A young mother with red lips, porcelain skin and big, bright eyes gazes into the distance. Seated on her lap, the sweet face of a blonde child has been re-printed several times and folded into a complex origami pattern by London-based artist Alma Haser. At first glance, the image is monstrous, as the repetition of eyes and lips mesh together in a Frankenstein-like composition.
The photographs in “Cosmic Surgery” simultaneously repulse and intrigue, and the viewer soon finds himself in a contemplative mode, musing over the works’ details and overall structures, very much in the same way Haser enters a meditative state when folding origami and placing and photographing the paper on the original portrait. The final effects in her photographs are more akin to three-dimensional sculpture that to two-dimensional photography.
