Bloody Mary Mirror

$1,100.00 Sold Out

This full length mirror will be available at this weekend’s @odditiesfleamarket & in my Bigcartel at 10 am PST this Saturday along with the rest of this collection. I chose this large vintage mirror for its evil Disney villain/coffinesque qualities. It has some nice ghosting to the glass & I’ve hand painted the frame with a dark stain. The hands are painted and sealed in oil/clear enamel. I pulled some long bloody oneshot lines all the way down the mirror on each side. For those who are interested in this mirror, it’s available for local pick up or drop off only due to size, fragility & weight.
The folklore of bloody Mary consists of an apparition that could be perceived as benevolent or evil and in the form of a witch, corpse or ghost. Repeating her name anywhere from 13 times could conjure her up in a dimly lit room as you stare into a mirror. We did this as children and always saw something as I’m sure many of you did, too. My mom used to say, “don’t stare in the mirror too long or you’ll go crazy”. The scientific explanation for why we see things in the dark is especially interesting. There is something called the Troxler effect. When you stare at the same object for a prolonged period of time, there comes a point when your brain adapts or acclimates to the unchanging stimuli. The neurons cancel information out rendering our perception as blurry, distorted, monstrous, or even demonic until you change focus or blink. Another explanation is the “strange-face illusion” explained by Italian scientist Giovanni Caputo. It’s thought to be a consequence of a "dissociative identity effect" which causes the brain's facial-recognition system to misfire in a currently unidentified way. His experiment had 50 participants stare into a mirror for 10 minutes in a dimly lit room. The results: 66% reported huge deformations of their face, 18% reported a parent’s face with change in traits, 28% perceived a different person, 28% saw an archetypal face, 18% saw an animal face, 48% reported fantastical and monstrous beings. Try it out for yourself at my booth this weekend and capture a photo of the beast within you.