Hasta La Ideas

Haunted houses and crime scene dioramas in a morbidly fascinating photographer’s work

Photographer Corinne May Botz’ imagery teases out the human relationship with the supernatural. In her latest show at the Kennedy Museum of Art, photos from Botz’s “Haunted Houses” series are on display as part of the collection “Shadows and Phenomena”. Shot over several years, Botz paired her photographs of “haunted house” interiors across the United States with a series of contemporary first-hand ghost stories.

The enchanting stills, inspired by turn-of-the-century spirit photographs and Victorian ghost stories, speak to the dystopian and sometimes romantic tales of discontent told by women long dead. Botz sees herself as a medium in the haunted environments, tapping her female sensitivity to the supernatural to capture eerie moments in time in hopes of unleashing the invisible nuances present there. Spiritually unfathomable and complex to some, those with curious imaginations or a touch of morbidity will find it compelling.

Another of Botz’ fantastically dark projects continuing the themes of macabre and female experiences is documented in her 2004 book “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death”. The monograph is a series of photographs of miniature crime scene dioramas built by honorary police captain Frances Glesner Lee. Lee, a wealthy divorcee, discovered the power of independence late in life when she dedicated herself to enhancing the field of murder investigation, constructing extremely detailed (down to grains of sugar on the floor) models of crime scenes to train detectives how to look for and follow clues.

“Shadows and Phenomena” runs through 19 June 2011, but if you can’t make it to Ohio the Haunted Houses book sells from Amazon, and be sure to check out more images from the Nutshell series in the gallery below.

Mysticism and skeletons collide in a Reykjavik designer and illustrator’s work

For a slightly more sinister take on tribalism, Icelandic renaissance woman Harpa Einarsdottir (better known by her valiant design pseudonym Ziska Zun) is a wildly imaginative illustrator, stylist, fashion designer, multimedia artist and farmer. While her mediums vary, her cosmic style fascinatingly blends the Day of the Dead icon, La Calavera Catrina, and elements of a warrior princess.

Ziska describes her recent solo exhibition “Skulls & Halos“—a darkly psychedelic display of illustrations and painted bones—as “all about our endless inner fight between right and wrong. We all carry some old skeletons in our closet and some get too heavy, it’s my way to find inner balance and say farewell to the past, make peace with myself and carry on in my way to become a better person.”

The tension between her more macabre impulses and her manipulation of them makes for enigmatic depictions that speak to her theatricality and rich fantasy life. Putting the experience from her former fashion line Starkillers to use, Ziska spent the past four years designing costumes and characters for the online role-playing game World of Darkness and films, also finding time to freelance as a stylist for magazine photo shoots. She explains “It’s good to be able to have variety in creation and do different projects, it’s a freedom that I want to hold on to as best as I can.”

When asked where she sees herself in five years, Ziska tells us she tries “not to think about that too much, life goes in mysterious ways, I just want to have fun and be good one week at a time.”

Photos by Craig Thomas