Artist Nina Katchadourian Creates Flemish Style Self-Portraits in Airplane Lavatory

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The work of artist Nina Katchadouri­an is high­ly acces­si­ble. So much so that it’s like­ly her fault if the line for the bath­room on your next flight stretch­es all the way from tail to the cock­pit. Such is the pow­er of Lava­to­ry Self-por­traits in the Flem­ish Style, the best known seg­ment of her ongo­ing Seat Assign­ment project. How can pas­sen­gers pass up the oppor­tu­ni­ty to recre­ate Katchadouri­an’s wide­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed images, know­ing that the orig­i­nals were shot in the mir­ror on an iPhone, using props like dis­pos­able seat cov­ers and an inflat­able neck pil­low?

more flemish
There goes the Mile High Club.

Shy and/or civic-mind­ed types who don’t rel­ish the impli­ca­tions of tying up the john­ny at high alti­tudes should have a go at restag­ing the oth­er aspects to Katchadouri­an’s inflight work, on dis­play above.

(Hint: book a win­dow seat and exer­cise restraint when the fight atten­dant hands you your com­pli­men­ta­ry bag of mini pret­zels.)

Hon­est­ly, much of what you’ll see, from the unnerv­ing­ly named Dis­as­ters to the genius of Sweater Goril­las, can be accom­plished with­out leav­ing the ground. Though it may prove more cre­ative­ly reward­ing to delay until the only palat­able alter­na­tive is an unreg­u­lat­ed amount of real­i­ty TV screen­ing on the seat back ahead of you.

Ayun Hal­l­i­day has an inflight Peanut for you. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday


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Comments (4)
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  • tara june winch says:

    I just wast­ed 12 min­utes of my life — I real­ly thought this was ama­teur and not at all cre­ative. All else from open cul­ture is great, usu­al­ly.

  • Dan says:

    I agree Tara.

  • Deidre Flavin says:

    Oh, please Tara! Art being ama­teur… what does it take to think, to cre­ate and/or to be crit­i­cal about anoth­er per­son­’s work? Wast­ing 12 min­utes of your life, real­ly? A sit­com runs a full 1/2 hour and I am sure though you sound real­ly high falutin’ you have watched a few of those in your life. I think that this work is real­ly fresh and fun­ny and inten­tion­al­ly off the cuff and new brow. If you actu­al­ly spent a few min­utes get­ting your ire up enough to write your crit­i­cal blurb to these works, then you, my friend, have not wast­ed a sin­gle minute. Oh, btw, light­en up a lit­tle.

  • Karl says:

    I think you need to be an expe­ri­enced artist to be able to ‘seize the moment’ like Ms. Khatch­adouri­an did here… I take these pieces of hers as an ode to cre­ativ­i­ty; to that obses­sion to always want­i­ng to cre­ate: even when you are far away removed from your stu­dio, your favorite cam­era, and even your usu­al sur­round­ings. But you are a human, you still make obser­va­tions, and so you cre­ate no mat­ter where you are! Those land­scapes are awe­some and the self por­traits rep­re­sent the nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion of a project like this one: high dutch art :)

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