Exquisite Corpse

I can't show you what I have been making lately, as it is for the school play...perhaps I can post some production stills later...

But I can post some links to my most current writing. I recently reviewed the book Exquisite Corpse by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss. It is about the connections between surrealism and the Black Dahlia murder. It combines my two interests of art and forensic science. You can read that review in its entirety HERE.

But here is an excerpt, or an amuse bouche if you will :

The authors of Exquisite Corpse, Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, posit an extremely interesting hypothesis: that the murderer of the "Black Dahlia" was inspired by, and intimately involved with, the surrealist art movement. This in and of itself is an extraordinary claim, which unfortunately relies on too many layers of assumptions and suppositions to be held truly credible in anything but the realm of pure theory.

The core of the text makes the basic assumption that the murderer of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. The Black Dahlia,was George Hodel. This information is relied upon as if it were fact in this book, which unfortunately, it is not. There is one major source that proposes Hodel is the Black Dahlia killer, and that is his own son, Steve Hodel. Exquisite Corpse fully hangs its hat on this idea of Hodel being the killer. If this were not the case, their hypothesis would crumble like the walls of Jericho. Once one buys the idea of Hodel as the killer (largely based on the presence of two pictures of a pretty, young unidentified woman in a Hodel family photo album, which Steve Hodel identifies as Elizabeth Short, frankly, I don't see the resemblance), then the connections to the surrealist movement can be made.....