Won by a nose! Picture of a dog poking through blankets is among the Pet Photographer of the Year awards

 

• International Pet Photographer of the Year Awards announced winners at professional and emerging levels
• More than 2,500 portrait entries were submitted in 52 countries and cut down to 12 category winners 
• Overall winner was Veronika Šandorová from Slovakia with a series of portraits of Border Collie dogs 

A photogenic chicken and a travel-weary dog are among the winning snaps of the International Pet Photographer of the Year Awards.

In one image, British photographer Jackie Eke captured a black chicken stood proudly on a wooden podium.

In another image by British photographer Bridget Davey, a small dog could be seen towering over the camera.

The International Pet Photographer of the Year Awards are presented by the Pet Photographers Club and are an annual celebration of the artistry and skill that goes into pet photography.

The competition comprises four categories and two experience levels - professional and emerging.

The judges included British artist Alice Loder, UK based photographer Cat Race, Australian photographer Caitlin J. McColl, Sara Glawe and Craig Turner-Bullock.

'It's been so wonderful to see the pet photography industry growing and thriving, particularly over the last decade,' said the organisers.

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The winning snaps of this year's International Pet Photographer of the Year Awards have been announced. Pictured: This photo of a dog poking its nose through a blanket by Esther Rybczynski from Germany won the Open Photograph of the Year category

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Among the 12 winners recently announced was this portrait of a black chicken standing proudly on a wooden podium by Jackie Eke from England. More than 2,500 portrait entries were submitted in 52 countries

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The overall winner was Veronika Šandorová from Slovakia, with a series of portraits of Border Collie dogs

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In one image of Veronika's, titled 'Floating Over Strawberries', captured a dog as it bounced over a vivid pink field of flowers

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The Pets and Their People Category was won by Kirsty Antunovich from New Zealand with their sunset shot of a dog walker on the beach

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'I quickly realised that I need lots of dogs around me and also I need to cuddle with every dog I meet,' said overall winner Veronika. 'I want to capture the uniqueness of each dog and transfer our love for them into photos'

'We really believe, and we’re sure you do too, that as an industry and a profession, pet photography is coming into its own. 

'We're all in this because we love what we do - and how could we not? We're celebrating the joy that animals bring to the lives of people around the world.'

The 2021 Overall Winner of the International Professional Pet Photographer of the Year category was announced as Slovakian Veronika Sandorová, of Ve Shandor Photography.

In one image of hers, titled 'Floating Over Strawberries', she captured a dog as it bounced over a vivid pink field of flowers.

'I quickly realised that I need lots of dogs around me and also I need to cuddle with every dog I meet,' said Veronika.

'I want to capture the uniqueness of each dog and transfer our love for them into photos.'

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This snap of a travel-weary pooch gazing out the back of a trailer by Daniela Hofmeister from Austria was made a 'Judges Choice' by Craig Tuner-Bullock

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Orthopaedic surgery personal assistant Gina Soule took home the Emerging Pet Photographer of the Year category with this tender moment of mutual respect between horse and rider as the sun was setting in the background

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In an image titled 'The Universe' by American photographer Travis Patenaude, water spun in a universe-like pattern from a ball that was about to be caught by a dog

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The judges included British artist Alice Loder, UK based photographer Cat Race, Australian photographer Caitlin J. McColl, Sara Glawe and Craig Turner-Bullock. Pictured: Judges Choice: Cat Race, photograph by Bridget Davey

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Other categories included the Members Choice award which went to Nikol Koppova from the Czech Republic and his adorable image of friendship between child and dog

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'It's been so wonderful to see the pet photography industry growing and thriving, particularly over the last decade,' said the organisers. Pictured: Judges Choice: Sara Glawe, photograph by Stephanie Barraco from France

The 2021 Overall Winner of the Emerging Pet Photographer of the Year category was American Orthopaedic surgery personal assistant Gina Soule.

In one of her winning images, she caught a tender moment of mutual respect between horse and rider as the sun was setting in the background.

'I like to bring the same attention to detail I bring in the operating room to my photography,' said Gina.

'It ensures that I capture and create special memories for my clients to cherish for a lifetime.'

In an image titled 'The Universe' by American photographer Travis Patenaude, water spun in a universe-like pattern from a ball that was about to be caught by a dog.

Travis, of Stink Eye Photography, was awarded the 2021 Action Photograph of the Year for his eye-popping image.

In another image, titled 'Rupert and his Mum' New Zealand photographer Kirsty Antunovich of Dog & Co Photography perfectly caught the experience of both species walking along the beach together. She won the Pets and Their People Photograph of the Year category.

Other categories included the Members Choice award which went to Nikol Koppova from the Czech Republic and his adorable image of friendship between child and dog.

The Open Photograph of the Year category was won by German photographer Esther Rybczynski of Klicktastic Photography with her image of a dogs nose poking through a knitted red blanket.

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Large New Embroidered Textile Moths and Cicadas by Yumi Okita

 

These oversized moths and insects by Yumi Okita (previously) are constructed with fabric, embroidery thread, fake fur, wire, and feathers. The Raleigh-based artist makes each piece by hand, creating faithful interpretations of actual insects like the Oleander Hawk Moth or the Peacock Butterfly. You can see many of her most recent creations on Etsy.

 

The Dressy Ghosts of Victorian Literature

 Realism was exceptionally well suited (heh) for elaborate descriptions of spectral clothing.

By: Matthew Wills 

Victorian ghosts dressed better than their ancestors. Gone were the traditional white linen, the funeral shrouds, the clanking fetters. In the nineteenth century, according to those purportedly in the know—spiritualists, spirit photographers (yes, they claimed they could photograph ghosts), and, above all, writers of spooky stories—ghosts manifested themselves in the latest fashions.

Scholar Aviva Briefel argues that the Victorian fascination with the immaterial was also very much an obsession with the material commodities that defined the living. It all showed up in the conventions of literary realism, which depended on thick descriptions of the stuff of the material world.

“The complex interactions between intangible spectres [sic] and concrete clothing became a rich site of inquiry in the nineteenth-century ghost story, a genre that was deeply informed by realist conventions despite its supernatural subject matter,” writes Briefel.

For Victorian writers, clothes made the ghost. As in the detective story, what a spirit was wearing was a clue to its identity: ghosts were recognized by their wardrobe. After all, in the words of a fictional character of 1866, a ghost is “hollow, and got no teeth, no bones, no hair… a sort of nothing without innards.”

The Ghost in the Stereoscope via JSTOR

In H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), the protagonist, essentially a ghost, can only manifest himself through costume. He needs, writes Briefel, “things to conceal his vacuity.” Or, as a character in the novel says, “Why! …that’s not a man at all. It’s just empty clothes.”

In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), Jacob Marley’s translucent ghost is only given substance by his “waistcoat, tights, and boots.” When this apparition starts to unwrap the bandages on his head, his jaw simply falls away. He’s literally held together by fabric.

Victorians left very few bits of the body exposed, so it should not surprise that they enjoyed ghost stories in which the “spectre goes after clothes to protect its decency.” A naked ghost could disrupt morals and the conventions of literary realism.

Skeptics and parodists had fun with all this, wondering if clothing itself was ghostly and made by ghost tailors and ghost cobblers. In Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), a ghost returns to kill her own sister to protect her wardrobe.

The Triumphant Tangles of Christina Quarles’s Canvases

In Quarles’s paintings, boundaries dissolve as the artist grinds up the fixed binaries of Black/white or male/female.
Christina Quarles, “Tha Color of Tha Sky (Magic Hour)” (2017), acrylic on canvas (© Christina Quarles; image courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London)


CHICAGO — If there were an equivalent to Mannerism in contemporary painting, Christina Quarles might be the Pontormo of 2021. She elongates, distorts, contorts, and flays the figure. Her paintings show off virtuosity in the way 16th-century Mannerist painters blithely tucked emotion into artifice in exaggerated, twisty, climactic altar pieces.

The Los Angeles artist’s largest show to date, currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, presents 24 paintings in two large rooms, organized thematically with single figure works, then double, then multiple. The work dates from 2017 to 2020.

Installation view, Christina Quarles, MCA Chicago, 2021 (© MCA Chicago; photo by Nathan Keay)

Quarles is queer, cisgender, and light-skinned, with a Black father and white mother. These multi-situated details bear mentioning because the artist says her paintings are specifically about gender and race. In a recent Art News interview, Quarles explained that, “The basis of the work is trying to get at what it is to be in a racialized body, to be in a gendered body, to be in a queer body, really to be in any body and the confusing place that that actually is with knowing yourself.”

If these identifiers are truly in the paintings, they float in coded languages. The paintings feel as if they are ambiguously about painting itself, with the figures serving a supporting role. The bodies are formed with breezy brush marks, patterns, dissolving washes that fill and deteriorate, limbs that don’t always support the formation of actual feet. She implies that we are complex liquid beings who morph according to our surroundings. Boundaries dissolve as Quarles grinds up the fixed binaries of Black/white or male/female and then reconstitutes definitions of wholeness in a flurry of languages. Like a Tower of Babel of mark making, a pattern or texture might hold some associative resonance but translation is never assured.

Quarles, who has an undergraduate philosophy degree in critical race theory from Hampshire College and an MFA from Yale MFA, begins her paintings by spontaneously making marks. Once she sees a direction, she photographs the painting and uses Adobe Illustrator to add planes and patterns that might get printed as stencils. These mechanics are seamless on the canvas.

Each painting is composed of bodies that intimately touch, stretch, or sexually entwine via loose, elongated limbs. The mood is tense and hard to decipher. In “Tha Color of Tha Sky (Magic Hour)” (2017), salmon and purples flirt with yellow and gray gradients, infused with David Hockney light, but the downward momentum of attenuated limbs and drips pulls with weighty materiality, penetrating geometric planes or boundaries. The figures stay faceless, angular, remote: not individuals but disordered forms that coalesce awkwardly with their surroundings, squeezing into the picture plane. In “Peer Amid (Peered Amidst),” (2019), a gooey cubist pile of three bodies torques over a black silhouetted shadow. Compression, strength, and exhaustion tangle in a painterly crescendo of physical gestures. As a viewer, you approach these works by trying to decipher a narrative, but inevitably get sidetracked into oohing and aahing over the way Quarles makes perfect raised lines of acrylic paint (hair), scratches in a wavy pattern, changes the color of a drip halfway down, layers transparencies, whips a simple line into a claw-like hand, contours moon shaped buttocks, and turns breasts into stalactites or gourds. The paintings are best when infused with a bit of playfulness, such as “Change Comin’ Round Tha Bend (Right Round, Right Round)” (2019), with a swirl of bodies anchored by a foreground of childlike daisies.

The back wall of the exhibition is painted bright pink and holds one of the few departures from the demands of the many (too many) paintings. Here a line of small pen drawings at first looks like sketches for future works. But then one sees the precision, the control mirrored in Quarles’ paintings. In the middle of the largest gallery are three 12-foot tall free-standing panels covered with unstretched canvas. Named after the 1974 Pilot song lyric, “Never Believe It’s Not so (Never Believe / It’s Not So)” (2019), the installation lets us physically walk through the work.

Filtered through the past decade of amplified debates about race and gender, Quarles’ work feels like a kind of contemporary Mannerism or a refinement of earlier, more direct identity art. Her figures express the exhaustion and triumph of wrestling ideas about race, privilege, intimacy, and queer identity to the surface. It is a lot to accomplish.

Christina Quarles continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (220 E Chicago Ave, Chicago) through January 16, 2022. The exhibition was curated by Grace Deveney and Jack Schneider.

Christina Quarles, “Peer Amid (Peered Amidst)” (2019), acrylic on canvas (© Christina Quarles; image courtesy the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London)






Christina Quarles, “Change Comin’ Round Tha Bend (Right Round, Right Round)” (2019), acrylic on canvas (© Christina Quarles Courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London)