Soft Target
Somebody brought a feather boa to a firefight.
At first glance, the silhouette reads instantly as a hand grenade. Then the threat collapses: the object is made entirely of feathers. The visual bait-and-switch belongs to a long Surrealist tradition of taking a familiar thing and changing one basic expectation. Magritte made ordinary objects behave impossibly; Meret Oppenheim made a fur-covered teacup feel both funny and unnerving; Claes Oldenburg repeatedly turned hard things soft and monumental things ridiculous. Here, visual texture does the heavy lifting. Your eyes almost know what the feathers would feel like before your hands ever could.
FUN FACT
Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 fur-covered teacup became one of Surrealism’s defining objects by making an ordinary household item suddenly tactile and strange.
Available as a museum-quality print.
Request this printRelated works
Sticky Situation
This looks like dessert dressed for a red carpet event and then immediately melted under the pressure.
Too Much Is Never Enough
This looks like a piñata exploded inside a supercomputer.
The Cloud That Missed Its Flight
Some clouds drift majestically across the heavens. This one called an Uber and ended up in a parking lot.