Creatures is a serie created by Iris Gottlieb. Iris is an Illustrator, a doodler, an observer and also, a watermelon eater. Creatures is between a dream and a nightmare. Things are happening but it is really hard to tell exactly what. Using different techniques, Iris manage to create a full community of weird, strange, beautiful creatures.
“I am deeply fascinated by death, decay, and the emotion of disgust. Disgust is a solely human reaction; we are the only creatures that pair instinctual revulsion with cultural values of judgement. For a long time, and still, I explore decay and disgust through drawings, generally in animals, and have found that making elegant and beautiful drawings of roadkill, or bones, or maggots often makes it more approachable and digestible than in its physical form. However, with these collages I have found the opposite effect; I am interested in exploring what elements of our humanness can become so instantaneously repulsive when recontextualized.”
“I am interested in the reactions elicited by taking representations of ourselves (humans) out of a context we are familiar and comfortable with. When parts of the physical form we inhabit are separated and placed closely together en masse or in a disjointed unnatural manner, we become deeply uncomfortable. We become disgusted, disturbed, or intrigued by the bodies that are idealized in media not for their beauty but by their grotesqueness. Collage offers a unique option to reuse the images we are surrounded by. I use only magazines that I find, which gives me a limited set of materials to work from but forces me to use images of the bodies that are sold to us and play off of them in my work. These bodies represent much larger issues of racism, sexism, ablism and sizeism.”
“The meat paintings are an exploration of recontextualizing a process that is generally hidden from public knowledge – that of slaughterhouse meat production. These pieces do not stem from a vegan agenda or an awareness of cruelty in these situations, though awareness of cruelty is incredibly important, but rather our obsession with keeping death hidden and pretending it doesn’t exist. In our death care system, in our meat-industry, and in our day-to-day discussions, death is generally left out of the conversation. I would like that to change.”
” Lastly, the dream drawings. They are little more than illustrations of dreams that I or my friends have had. I love to transpose the images from dream life into real life, it makes them solidify the dream world in a different way and allows me to remember them when I wouldn’t otherwise. “
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