Artist Hannah Piper Burns has made an art project around snail slime as a skin care ingredient. In South America there are vast snail farms; their slime is harvested and sent to high end skin care product formulators.
She brings her project Active Ingredients: A Guided Mediation in collaboration with the Bronco Gallery to the Mississippi Street Fair, July 9; PDX Pop Now!, July 23-24; and Converge45, July 31.
You can have one of her pet snails crawl on you while watching videos of skin care ads.
And she wins the copywriting award for the month:
The magic of skincare — both proven and promised — is that we think we want to look different, but really, we want to feel different. Our skin damage betrays our inevitable implication in destruction: of our own bodies, of other living things, of the earth. We want to halt, offset, repair and above all, deny that damage, erase the evidence of our past transgressions as if banging out the dent could somehow un-crash the truck. And, we want to feel good about it. So we are promised radical recipes and revolutionary rituals, fair trade and cruelty-free systems for procuring our precious elixirs, spiritual transcendence as a viable alternative to vanity and self-empowerment through the practice of self-care. What we desire goes beyond beautification. We want absolution.
In this quixotic quest to detoxify, we will stretch the limits of our belief and tie it up in knots. We seek out, eke out and demand the affirmation of nature through our perception of its ability to heal us. That’s what brought us here, that’s why it’s come to this: snail slime. Can there be a more perfect symbol of our perverted quest for purity than industrialized snail slime extraction? We start with the snail, and then we spiral out. Way, way out.
During the tailgates I will be performing as an esthetic technologist and snail handler, offering a multimedia treatment of fresh, organic, locally-sourced and high-vibration snail slime, activated by a proprietary blend of foraged, filtered and concentrated video footage from commercials for high-end face products and dispensed via a unique delivery system. The benefits of this treatment include but are not limited to: enhanced intuitive powers, increased production of collagen and elastin, deep-frequency cell communication, reduced inflammation, stimulated meridians and neutralization of free radicals."
