276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Fairytales: Petra Collins and Alexa Demie

£16.25£32.50Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Petra Collins is a multi-talented artist and director whose photography set the stylistic tone for much of the 2010s.

The photos combine elements of camp, prosthetics, and shibari in a surreal update to the imagery of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, and others. Retelling childhood stories, Petra Collins and Alexa Demie play with juxtaposition: dark and light, violence and kindness, delicacy and tension. Fairytales is an erotic folklore collection of Petra Collins and Alexa Demie's illustrated short stories.The photographs, are stunning, magical, and transmit an aura that, for me, would make this book 5 stars. Here, their subversive folk tales are brought to vivid life via handwritten stories the pair worked on together, alongside illustrations by artist Evita Flores and art director Sandra Leko’s gloriously whimsical pastel pink layouts. Artist Petra Collins and actress Alexa Demie create nine erotic stories in a contemporary reimagining of a fairy tale book. Indeed, the interplay of text and images throughout the book has less in common with engravings from a well-thumbed tome of old fairy tales than with something like Madonna’s infamous Fabien Baron–designed, Steven Meisel–lensed publication, Sex. Petra posted a photograph of a fairy, and I wrote to her and said, ‘I want to be a fairy,’ and she was like, ‘Well, let’s make you a fairy,’” Demie says of the origins of their friendship, laughing.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. This collaboration sees Alexa Demie embody empowered femme mythical beings in a world like ours today. I remember a few years ago when I shifted to more surrealist work and someone was like, ‘Why aren’t you doing documentary photos anymore? The photos are gorgeous and the aesthetic sucked me in immediately… an overall let down even though I enjoyed the art.

It explores the femininity and sexuality of mythological beings, but in the context of very human spaces, such as teenage bedrooms, medical facilities, parking lots and exotic dancing clubs.

This trope recurs throughout the book, challenging ideas of empowerment and restriction, symbolic of the patriarchy and our power to repurpose oppressive devices. The darker European folklorists, from Charles Perrault to Hans Christian Andersen, spun stories with little resemblance to the Disney-sanitized versions we grew up on: The queen in Snow White wished to devour the girl’s lungs and liver, for example, and the evil stepsisters in Cinderella cut off their toes with a knife to fit into the glass slipper. Petra and Alexa s chapters of elves, mermaids, sirens, water sprites, fallen angels, fairies, witches, and banshees blend their own stories with retold fairy tales. Each of the nine tales is set in unique spaces, ranging from suburban homes and parking lots to fantastical sets.Collins has created a style that will go down in history as one that people can only hope to try to recreate.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment