that manipulation in photography existed long before the days of Photoshop.

Her personal and professional work takes a significant turn when she is included in the group of Surrealists. Man Ray, the father of experimental darkroom practices, makes her portrait using his unique method of solarisation out of three photographs. Her gaze is longing, yet the painted fingernails of the hands that are placed on her forehead are revealing of being struck by some creative genius. When Picasso found this photograph of Dora Maar in Man Ray’s studio, he begged him to have it.

It is in this exhibition however, that I am also struck by some other marginalia: the wedding invitations to the weddings of Andre Breton and Jacqueline Lamba. With my own impending wedding coming in August this year, I am thinking that even the Surrealists held their weddings in quite a traditional fashion. Or not? I wonder what could have taken place at that wedding of 14th August 1934? How was their love depicted? Man Ray was the chosen photographer. I wonder what a Surrealists wedding would have been like.

The invitation is simple:

“Jacqueline Lamba and Andre Breton Sont heureux de vous faire part de leur marriage”

The date: 14th August, 1934.

In the same vitrine where the invitations to their marriage, an early copy of “L’amour fou”

Jacqueline Lamba, the orphaned underwater dancer of Montamartre, becomes the everlasting muse of Breton’s mad, obsessional love. But I am drawn to the photograph of Lamba underwater, on the opposite wall. She seems beautiful, alluring and above all, free, suspended in the aquarium water. Naked, too, nevertheless, this nakedness is somehow inspiring, for it isn’t a typical reclining nude or scantily clad one. This nakedness is bold and mesmerising.

I am fascinated by Jacqueline Lamba, her slender figure and personality. Her pain and anguish as she was sidestepped by Breton, never fully achieving her place amongst the Surrealists but always referred to as “his muse” and then “his wife.”

She destroyed her own paintings, and nothing much has been preserved.

There are however, a series of “Cadavre Exquis” (Exquisite Corpse) collages, made in February of 1938. A reminder of happier times, they are signed by Andre Breton and Jacqueline Lamba and various other Surrealists of the time, including Yves Tanguy. It seems like an exquisite corpse was produced each night, in February. This one that I saw at the Pompidou dates from February 7th, 1938. Upon my return, I do some further research to find that there have been a few of these produced over the month of February, almost all of these entirely attributed to Jacqueline Lamba. They are now part of museum collections all over the world, including the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

This one, that I have seen as part of the Dora Maar exhibition at the Pompidou, is a collage and drawing on paper.

The “Cadavre Exquis” was a technique introduced by the Surrealists, and since a favourite for artists. It is a game of participants, where each one draws or adds their part on the collage, then passes it on to the next, without seeing what the previous one has done. What emerges is usually a strange, “surreal” depiction of a body that has swapped limbs for antennas, a head for a monster, a mechanical clock instead of a torso.

In these collages, it is interesting to see that the “exquisite corpse” transcends any notion of gender, place, time. What emerges is a hybrid, or fusion of undetectable parts.

I thought that those were perhaps the happier times for Jacqueline Lamba. I can visualise her at the dinner table, after a meal, instigating yet another round of an exquisite corpse game. Initiating it and allowing her participants to take part, equally.

Jacqueline Lamba and Andre Breton separated soon after they arrived in New York, after fleeing war torn Europe, in 1941.

Apart from the Cadavres Exquis, now in many public collections and museums wordwide, Jacqueline Lamba destroyed most of her paintings.

In my mind however, she will forever be dancing underwater, free from constraints of Surrealists and the artistic movement she was expelled from.

I wander on to the next rooms, the final ones of the exhibition. Experimental works by Dora Maar on negatives, including scratched, punctuated, darkroom photograms. Works that were done away from the artistic limelight, yet fuelled by observation, rigorous and extensive experimentation and testament to someone who knew the art and practice of photography so well.

It is a shame that this exhibition has taken years to emerge despite most of the material being at the Pompidou collection; a much needed and anticipated one. Curated by two women, Damarice Amao and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, this is an extraordinary account of a woman and her life achievement. Indeed, it shows that women were at the heart of making as well as, inspiring, Surrealist art.

All images are taken on the occasion of the exhibition Dora Maar, and contain material from the Centre Pompidou. Photographs taken by author.

#Dora Maar Centre Pompidou Paris Surrealism Photography France Jacqueline Lamba

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micaramel · 4 years

Link

Artist: Josephine Pryde

Venue: Galerie Neu, Berlin

Exhibition Title: Exterior, Night, Day

Date: June 11 – July 23, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin. Photos by Stefan Korte.

Press Release:

Juxtapositions on a façade. *

I had been travelling. I had been to Galicia and to Portugal, and I had been to the Art Institute of Chicago. With what confidence may I say this.

The photographs printed on the tarpaulin show carvings on rocks that exist in the open air. One of these carvings is in Northumberland and I have been visiting it since I can remember. Others, whose formal similarities to this carving are striking, are situated thousands of miles away and I saw them for the first time in March 2017.

Following writings by archaeologists whose work I have consulted, I will refer to these carvings as Atlantic Rock Art. They are thousands of years old. Neolithic. Likely being carved until around the 1st millennium BC.

‘Atlantic Art’s chronology has been a recurrent discussion, but is still an open debate.’(1)

It might be added that interpretation of the motifs is not the subject of my interest here. Indeed, how will we ever know? Let’s think about something else. I have been working with images of these carvings for several years, interested, among other things, in the movements of thought and of people that they suggest. Prehistoric movement. Language. I would like here to join with others who offer the scope of the carvings for consideration.

In February 2020, I was in Chicago to discuss an exhibition of my artwork due to open in the Art Institute at the end of August 2020. On my last afternoon in the museum, before leaving for the airport, I was moving through the painting galleries. There was a free-standing wall in room 201. On it, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877, by Gustave Caillebotte, was hung to face the visitor who entered from the Grand Staircase. The confident, central location for the wall, with its rainy street scene and camera-style perspective, made for a proper crowd puller, and there were people clustering in front of the artwork. I walked round the back, to see what was on the other side. We had been talking all week about constructing free-standing walls for my exhibition, in rooms 182 and 184 in the Modern Wing downstairs. Behind Paris Street; Rainy Day, there were two paintings: a still-life with fruit by Monet, and another Caillebotte, Calf’s Head and Ox Tongue, ca. 1882. The painting had a lavender sheen shimmering through its gristly subject matter.

On the plane home a few hours later, the airline blanket across my knees, I had the idea to shoot a photograph of an ox tongue, based on the composition of this painting, for a free-standing wall in my own exhibition in Chicago. Chicago, like many US cities, has at the time of writing a building with the word ‘Trump’ emblazoned large upon it. I had seen the building on that last afternoon as well. It too floated through my mind as I sat under the blanket. I imagined Trump with no tongue and what a blessed relief that would be. Deprived of the langue in his language. I had found the title for my photograph. Over the months ahead, through all the shifts that were to come and keep coming, I returned to thinking about that title. Could something so apparently obvious remain in place? Could using it say anything about language and art, other than that I pleased to imagine the 45th President of the United States to be relieved of his tongue?

We leave the door open from the outside into the gallery. A channel into the interior. The lobbyspace is empty, except for possibly some antiseptic and face masks. The reception desk has been re-located into the gallery space at the back, like it was in the exhibition by Klara that I had liked so much. Around the reception desk are hung some black and white photographs, in scaled-back exhibition. They are part of the Hands (Für mich) series I have been printing for the last few years. They show hands in contact with what I call touch-sensitive devices. Touch-sensitive in an expanded sense. These are new prints, and they are framed behind coloured Perspex, which is deployed to function as a kind of ‘in real life’ coloured filter. I choose some older works from the series to install with these, looking especially for ‘Aufnahmeprüfung 1’, for example, because it’s that time of year again, the time of the entrance examinations, at the University where I teach.

That would be the prosaic explanation, anyway, for the inclusion of that work. If you look at it, you see a young hand reaching out to an older one that holds the documents or artwork, just out of reach of the younger hand. When you walk outside again, the 88-square-metre banner, Exterior, Night, Day, is still there, framing the vitrine where The Tongue of Donald J. Trump hangs, to be peered at through the glass.

The photographs stretch images of prehistoric art across the building, with a nod to Impressionism framed for display in the gallery window. The violent removal of the tongue has taken place. This is not so much a call to arms, but a reminder for a future. How did the carvings travel?

Josephine Pryde

1 Joana Valdez-Tullett, Design and Connectivity, 2019, BAR publishing, Oxford, p. 2)

There is no pretending that Exterior, Night, Day is the same exhibition that had been originally discussed between Josephine Pryde, and Galerie Neu’s Alexander Schroeder and Minnie McIntyre, during a studio visit in January 2020.

Should a virtue be made of its re-arranged elements, however? The plans for the exhibition doubtless would have altered between January and June anyway, even without the emergency of the pandemic arriving. What now emerges as Exterior, Night, Day places language firmly at the centre of its concerns, even as new relationships form to the work’s time and location.

Moving a set of images of prehistoric rock carvings onto a banner with which to cover the front facing façade of the gallery was one way to bring part of the exhibition into the open air. Added to this, the large ground floor window could be re-framed as a kind of shop vitrine, in which a single, separate photograph, inspired by a painting hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago, would be displayed for viewing from outside.

Finally, Pryde extended her series of Hands (Für mich) photographs with five new prints of black and white images, framed behind filters of coloured plexiglass. These would be installed inside, together with other works from the series, depicting hands in contact variously with driftwood, electronic devices, and the human chest. A buffer space remains between these photographs and the exterior, at once linking them to the front, while also consigning them for the time being to the rear of the gallery building.

Galerie Neu

Link: Josephine Pryde at Galerie Neu

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/2BW2hJc

#micaramel

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davidforsee · 5 years

Text

Eve of November

1 // Scheduling

In-Studio Time

2 hours performative sketches writing .5 hour peer consultations .5 hour pre-studio waiting time 1 hour Stamps Studio Grant writing .5 hour Museum vitrines sketching / research Out of Studio Time 1.5 hours interview with Joann McDaniels 2 hours reading from Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, researching U of M history 1 hour guerilla performance at the Walgreen Drama Center 2 // Reflections

This week constituted a really refreshing mixture of making, conceptual progress, research, and developing work. Conceptual progress on my thesis came through clarifying and specifying an engagement with U of M and Ann Arbor’s material history of commodifying identities. Active research was done by both engaging texts speaking with Joann about her own personal histories, and leading me towards the concept of the Damnatio memoriae (an example from Rome, a c.190AD tondo of Septimus with his son Geta erased, below) - literally “condemnation of memory” - and how we physically decommemorate objects and artifacts of the past. This led me to thinking about U of M’s own damnatio memoriae - of the C.C. Little Building, of the highly racist Michigamua secret society (these black and white photos of their gatherings / parades) are now retitled The Order of the Angell.

Making took the form of mostly writing and doing a small guerilla performance within the Walgreen Drama Center, where I simply sat at the lobby’s main table with a sheet asking for “what people wished they could erase.” Like my other communal-marking experiments in the IP Studios (the collaborative history and the collaborative inking/venting), this is my way of engaging collaborators through a democratized, site-specific lens.

3 // Going Forward My map of technologies is still in-progress, and the additional layer of U of M events to map onto it should be interesting: I love the idea of unearthing what specifically U of M has suppressed in the pursuit of new futures: what is the Ivory Tower’s damnatio memoriae? To answer this question, tomorrow I’m making my first trip to the Bentley Historical Library to dive into the archaeological records of two U of M archaeologists associated with eugenics. By examining one specific incident (and making notes the entire time of my own interactions with research staff, if they take care or consideration in the distribution of charged material, etc.) I can examine what structures prevent, promote, and re-conciliate our institutional memory. I’ll be spending a great deal of time this weekend refining my presentation on Monday: I’ll be performing through one or two of my performative sketches, presenting the logistics of my cumulative “package” of performances to be done in April, further articulating my process, and showing a site-design for the installation to reside in my Stamps Studio.

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littlefreya · 3 years

Text

August’s Box of Mystery

Summary: He left you all alone in his great castle by the sea and requested that you shan't touch yourself... can you keep your loyalty?

Prompted by @gotnofucks: “How do you feel August would react to knowing his girl uses sex toys when he is away? Would he feel jealous? Angry? Turned on?More importantly, what does he do? 👀”

Pairing: August Walker x Female Reader (No description of ethnicity or body type)

Words: 3k

Warning: 18+, smut + romance and fluff in the end. Female masturbation with a sex toy, voyeurism, sex-tape, cockwarming, mildly rough unprotected sex, breeding, breeding as punishment if to be exact, slight denial, MaleDom, creampie, a lot of it. Read the warnings properly, please.

*No permission is given for reposting my work, copying it, or parts it and claiming it as your own.

A/N: I am anxious about this one and hope you’ll enjoy, i’ve been rather influenced by Angela Carter writings. Many thanks to @the-soot-sprite @wondersofdreaming for feedback and @agniavateira for her review. Added notes and credits in the end!

Please reblog and comment if you enjoyed my work. 🖤

August’s Box of Mystery

Outside the bedroom window, the waves roared in a tempest's rage. Torrent after torrent, the sea unleashed brutal tentacles onto the salty iron rocks in a keen, vindictive urge to dismantle them to nought.

It was your own unruly longing that the ocean sensed: forlorn and listless, lying on your bed, the blue mist cloaking your heart.

August's sea-fort was a gilded cage. He had given you everything: diamonds brighter than the moon, sheets made of the softest golden silk, and even a ring to bind you to his unbreakable siege.

His only demand was that you will always wait for him, not only by flesh but soul as well. Despite his dark ambitions, trust and loyalty were qualities August valued beyond anything else.

But soon, you grew tired of watching the reflection of the tides refract upon the naked ceiling. A woman with fire for blood, you were forever tormented by your sultry nature and daydreams of that would make the devil blush.

Frustration gnawed at your bawls until—enough! You shot up from your bed—a storm of silky linen whirling around you like Venus emerging from spume on shore; and just as the goddess of love and beauty, you too yearned to be penetrated. Nibbling your nails, you glanced at the open door, your mind seeing beyond thick walls into his office where he kept a chest filled with illicit delights.

Every now and then—when August's muse struck—he would bring one of his toys to the bedroom, but you weren’t allowed to play on your own.

Body.

Soul.

‘Certainly, August won’t be able to tell if I would be careful?’ You hoped and followed the oceanic breeze hymning from the corridors.

Sand stuck to your bare feet, the wooden planks gently wept beneath your stride. Tipping on your toes, you snuck into his cavernous study, the key stolen from his nightstand already seized between shaky fingers. Though August was absent, your heart thrummed with ire upon setting foot onto the furry rug, as if he was to appear behind you at any given moment.

It was a room that reeked of debaucheries of all kinds: "borrowed" works of art depicting naked nymphs adorned the cherry-wood shelves, divine entities hung onto the wainscoting, and trophies he kept from his victims were encased in a fancy vitrine. Even the slate-blue view felt different from this spot; the rocky piers seemed like a pathway to a marine graveyard.

You paid no mind. You knew who you married and gained nothing but ethereal bliss whenever August fucked you against the window for the shark and whales to see.

Like a girl crawling into the rabbit’s hole, you took half a twirl. There, below the large monitor plastered to the wall, stood the locked chest. Black and gold roses ornamented its exterior and a trident crest was engraved on the lock. Only a fool would overlook such blatant temptation, and though you were no foolish girl, you were feeble at the face of seduction.

Falling to your knees, you made haste to unlock the chest, your heart drumming in your ears with the notion that you defied the words of your strenuous lover. But the same muscle that pumped you with fear, pounded wickedness into your blood.

If only you were blessed with a shred of your husband’s patience.

All the toys inside were placed in order, sanitised, and appropriately boxed in such fashion that you knew August would notice if something was misplaced. The man had the capability of finding an eyelash on the carpet. Still, unrelenting desire strung the cunning finger you ran over the loot, carefully picking one of the familiar vibrators he used on you before.

'Here?'

Standing at the centre of his tidy office you contemplated, suddenly aware of how the room leaked of his entity; scented notes of old leather binding and his woodsy cologne threatened to adhere to your skin, making this mischief taste like a crime. It was best to keep all disobedient whims in an isolated location, you assumed and allowed your eyes to further drift and glide upon the large monitor and the antique desk where August kept the remote. An abrupt wicked idea swam into your mind, reminding you of his private collection.

Catalogued alphabetically, he kept them on his streaming device.

'It should make things quick...' you convinced yourself whilst nibbling on your bottom lip. How worse could it be, anyway? You already rummaged through his chest. Taking a gander at his not-so-secret directory was puny in comparison.

With your lungs in fists, you slipped your panties to your ankles and settled on the cosy leather chair in front of his desk. Ignoring the red flag waved by your anxiety, you reached for the remote and clicked the button.

August made no effort to hide his recordings, simply naming the directory as "Films," as if it contained ordinary Hollywood blockbusters. Impatient, you scrolled down the list, trying to keep the jealousy from simmering in your bawls. August wedded you in this fort, but he never captured you on film like he did his girls. All lovers from the past, of course, but still it almost irked you; yet you brushed these concerns away and picked a file with the name you liked most and pressed “play”.

The ocean's lament was instantly swallowed by guttural howls and grunts that took every empty space within the chamber. Before your flaring eyes appeared the most forbidden of spectacles— your husband taking a different woman. It was odd to hear the familiar timbre of his groans laced with the voice of another. It was even stranger to sense the unmistakable spark of desire jittering in your cove.

Poseidon himself could not compete with the glory of the man, naked and drenched, all muscles and might. Furious, he took her on her knees, his fingers cradling her skull, pushing her head to the pillows while restraining her wrists above the small of her back. She wasn't you and still you clenched, aroused by the sight of the sweat glistening the fur of his torso and by the lack of mercy in the violent motion that ended with the dutiful grind of his sac against her swollen lips.

You hadn't even realised how shamefully you dripped upon the oxen leather of the seat, your thoughts focused on the odd mixture of envy and lust that penetrated your blood.

Desperate to unleash the monstrosity building within your core, you spread your legs over the desk and pressed the toy between your slippery petals. A shuddering whine rode your breath at the brush of the buzzing device, the pleasure so unimaginable it nearly drowned your senses. Gasping, you fought to maintain a hooded gaze upon your lover and his ‘whore,’ and imagined that the rosy silicon phallus that entered your anticipating hole was his swollen cock.

Your walls quickly clenched around the toy in true longing while the window trembled under the muffled rumbling of thunder. Perhaps your passions thickened the clouds. Or maybe it was the immoral streak of ecstasy laced by danger. Whichever it was, it urged you faster toward imminent bliss.

The other woman’s moans entwined with yours while your wayward hand mimicked the rhythm of bodies slamming together in the same frantic chaos that swept you.

Sweat-riddled, your ankles lost way across the smooth surface of the desk, leaving oily markings in a frenzy as climax drew close.

‘Almost…’

‘So close…’

‘August!’

"Enjoying yourself, my little princess?"

Lightning painted the room bright purple, announcing the thunder that tore through the ocean. It wasn’t half as frightening as the low timbre of his voice, which cruelly withheld your ecstasy. The fervour in your veins turned glacial; one moment you ascended to the heavens and the next, got rejected at its golden gates. All the while the growls of his reflection on the monitor echoed through the chamber along with the buzzing toy still buried inside you.

It granted no pleasure now, but further stretched the guilt.

Calm and forebodingly stoic, August reached a curious hand between your quaking thighs, seizing the toy and flicking the switch off. Unable to lift your gaze to meet his severe face, you struggled to swallow and kept your eyes glued to the monitor. Yet, there was no escape from his reflection—the “real” him present in the room peered back at you through the glassy screen. Standing behind you, he etched his fingers around the headrest of the chair and tutted.

“Do you like watching me with others, sweetling? Did this video make you wet?” he asked curiously.

Before any words formed on your quivering lips, his hand fell to your mound. An intrigued “hmm,” flowed from his throat as he found you overflowing with arousal. Like a whore, you couldn’t help but squirm into his touch, your body still enraged of being denied pleasure, and so was the sky that now threatened to turn the ocean upside down.

You nearly gasped at the heavy patter of rain that began to hit the window.

“I…”

“Disobeyed me,” he completed the sentence, his voice mellow and pleasant though the caress of his breath on your face burned.

“...missed you.”

Your attempt to pacify him did not go unnoticed. Lips stretching to a slanted grin, he dared to replace the toy with two fingers that drove inside your gaping hole—sensing how you wrapped and suckled around his long digits like a carnivore plant.

“Such a sweet gesture,” he retorted, “and still, my love, my dear wife who I’ve given everything to, has defied me like a lawless brat…unable to wait for her husband to return from his very important meetings.” His dainty fingers pumped crudely deeper, not to please you but remind you who you belonged to.

Writhing in your seat, you fluttered your eyes shut. “Where were you?”

Ignoring your question, he leaned down, his lips mere inches from your ear and whispered, “I think it’s time I’ll tame my bratty woman for good, don’t you?”

You shuddered to think what punishment he had in mind, your heart sinking to a dark pit at the deadly kiss he offered next to your ear; but then, he took your wrist and in a surprising tenderness guided you from the chair to bend over the desk.

Predictably, the movie had run its course and started again from the beginning, her promiscuous moans and the pounding of their flesh stealing your attention for a split second.

Having you at a disadvantage, August drew an invisible line from your spine to the curve of your behind, his fingers mimicking lines drawn on soaked sand. “All this sea salt in the air around us and your skin is still so tender,” he murmured lovingly and secured a hand around your nape, holding your head forward.

It excited you to watch them before and now with his groin hot and hard against your bare crease you were nothing but craving his cock.

“Is this going to hurt? Will you spank me? Treat me like that whore on your film?” you asked naively, smoothing your sweaty palms across the antique wood with dark anticipation.

“No, my beautiful angel.” his belt clicked and dangled like a set of heavy keys of a warden toying with his captive, “You are not my whore, but my wife. Which is why I’m going to put my child in your reckless womb to end your wicked ways once and for all.”

A gasp of shock left your throat, dazed by his threat you turned to protest. But the air drowned in your chest and your entire body stiffened as August’s ‘leviathan’ split your succulent flesh. Vulgarly you were penetrated, his size stuffing you so deeply, you felt the aching pressure in the pit of your belly.

August stilled for a moment, lingering at the sensation of your hot cove fitting around him in both a strenuous protest and the pathetic defeat in which your body seized the beast, milking it in an attempt to rope him into your womb forever.

“Oh, my sweet wife, I will stretch your little cunt to sheath me that not even these toys will please you. You see, everything here belongs to me, even your defiant womb. And I will leave a piece in me there to teach you a lesson.”

“I don’t think I am ready!” You whined, but the thought of being bred and carrying his child made your cunt unwittingly twitch. Your canal sucked him even deeper if it was even possible.

August sensed your convulsion and growled, his hips pressed unfathomably tight against your rear, making your cheeks ache from the press of his bones. It was torture with the film playing right in front of you; falling into a lucid delirium, your mind replaced her with yourself, yet your August refused to move, withholding your pleasure, owning it, owning you.

His cock anchored hot and thick inside you, its throb as powerful as the thunder hammering the ocean.

You wanted to cry.

“August, please! I need you! I missed you!”

With a harsh pull, he drew back and bludgeoned your crease, his might so vulgar the tip of your toes levitated from the ground. Again, and then again… he grunted at the choke of your flesh around him. Paying you no courtesy, he shook and pounded you almost terrifyingly as meticulously as he did this woman.

His fingers burnt around your waist, so harshly you thought you’d never be able to sense anything but his grip under your skin.

“Oh!” fat tears rolled down your cheeks, your breath a wheeze. Piteously you crumbled onto the desk. Thunders, cries, sounds of rutting flesh, and grunts surrounded you in this cavern of sin; you didn’t know which were yours and which were from the recording. All you knew was that he never took you so zealously before, you were at the brink of either rapture or falling to the abyss.

“You’re too deep! Too rough!” you wailed, unable to adjust to his pace but truthfully you didn’t want him to slow down. Currents of bliss submerged your loins the rougher he fucked you. The hot tingle in your core stormed with every collision of his cock with your cervix.

August reached from your neck to your jaw then and held your face to the screen.

“You wanted to watch her while touching yourself. Do you want to be her?” he growled and increased the pace, splitting through your body the way Dagon ripped open the waves.

Even if you had words, you couldn’t bring yourself to speak.

“You can never be her my darling,” August said and removed his hand from your hip. There was a quick drag of his drawer behind you and a rummaging sound. “Here, I’ll make us a short film; memorise this moment when you conceive me an heir.”

Struck by his words, you turned to stare. The sight of him behind you, inside you, was far more worthy than any film: sweat trickled down his messy curls and arduously strained face, his cerulean shirt damp and his mouth open as his fingers clutched the camera that was directed to the point where you were joint.

Unrelenting, your orgasm flooded through every muscle like a wave of destruction that wrecked every organ within you until you felt nothing but bliss. You felt August’s heart beating in yours.

There it was. Euphoria.

You drowned in it. The maelstrom inside you swallowed and sank his ship as well. With a loud shout of surprise, he broke apart and erupted inside you, his creamy gift ploughing your womb until it overflowed and dripped down your quaking thighs.

The rumbling from outside eased now, the clouded sky groaned with a release, their tears melding into the ocean never to be seen again.

August remained inside you, his breath thick, his hips gingerly grinding into yours to make sure his seed will take.

“There you go, my special girl.” his voice came huskily. “Now you will never be alone, unlike these women I can’t even remember.”

Your hand instinctively snapped to your lower belly, soothingly caressing it in a reverie. You felt battered, full, and disgustingly and arousingly dirty as he swam inside you.

Yet the thought that he impregnated you made your heart flutter.

Was there a more eternal symbolism of love than a legacy?

“August…” you whispered. Beneath you, the desk slightly shook, little tremors vibrated against the delicate pads of your fingers. Turning your head back, you offered him an enamoured glance and reached a hand in plea to lace fingers with his.

His storm-kissed eyes softened and he broke into a sigh at the sight of his wife at her best submissive behaviour. The greatest of all delights was to refine a crude rock into a fine delicate diamond. Proudly, he took your hand in his, entangling your fingers together, yet he kept the video-camera aimed at your joint bodies.

“Don’t move,” he breathed behind you and carefully pulled out his shaft from your flooded hole. A velvety chuckle played on his tongue, impressed by the wet plop and thickness of the cream that leaked off your entrance. Your cheeks burnt as you realised what he has done; your lips parted open to complain but then, with his cock already fully rigid and thick, he plugged you once more, shoving his seed back inside you.

“What are you doing?”

“Waste not, my angel,” he tutted and remained still, brushing his knuckles up and down the curve of your rump.

“Oh, how long?” you whined, uncertain if you are capable of staying this way with him throbbing between your taut walls.

“Until the sky clear up?...” he suggested, voice haunted by lingering satisfaction.

The waves of your previous orgasm were yet to ebb, and now stronger tides began to emerge. Frustration grew within once again and sadly, August’s will had the mettle of an anchor.

“At least tell me where you were!” you yelped.

August scoffed, and wrapped his hands around your waist, only slightly guiding you back into his hips. “No, no, my love. Every marriage needs a little bit of mystery, as you’ve already learned. But now do me a favour,” he uttered and placed the remote next to your hand.

“Play us another one? We might be here a while.”

Credits: Dividers by @firefly-graphics. Themes Inspired by Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber. Leviathan inspired by @sillyrabbit81!!

Disclaimer: I don’t own August Walker or Mission Impossible.

#henry cavill #august walker #august walker x reader #august walker fanfiction #henry cavill x reader

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joescanlan-blog · 7 years

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The Art of Disappearing

Originally uploaded on Joe Scanlan’s website.

A beautiful thing happened over the summer: Ellsworth Kelly’s Sculpture For A Large Wall came to New York. Originally commissioned in 1957 and installed in the lobby of the Penn Central Transportation Building in Philadelphia, the work was on view at Matthew Marks Gallery for the month of June. Which is to say that, forty-one years after the fact, Sculpture For A Large Wall made its first appearance in the art world. But even though the twelve by sixty-five foot anodized aluminum mural covered the entire east wall of the gallery—and even though two benches were provided for getting a good, museum-style bead on it—there were still moments when I swore it wasn’t there.

Let me explain: Kelly’s early drawings are simple ink studies of light and shadow, object and reflection, density and disintegration. Abstracted into graphic shapes (cartooned, really), the arch of a bridge or a slanting ray of light become interchangeable with the water surface or window sash that frame them. In other words, the bridge and the light become confused with what they are not. Sculpture For A Large Wall is the same idea on a larger scale, comprised of 104 shield-sized aluminum shapes mounted out of kilter on horizontal rods. Some of the shapes are painted and others have a brushed finish, many with edges cut to match those of adjoining shapes, so that from certain views they appear to be fixed together and yet from other angles they pull apart. As light plays across and through these shapes the spaces between them are alternately made to congeal into solid matter and then vaporize into air—to appear and disappear. After a while these optical effects affected my nervous system and made me uncertain of my own edges, made me unsure of where my body stopped and my surroundings started, even when planted on an oak bench.

While I sat there disintegrating I was reminded of my favorite show from last summer: Henry Dreyfuss, Directing Design: The Industrial Designer and His Work, at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Dreyfuss is the most prevalent American objectmaker of this century, and in that respect his work is both more invisible and more profound than that of better-known designers. While it is impossible at this point to consider the work of Frank Gehry or the Eameses without also having to take into account their personas, I guarantee that any American over the age of thirty has encountered hundreds of Dreyfuss objects without ever having given him a thought. This is not to say that Dreyfuss is somehow a more noble or pious designer, but to suggest that, like Kelly’s relation to the Abstract Expressionists, there’s more than one way to make an impression.

Having cut his teeth on the Modern movement and 20s Art Deco, Dreyfuss’ commission by the Bell Telephone System to re-design their standard phones forever etched his work into the American consciousness, from the wall-mounted 500 series chatted on by housewives to the desktop model Tipi Hedren used in The Birds (1963). Big Ben alarm clocks, Polaroid Land Cameras, Honeywell room thermostats, John Deere tractors—just about any image of the United States from 1940 to the present, in some measure, depicts Henry Dreyfuss. What was so impressive about his show was the unsettling feeling of having such mundane details from your life suddenly presented to you in a vitrine. Not the obvious icons, but details in the background of the memory of your parents’ living room that night you spilled a can of Coke on the new white shag. There . . . behind the recliner . . . was that a Dreyfuss thermostat? What with so many artists combing the streets in search of “the everyday,” the Dreyfuss show was an excellent opportunity to admire one of the people most responsible for what it looks like.

Perhaps more than any of his peers, Henry Dreyfuss knew what it meant to have one’s work go unnoticed. For him this was the pinnacle of success since, from the standpoint of both the client and the discriminating consumer, the better the design, the surer its immersion in the world. In contrast to the fine arts, which are bound by distinction and preservation, it is a particularly perverse aspect of designers like Henry Dreyfuss that the more we engage their objects the more invisible they become. Dreyfuss’ oeuvre demonstrates that the most impressive aspect of de sign as an art form is not that you can sit on it or dial it or wear it in the rain, but that by doing so with pleasure unwittingly over time, and object’s beauty and rightness are confirmed. Until that day comes when, on the very verge of disappearing, someone deems that the object is worth saving.

Despite having lived in the relative obscurity of a corporate lobby for 40 years, Sculpture For A Large Wall eluded both public defacement and committee destruction. (Kelly’s Seven Sculptural Screens in Brass, another commission for the same building, was not so fortunate.) And now that the new owners of the Penn Central Building have decided not to include the sculpture in their overall renovations—leading Marks and Kelly to buy it back—the work’s place is in flux. It’s status, however, is not. As with a Dreyfuss design, the most important aspect of Kelly’s piece is the fact that we have been made aware of it, and the extent to which that awareness alters our perception is the measure of the sculpture’s success as a work of art. Through its simple evanescence, Sculpture For a Large Wall turned the superficial notions of “appearances” into a structural questioning of all that is solid, making you forget about your own ephemera for a moment and almost wish that you could disappear.

#joescanlan #writing #author #artist #publication

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bestdissertationwritingser-blog2 · 7 years

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Bernard Marx in Brave New World

In Aldous Huxleys novel, A audacious New universe, unriv all in alled of the main characters is Bernard Marx. Bernard is very diverse comp bed to separate(a) Alphas because Bernard is about 3 inches shorter than the average Alpha. This is due to an diagonal bit he was in his test tube existence formed. Other than that Bernard is identical to the other twins. As Bernard first shows up in A Brave New World, it is just after(prenominal) the Director says that they get hold of erased all frustrated desire from the world. This is wry because Bernard is the total opposite of what the World State labels as normal.\n passim the book Bernard is criticized for being different, strange, supernatural and just unlike his peers. An vitrine of this is when Bernard and Lenina go out on a date and they are flying above the ocean and Bernard feels relaxed and enjoys feeling and witnessing the storm; in the meantime Lenina panics and attempts to turn the radio on. Bernard turns by the radio and says I fate to look at the sea in peace; sensation cant thus far look with that beastly dissension going on (Huxley 90). after this Bernard asks Lenina if she likes being with him. She says But of line of merchandise Bernard, its this horrible cast (Huxley Page 91).\nSome events Bernard partakes in are every other Thursday he goes to a Solidarity Service where he and 11 other people put down in an orgy porgy where all participants take embodiment and become one. This is an attempt to stress and fit in by having promiscuous sex which Bernard does not like. Throughout the whole assure Bernard is wishing he could have sat beside Fifi Bradlaugh because she is Plump, Blonde, not alike large (Huxley 81)\nLater Lenina and Bernard go on a prompt to the reservation. While on this eluding Bernard and Lenina walk around a village and witness a mother nursing her child. Lenina is utterly disgusted by this while Bernard says What a wonderfully interior relationship (H uxley 107). Bernard also learns that the Dir...

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Florine Stettheimer’s Vision of Equality

Florine Stettheimer, “A Model (Nude Self-Portrait)” (1915), oil on canvas. 48 1/4 x 68 1/4 inches, Art Properties, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967 (all images courtesy Jewish Museum, New York)

Along with Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Archibald Motley, Arshile Gorky, and Horace Pippin, Florine Stettheimer is one of the great American painters in the first half of the 20th century. There are lots of reasons why she has not been accorded the same status as Hartley and O’Keeffe, and more than a few have to do with deeply ingrained prejudices regarding money and class. Stettheimer was born into a wealthy, financially secure Jewish family, and she never had to work. For some people, her wealth means that she did not suffer enough to be an artist, and therefore her work does not have enough gravity. Others, who are delighted by her extravagance and whimsy, often fail to see further than that. For everyone else, Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry at the Jewish Museum (May 5 – September 24, 2017), the first major exhibition in more than twenty years devoted to this wonderful, still underknown artist, should open some eyes.

Stettheimer was a witty, sharp-eyed painter who, for all of her attention to her social surroundings and the people in them, was not afraid to inject her subjects with large doses of fantasy and whimsy. Academically trained in Germany (Stuttgart, Berlin, and Munich), her early drawings are far more than skillful studies. When she was fifteen and living with her family in New York, she went to the Art Students League. Traveling regularly between New York City and Europe, she absorbed a lot of influences and looked at, as well as thought about, a lot of art. Her influences include Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Symbolism, which she absorbed and transformed into something unique in American painting. There was no one else like her at the time.

Florine Stettheimer, “Self-Portrait with Palette (Painter and Faun)” (undated), oil on canvas. 60 x 71 7/8 inches, Art Properties, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967

As told by this exhibition, organized by Stephen Brown and Georgiana Uhlyarik Stettheimer begins putting everything together after she attends a production of L’Aprés-Midi d’un Faune by the Ballets Russe in Paris, June 1912. Inspired by this eye-opening experience, Stettheimer began working out plans for her own ballet based on the story of Orpheus. She made drawings, paintings, and maquettes, many of which are displayed in one area of exhibition. Seeing this particular ballet — as Brown and Uhlyarik conclude, and I think they are absolutely right — seems to have changed everything for Stettheimer. Within a few years, she began making her signature paintings.

The Orpheus project also prepared her for designing the sets for the opera, Four Saints in Three Acts (1928), with a libretto by Gertrude Stein, music by Virgil Thompson, and — more importantly — an all-black cast. One of the materials she used was cellophane. Near a vitrine containing ephemera from the opera, you can watch a short film by Julien Levy of a performance of one of its scenes. I watched it twice. Despite the graininess of the film, you are transported, and can almost forget what the world outside that theater was actually like for those on stage, first in Hartford, CT, in 1934, and shortly afterward on Broadway, where it had a long and successful run. Aesthetically and socially, the staging of Four Saints in Three Acts was a radical act, which passed itself off as fantasy.

Florine Stettheimer, “Procession: Orpheus…”. Orphée of the Quat-z-arts (1912), oil, fabric, and beads on canvas, 17 1/8 x 35 1/8 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Miss Ettie Stettheimer, 1947 (image provided by The Museum of Modern Art / SCALA / Art Resource, New York)

Here is what changed in Stettheimer’s work around 1914. She shed all traces of naturalism and realism and developed a faux naïf style in which small, often elongated figures occupy a stage-like setting. In contrast to her peers, many of whom did not have the rigorous education she had, she set about to unlearn her academic training. This change was accompanied by her increasing use of hothouse colors. She transferred the artifice and dramatic bodily distortions of ballet to her everyday, privileged surroundings, which included famed salons and soirees held at the family manse on the corner of 58th Street and Seventh Avenue. Among the guests were Viola and Elie Nadelman, Georgia Keeffe, Alfred Steiglitz, Carl van Vechten, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. In reinventing herself, Stettheimer goes her own way with no regard to what was the right thing to do: she became an uncategorizable narrative painter. She did not try to fit in and, because of that, she enlarged our understanding of what was possible in American painting.

Four Saints in Three Acts, performance photograph by White Studio, New York, 1934, Florine and Ettie Stettheimer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven

When you are a fan like I am, two things can happen: Your admiration grows or you are disappointed. I certainly could go on and on about all the wild and wonderful things she does in her paintings, her use of color so unlike anything other American painters were doing at the time; her satirical eye and gift for telling caricature, but that would not be enough, especially now, after seeing this exhibition. I love how smart and funny she can be, as well as critical and tough, which is to say that Stettheimer is a nuanced artist. In “Studio Party (Soirée)” (1917-1919), which depicts a gathering at her family house to celebrate her full-length “Nude Self-Portrait” (1915), Stettheimer shows her select audience’s response to one of her groundbreaking paintings. Some scholars believe this to be the first nude self-portrait by a woman artist.

Stettheimer’s “Nude Self Portrait,” which was inspired by Edouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1862), is in the upper right corner of “Studio Party (Soirée).” A figure in a stiff-backed chair, with hands folded primly in her lap, is seated directly in front of the self-portrait: her head discreetly obscuring the nude’s crotch. Nearly everyone in the room is looking away from the painting. In the lower left corner, two men stand side by side, staring with exaggerated thoughtfulness at a painting on an easel, whose image we cannot see. Stettheimer’s “Nude Self Portrait” is a presiding spirit ignored by nearly everyone in the room. She is also the only figure in the room with a smile. Whimsy, I would say, is one way Stettheimer protected herself.

Florine Stettheimer, “Asbury Park South” (1920), oil on canvas, 50 x 60 inches (127 × 152.4 cm). Collection of Halley K. Harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York

The painting that got me was “Asbury Park South” (1920), which is about an Enrico Caruso recital on July 4, 1920, at Asbury Park. We have a slightly elevated view of the boardwalk, pier, beach, and ocean, all bathed in different hues of yellow. Although Asbury Park was a segregated beach, with designated areas for blacks and whites, Stettheimer shows us an integrated social milieu of families, people dressed to the nines and bathers frolicking in the calm water. The audience in the grandstand viewing this scene is also a mixture of blacks and whites. It is a fantasy and it is whimsical and it is something more. It made me wonder: when was the first time an American painter depicted an integrated social gathering? Stettheimer never announces her subversiveness, because she is not interested in self-glory. As she wrote in one of her wonderful poems, “Art is spelled with a capital A…”

Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry continues at the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through September 24.

The post Florine Stettheimer’s Vision of Equality appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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micaramel · 4 years

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Artist: Max Hooper Schneider

Venue: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Date: September 21 – February 2, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of High Art, Paris and Maureen Paley, London. Photos by Jeff McLane.

Press Release:

While for the moment, the fates of human and non-human beings are inextricably entangled, the power of humans is waning. We arrived late on the planet and are likely to exit early.

—Max Hooper Schneider

A mad scientist, magician, alchemist, trash master, doomsday predictor, and borderline hoarder, Max Hooper Schneider has spent the past decade developing a taxonomy of living things, dead technology, and refuse, transforming grotesque souvenirs of everyday life into exquisite objects and environments. His passions for the nonhuman world and marine biology fuel his explorations of the often tragic results of humanity’s interference with the natural world. The results are visceral scenarios reflecting on the nature of existence and environmental crises. Ostranenie—the artistic technique of presenting common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance perception of the familiar—and techne—the ancient precept of material making—anchor Hooper Schneider’s approach to art making.

Hooper Schneider studied landscape architecture and marine biology in college, which provided access to facilities and labs where he could blow things up, cultivate glowing algae, and explore the habits and habitats of a plethora of specimens and exotic materials. Accordingly, research is central to his process, and his overflowing studio— Little Shop of Horrors meets a secondhand shop—functions like a laboratory where he can conduct off-label experiments and develop bootleg ecosystems. He is an incessant scavenger, trolling dumpsters, the beach, scrap-metal yards, anatomical replica companies, and the coffers of deceased relatives for discarded treasures. His vast collection of raw materials includes neon, bones (real and fake), scrap metal, sea creatures (also both real and fabricated), vintage toys, mannequins, junk jewelry, real and artificial plants, candy, fossils, death metal cassettes, discarded furniture, movie props, and more. He was, and still is, fascinated by tide pools and spent most of his free time observing these discrete worlds, which for the artist “represented something larger than myself . . . that exceeded my anthropocentric, postulatory thumbings at the ‘natural world.’ . . . One could witness this multidimensional play of habitat creation and destruction, mutualistic partnerships, sieges of elemental forces, and peer into a phantasmagorical, subplanar vista of tube feet, stinging tentacles, and regenerated limbs.”1

One might not immediately associate Hooper Schneider with Marcel Duchamp, the godfather of postmodern art. His primary medium, however, is in fact found objects. He transforms and redigests existing materials (and occasionally organisms), or in his words, “my day job is to package gore.”2 For Aral Spring Trolley (2014), he turned a classic popcorn trolley into an aquarium for popcorn- shaped snails, and for Antemortem Sirenian (2018), the artist sliced open an animatronic manatee, exposing the fictive guts—sinewy wires and electrical cables. Hooper Schneider doesn’t just recontextualize found materials and objects; he treats them as ingredients in a recipe in which he creates something entirely new without concealing their original use or function. He humanizes (or more accurately animalizes) machines and human-made objects, exposing distinct biological characteristics. And as Barbara Hooper observes, “his worlds do not represent nature: They are nature. . . . Of course, lobsters, fish, seahorses, spiny urchins. But boots, bullet casings, plastic chains? The works, if they are functioning as the artist would like them to, have opened at least this one small aporia, an aporia being, literally, something that stops you in your tracks.”

While the subjects of Hooper Schneider’s works can be somewhat dismal, every doomsday diorama features elements of delight and wonder. His poignant and magical assemblages never fail to seduce and mesmerize. An early piece titled The Last Caucasian War (2014), for example, comprises his mother’s laptop submerged in muddy water, with tiny fiddler crabs crawling over it. This captivating scenario encapsulates the real and urgent crises of environmental degradation and climate change.

Hooper Schneider is probably best known for his Trans-Habitats, aquarium tanks teeming with an array of materials culled from his various collections in the studio or those sourced from the field, which he considers “worlds that materialize and dramatize in diverse ways nature conceived in a specifically monist mode—i.e., as a process of ceaseless morphogenic modulation, a relentless onslaught in which bodies, as formed matters, are continuously created, transformed, and destroyed. . . . My sculptures and systems deploy a set of conditions involving perceptual shift, interactivity, mutation, juxtaposition, containment, openness, life, death.”

For example, each of the thirteen terraria in the Pet Semiosis series—such as Pet Semiosis 11: Leprosy (Hebrew) (2016), Pet Semiosis 5: Lethal Injection (Burmese) (2015), and Pet Semiosis 9: Coprolalia (Arabic) (2016)— displays a neon sign in a different language and alphabet, referencing a disease, symptom, or cause of death. More recently, he has produced the series Planetary Vitrines, larger-scale Trans-Habitats that grew out of his 2017 maritime expedition (supported by the BMW Art Journey initiative) to seven coral ecosystems in varying states of growth and decay—including White Island, New Zealand; Cocos Keeling, Indian Ocean; and Zighy Bay, Oman. Each reef biotope he visited suffered from a form of human interference followed by either efforts at damage control or total neglect. Hooper Schneider buried empty vitrines at two of the reef sites, leaving them to transform organically into “Trans-Habitats, co-created by artist, reef, and other natural and human participants in the process.”

Continuing this narrative, Hooper Schneider’s Hammer Projects exhibition explores “climax communities,” which represent “the final stage of succession, remaining relatively unchanged until destroyed by a disaster or event caused by humans or other destructive forces, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, or large perturbations in the atmosphere,” inevitably leading to another precondition of succession. The artist argues that nature, in this exact way, exists in an ongoing state of climax and molecular flux. Circling back to his scavenging rituals, he has transmuted objects and materials that he has amassed over the years—burning, chopping, combining, and solidifying in a layer of marine epoxy and primordial ooze—into a landfill cascading into a reservoir of yet more stuff. It’s at once horrifying and intoxicating, seductive and foreboding.

Baby dolls, plastic fruit, bullet shells, shopping carts, chains, air plants, a dollhouse, a suitcase, a pay phone, freeze-dried food, cables, car parts, wire hangers, plastic vines, a life-size plastic alligator, and more were combined into islands of debris, mini dumps within an archipelago, and baked in the New Mexico sun. Hybrid creatures—part human, part marine organism—reside within the cacophony, the sole survivors and inheritors of this new world. Like a walk-in diorama, the gallery becomes one of Hooper Schneider’s Trans-Habitats, where visitors experience a biosphere of a seemingly inevitable future. Every aspect of the installation is deliberate and considered, including the lighting, which replicates the sun’s transit, and the audio, an original soundtrack recorded with marine invertebrates and electric fish and produced in collaboration with the musician Jorge Elbrecht. With this immersive installation, Hooper Schneider provides a glimpse into his weird and wonderful mind, letting us see how he engages with the world and its inhabitants.

—Ali Subotnick

Link: Max Hooper Schneider at Hammer Museum

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