Horrible Adorables (Edition 2/15) Photograph

Portrait of toy designers Horrible Adorables NeoBrooklyn Park - New New York - 2019 High-resolution image on top-quality paper covered by a 3 mm methacrylate sheet with a dibond back frame, ready to hang. Each copy is numbered and signed on the back by hand. Certificate of Authenticity included. Horrible Adorables is an artistic duo of toy designers from Cleveland also known as Jordan Perme and Christopher Lees. They create incredibly expressive and detailed creatures by meticulously arranging felt scales on hand-crafted sculptures. I had the chance of capturing them in their true form in New York during the Five Points Festival, at the Brooklyn Expo Center. Visiting this festival was fantastic for my experiments, as it allowed me to capture many creative specimens from different corners of North America in one single spot, such as Eric Althin, Camilla d’Errico, Mab Graves or Wizard of Barge. The only problem was the location, which didn’t represent the natural habitat of each portrayed subject. For this portrait, we went out of the building to get some better light, so the background of the original photo were the glass windows of the Expo Center. As this setting didn’t match the fantastical appearance of the creatures devised by this creative duo, I had to find a more appropriate background for this portrait, as I did with Eric Althin. After exploring different options, I finally came across the perfect location in the walls of a park with windows that seemed to be gigantic eyes practically covered by vegetation. To increase the magical atmosphere of this environment, I made it semi-symmetrical. Symmetry has the incredible capacity of generating shapes that look like lifeforms. This is due to the fact that living beings have bilateral symmetry. In this case, a beetle appeared in the middle of the image. This could be considered just a randomly-generated image created by the effect of symmetry. But, as we saw with Peca and Luke Chueh, I believe in synchronicity, which means that everything happens for a reason; we just have to pull the strings to discovery why. This top-down view beetle is a perfect depiction of the scarab hieroglyph widely used in Ancient Egypt. The real meaning of this hieroglyph is quite obscure, as so many traditions, beliefs and rituals from Ancient Egypt, which are practically unknown in present times. The two perfectly divided sides of the scarab body covered by a double shell represent the two hemispheres of the human brain. While the head of the scarab represents the frontal part of the head with the seven elements through which we perceive the external world that is then analyzed by the brain (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and the mouth). Ancient Egyptians associated the two hemispheres of the brain with the divine femenine and the divine masculine. The right hemisphere, which is associated with subconscious thought, was linked with the divine feminine; while the left hemisphere, which is associated with rational thinking, was linked with the divine masculine. The idea of the feminine and masculine sides of the brain still prevails today. While the feminine side is related to creativity, intuition, art, music, feelings and imagination; the masculine side is linked to analysis, logic, mathematics, language, writing and science. The feminine side is believed to give us a more holistic view of the world, while the masculine side is more single-focus oriented, giving us the capacity of concentrating on a specific topic, object or threat. We just have to take a quick look at the amount of time and value we give to each of these fields in our educational system to realize that we live in a heavily masculine dominated society. While rational thinking is rewarded, intuition and critical thinking tend to be penalized in schools. We give our students a heavily specialized education divided into independent subjects without any kind of holistic approach. Instead of teaching our students to think or try to reach conclusions on their own, we instruct them to repeat; we don’t encourage debate. Contradicting the teacher is considered as an act of misconduct, instead of an opportunity to start a dialogue. Think about the evaluation system we use. The teacher explains “facts”, for example: “the pyramids were built by Egyptian slaves as tombs for the pharaons 2500 years before Christ.” Then we evaluate the students by asking them questions such as “When and why were the pyramids built?” expecting them to just repeat these “facts” without any kind of imprecision. The better a student can repeat them, the greater the reward. We encourage repetition while punishing critical thinking or questioning concepts. We lecture our students instead of creating debate. This specialized rational-thinking-based education generates professionals programmed to avoid contradicting the authority, thus perpetuating the accepted convictions without challenging the current belief system; indoctrinating generation after generation of rational thinkers. So we can say we live in a society in which people use only one half of their brain. It’s like trying to see the world with one eye closed. It may sound crazy, but, if we analyze our recent history and our educational system, we can see this claim has a lot of truth. It’s obvious that our current society lacks the most essential femenine values, such as empathy, compassion, and unconditional love, which are considered signs of weakness. We live in an individualistic, competitive and ultra-specialized system in which each professional stays within the boundaries of their field without looking at the bigger picture trying to prove they are better than their pairs instead of collaborating with them. A sane and healthy society should have balance between both sides, being able to use rational thinking but without forgetting intuition, feelings and creativity; caring about your own needs but also having empathy towards others. Only by finding harmony between the masculine and femenine energies we can be complete, opening our mind and connecting both sides of our brain, like a scarab opening its shell to finally start buzzing and flying away. This symbiosis represents the perfect balance between the two energies, that’s why she’s wearing an engagement ring representing union. It’s important to clarify that this has nothing to do with being a woman or a man, we must remember we are talking about divine energies, not about genders. We all have two brain hemispheres, it’s about time we start using them both to be able to see the world as a whole with both eyes open, like the giant forest spirit behind them.

Photography:Digital on Other

Artist Produced Limited Edition of:15

Size:32.5 W x 21.7 H x 0.4 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.