#cycle 23 superlatives

[surrogacycenters455]

Leading Way in Fertility Solutions: Top Superlative IVF and Surrogacy centres with costs

Choosing the path to parenthood can be a challenging journey for many couples, particularly when facing infertility issues. There are centres, clinics, hospitals in India with advanced technologies, equipped with experts which provides Assisted Reproductive Technology and excellent personalized care by skilled professionals which help couples achieve their dream of having a family through the method of IVF and Surrogacy. Exploring  the leading IVF and surrogacy centers in India is crucial to get the best result of the treatment.

 IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) in India is a popular solution for couples  facing infertility. The process involves the collection of mature eggs from ovaries and are fertilized by sperm in a laboratory. The embryo are than  transferred  in the women’s uterus. One of the latest IVF treatment is Embryoscopy, this time-lapse imaging allows doctor to monitor development of embryo in real time and select most viable one’s for transfer. The technique has turned the success rate of treatment more and helped avoiding multiple pregnancies. The IVF cost in tiruchirappalli typically ranges from ₹1,50,000 - ₹2,50,000 per cycle, which is considerably lower than in many countries.

Surrogacy involves a method of reproduction where a women agrees to carry a pregnancy and give birth as a substitute for the contracted parties who are unable to conceive in natural way. As per the Surrogacy Regulation Act 2021, only a couple who has been married for 5 years can opt for surrogacy  medical grounds. The couples should be married with age-criteria of 23-50 in women and 26-55 in men. The legal agreements, medical procedures and extensive care are included for the process. Surrogacy are of different types- traditional, gestational or commercial surrogacy. The surrogacy cost in tiruchirappalli  generally ranges from ₹10,00,000 - ₹20,00,000 depending on the clinic, surrogate compensation and additional medical expenses. 

Best IVF & Surrogacy centres  

Some of the best IVF centres in tiruchirappalli and surrogacy centres with their high success rates, advancement in treatment and skilled medical staffs are –

IVF Centres and their cost

1. Nova IVF Fertility, Mumbai

Offers fertility treatments such as IVF, IUI, ICSI, surrogacy.

IVF Cost around ₹1,30,000 per cycle.

 2. Bloom IVF Clinic, Mumbai

It  offers various fertility treatments.

IVF Cost  around ₹1,50,000 - ₹2,00,000 per cycle.

3. Max Hospital, New Delhi

The hospital offers customized IVF treatments.

IVF Cost approximately ₹1,50,000 - ₹2,50,000 per cycle.

Surrogacy Centres and its costs

1. SCI IVF Centre, Delhi

Centre known for specialization in Surrogacy with high success rates and considered as best surrogacy centre in tiruchirappalli  .

Cost of surrogacy is approximately ₹10,00,000 - ₹15,00,000

2. Akanksha Hospital and Research Institute, Anand

The centre includes advanced fertility treatments and Surrogacy.

Surrogacy cost is around ₹10,00,000 - ₹12,00,000.

3. Dr. Rita Bakshi International Fertility Centre, Delhi

Offers services such as Surrogacy and fertility treatments.

Surrogacy cost around ₹10,00,000 - ₹15,00,000

Clinically proven IVF has more success rate compared to surrogacy . whereas some couples may need three or more cycles  of IVF to conceive. And in the couples who are older than 30 years surrogacy can increase the chances of baby by 30%. IVF usually  has some of its side effects, which  may be concurrent associated with successful signs like - fatigue, increased appetite, loss of appetite, nausea, bloating, sore breasts, bleeding, headaches. Surrogacy as well has some medical risk such as nausea, heartburn, weight gain, swelling and back pain, as well as more serious but rare  problems like hypertension and loss of  reproductive organs depending on person to person.

Doctor information :- 

1.Dr Rati rabra  :- MBBS, DGO, DIPLOMA IN USG and Color Doppler, FMAS, FELLOWSHIP IN INFERTILITY (IVF), MASTERS IN COSMETIC GYNECOLOGY, COSMETIC GYNECOLOGY

2. Dr P Mohana Veera Prakashini  :-MBBS, DNB in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Bangalore. Fellowship in Radiology, Fellowship in Infertility treatment, Senior Resident at St. John’s Hospital, Consultant(OBG) at Apollo Cradle, Consultant (OBG) at Aishwarya Infertility Hospital, IVF Consultant - Ayushman Hospital ( Presently )

Contact Us :- 

Address:-  H. No. 133, Room No. 208, behind BSES Rajdhani Power Station, Katwaria Sarai, Delhi 110016

Phone No. :- 8448879134

Loctaion :- https://maps.app.goo.gl/3HKaHUvLAeT2aBfQ9

[antmrankings]

The Girl Who Everyone Forgot - Justine

I’m giving this award to Justine sort of by default, because all of the big and memorable personalities were eliminated one-by-one each week, with the forgettable girls making all the way to the end (making them memorable by default). Justine was in no way forgettable, because her look immediately caught the attention of just about every viewer and it’s hard to forget a girl that fainted in a challenge and had to be taken to the hospital. However, since this cycle essentially forced everyone to be memorable, she got here simply by being the first one eliminated.

[veridium]

I am in the baby stages of unpacking my communication burnout in therapy. It’s a problem I have that has, unsurprisingly, grown more apparent this year. Though it feels recent it has deep roots throughout the whole of my life. If we are talking tropes and categories of people, I would likely fit in the “listening confidant” and “crisis friend” types. When I was a kid I had few close friendships but most everyone in my grade came to me, for one reason or another, for advice or someone to talk through a problem. You can imagine just how profound those problems were for 7-11 year-old children. Nevertheless, because I always felt lonely and left out, I took advantage of these exchanges in order to feel belonging. I vested the majority of my self-worth into these transactional, mostly non-reciprocal bonds. 

That continued into high school when friendships become more mature, heavier, and complex. I had a close circle of 2-4 friends and then a wide swath of good friends who I shared wonderful times with but otherwise drifted from after we all grew up. Yet in all of my friendships, regardless of closeness, I was the person to whom others confided. Hell, even my elementary school principle announced to a room full of kids, parents, and families during an end-of-the-year celebration that I was the kid who knew everyone’s secrets. Try that on for a school superlative. 

I cannot even tell you all of the bizarrely intimate details I’ve known and learned about people who I can no longer remember their last name or the color of their eyes. I cannot count all the times I’ve been thrown into a situation where someone bore their soul, or were in crisis and in need of a witness/someone to cry to, and I was just there. Sometimes I wonder if I have either the best luck, or the worst, or if it’s a purely coincidental thing. All I know is I have picked more people off the floor than I would have wished to, and I have helped people through some of the darkest kinds of troubles I would never wish on my worst enemy. 

Nowadays I am having to talk with a lot of people for a lot of reasons. Work, activism, personal struggles. Most of the time I enjoy it, and the exhaustion never comes from one specific person or conversation. It’s the cumulative that gets me. It’s the waiting to be asked, because I will be asked. It’s remembering to follow-up. It’s being easily “bored” when the truth is I just don’t have the energy to spare. It’s wanting so badly to be “that person” for many people that you just go full-throttle until you’re at your hard limit. 

I do not say any of this with vanity. I don’t say it with smugness. I say it with humility, because now at the ripe old age of 23 (ha-ha), I am realizing more and more that my devotion has left me largely unable to set real, consistent boundaries. I am so innately hungry to be needed, to be looked up to, to provide care for people, that I now have to consciously re-learn what it means to say “no,” “not now,” and “I can’t help you.” It sucks. It really, really sucks. When you are someone who feels deeply, whether you wish to or not, it feels impossible to turn away a matter or a person. Even if you do, you still feel what they are going through. So you think, why shouldn’t I help, if it is effecting me this way? Your feelings become a compulsion. 

Then, if you’re like me, and you are traumatized? Pfft. Your penchant for being there becomes entwined with a trauma response. You feel both doomed and superhuman. No matter what, though, it is hell to defy. 

I won’t say it has all stayed the same with no new, good things. I have friends in my life who listen to me when I need it, and I am much more assertive in that regard. I vent more often rather than bottling it up because I think it’s “unreasonable” or “irrational.” I journal. I reach out to people for reasons outside needs and they do so, too. There are a lot of aspects of my social life and kinships that have improved, started with healthier foundations, and been able to sustain boundaries. Not all, but a lot. And the ones I have lost, especially in this year, I lost because I finally accepted that I couldn’t fix everything or change myself to fit a role that was no longer being appreciated/understood. 

My empathy and care are not problems I want fixed. I don’t want to stop being a person people go to for advice or compassion. I want to do that for the rest of my life because I see it as some of the most critical actions someone can do. That being said, if I want that to survive and not burn out in a blaze of glory, I have to learn to protect myself. I have to learn vulnerability. I have to practice it instead of just expecting it. And, likely the worst and most painful part for me: I have to know when it is time for me to let go of someone, or something, and admit that there’s nothing more for me to do or say.

I have to reckon with the truth, that my choice as a child also left me feeling incredibly hurt and exploited by friends, misunderstood by most everyone around me, and just as lonely as I was before. Loneliness doesn’t go away with even the most profound distractions if you’re not really allowing yourself to be known or your needs fulfilled. It is a much more tenacious and unforgiving beast, requiring a particular kind of healing. A particular kind of honesty. 

Sometimes -- like now -- I fear I’ll never stop this cycle I have created. I fear I won’t ever want to stop, that I won’t ever be able to stop letting myself be used. But I have to hope. I have to try. Otherwise my fear will be certain. And if it is one thing I have always done, it is tested my fears. 

[art-now-argentina]

HUNT #23 one, Daniel Romano

www.danielromano.com.ar For HUNT project. Surfaces games Federico Baeza, Art curator. Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922. Figures dimly emerge from mist, a barely colored whiteness, so thick that it only allows us to recognize the presence of subtly outlined bodies on a background without horizons or apparent landforms. Insinuated silhouettes, elusive lines and tones. Surrounded by this dense atmosphere, we are examined by the frontal and symmetric presence of deer heads that overlap with these vaguely outlined human anatomies. The grimace on these heads shows an impending threat; something is stalking them. As in TV documentaries about wild life in dense woods, arid steppes or green plains, the face of the deer seems to be frozen in the exact moment it detects the hunter. Its head turns violently, upright ears point at danger, its minute, dark and blank eyes sense us. On the surface of the painting, in this evening clarity suspended in time, the eyes of the deer are cracks, notches of unsaturated colors. In the room you are going through, figures appear to be looking for each other; they observe and suspect each other; they are on guard. Alone, or in pairs, they look at each other. You may think that the face of the deer is a mask, and that the hunter´s imagination has imprinted that deer's mask as a code for what he considers his prey. At the end of the 1950s, Erving Goffman recalls that the original meaning of the word person is mask. The father of microsociology found this etymological origin very useful: in the little scenes of our relationships, in our wishes, in our hunting targets, we create roles, masquerades, surfaces games that we use to decode the enigma that the other represents and, at the same time, to create an image of ourselves. In the clarity of the pictorial surface you are observing, the outline of the hunter does not appear. Maybe his territory is not permanent; this predator can be a floating place, some sort of mist that impregnates all the space in the room. A blurred hunter within the environment. These bodies can be predators and prey at the same time when they look at each other alternately. This is a game of reflections and transparencies, a land of attempts, between actions and predictions, steps forward and setbacks. In the series Hunt, Daniel Romano wonders once again about a situation that has been keeping him awake for some time: the perimeter of our interpersonal relationships, the invisible threads that coordinate calculations and tactics within the winding limit of our closest bonds. Within these personal politics, there are surfaces games, mirrors where we, and the others, create a profile. Masks, skins, cuticles, arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling. In the image, in the painting, wishing appears. It is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts. Federico Baeza (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1978) He is researcher, critic and teacher specializing in contemporary art. He graduated in arts and history and art theory at the Faculty of philosophy and letters by the University of Buenos Aires. He received doctoral scholarships awarded by the University of Buenos Aires and CONICET. It has developed research in the Centre for studies and documentation of the MACBA (Barcelona) around the heritage of the institution on Argentinian conceptual artists. More recently, he works in the field of arts management developing curatorships as the project of a retrospective of Argentine artists of the last ten years to cycles of talks scheduled from the area of University extension of IUNA and OSDE Foundation. It is currently director of extension and institutional linkage, Adjunct Professor of undergraduate and graduate in the area of criticism of Arts IUNA. He is co-author of three books on Visual and performing arts, publishes articles on contemporary art in journals, write catalogues of artists and regularly participates in conferences and other national and international meetings for a decade. It develops research and scripts for Encuentro channel about contemporary art.

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-HUNT-23-one/168670/3414836/view

[lincolncollection]

Abraham Lincoln on the Silver Screen

During the first decades of the 20th century, Americans were enchanted by the glamour of the silver screen.  The story of Abraham Lincoln—the pioneer youth, the self-made man, the embattled president, the savior of the Union, the Great Emancipator—seemed the perfect subject for the new medium, the “movies.”

One of the earliest and possibly most ambitious projects was conceived by Benjamin Chapin, a well-known Lincoln impersonator and a believer in the potential of motion pictures to present the 16th president’s story to the widest audience. He envisioned a “Lincoln Cycle” of films that would trace Lincoln’s life from birth to death. Between 1913 and 1917, Chapin wrote, directed, produced, and starred in eleven half-hour films, the first five of which he released himself in 1915 and 1917.

The films were a critical and commercial success, and Chapin was able to contract with Paramount Pictures for national distribution of ten of the films as a “series” under the title The Son of Democracy, which told Lincoln’s story through the early years of his presidency.

Paramount distributed advertising posters like these for the series.

Chapin intended to complete a “Lincoln Cycle” that would be comprehensive and inspirational for future generations of Americans. But he died of tuberculosis in June 1918 at the age of 45. Despite the efforts of his sister, Lucile Ann Chapin, to distribute the films, Chapin’s work was largely forgotten.

In August 1923, Wid’s Weekly, a Hollywood film magazine, announced “a great international event”—the release of the Rockett-Lincoln Film Company’s “The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln,” a title that was later shortened to simply “Abraham Lincoln.” The magazine devoted its cover and 23 pages to the film. It was, according to the publicity, “A pictorial record of the life and events of Abraham Lincoln from log cabin to White House….A burning drama of the most amazing career in history.”

The film was made by Al and Ray Rockett, both in their early 30s, who said their goal was to “make Lincoln the inspiration to others that he always has been, and always will be, to us.” It starred neophyte actor George A. Billings. Billings was cast largely because he bore a striking resemblance to Lincoln, as this publicity poster purports to show. (The answer to the question “Which is Lincoln?” is “neither”—both photographs are Billings.)  The movie won the Photoplay Medal of Honor for 1924, the most prestigious American film award of its time.

D.W. Griffith Productions released its own film titled “Abraham Lincoln” in 1930. Directed by Griffith and starring William Huston, the “talkie” received positive reviews—Variety called it “a startlingly superlative accomplishment,” the New York Times found it to be “quite a worthy pictorial offering,” and the New Yorker’s reviewer wrote that it was “a pretty high-grade picture.”

Several different publicity posters featuring scenes from the movie were distributed.

Despite the reviews and publicity, however, Griffith’s “Abraham Lincoln” was not a huge box office success.

The last Lincoln film of the silver screen’s early decades was “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” released by RKO Pictures in 1940 and starring Raymond Massey. Massey had starred in the Broadway production of Robert E. Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning stage version and was a natural to repeat his role on the screen. Newspaper advertisements for the movie were enthusiastic, to say the least: The film was “A thousand action-packed dramas rolled into one!...a mighty motion picture, so big, so true, so tender, so violent…so emotionally great it defies description.”

Prints like this one of scenes from the movie were available for $1.50.  

Given its pedigree, its star (who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor), and its publicity, the movie should have been a blockbuster, but it was not. With a loss of $740,000, “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” one of RKO's biggest financial disasters.

[dawnajaynes32]

A Life in Relief

 A Life in Relief

By Tom Wachunas

   “…Disjointed scenes of a life lived in nighttime dreams. Memory holders of what? Wood, ink, paper – stuff of another age. Like me. Not perfect. Film noir. Cuz I never dreamed in Technicolor. Poetry, not prose. My biography.”  - from William Bogdan’s Artist Statement

   “Art teaches nothing except the significance of life.” – Henry Miller

   EXHIBIT: Xylographic – Biographic, woodcut prints by William Bogdan / THROUGH JULY 15, 2017, at The Little Art Gallery / located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton, Ohio / 330.499.7356 /  www.northcantonlibrary.org

   After only a few seconds and footsteps into The Little Art Gallery’s opening reception for William Bogdan’s solo exhibit, I was floored. I hadn’t greeted anyone yet, hadn’t even looked closely at a single piece. But I saw immediately something wholly fresh and arresting about the space.

    The walls are a spectacle of black and white starkness, at once startling and inviting. The sheer uniformity of Bogdan’s presentation – each piece matted in white and set in a simple, elegant black frame – is spot-on. And curator Elizabeth Blakemore has done a superlative job in sensitively spacing the works with a keen attention to not only their variable subject matter (including landscape, architectural, and figural content), but also in setting up a variety of visual rhythms that can keep your eye engaged and moving throughout the gallery. We would expect nothing less from a show that featured electrifying works with a strong color dynamic. But interestingly enough, while there is no such dynamic here to excite our senses, the room still pulses with a strong heartbeat.

            Could you describe your world without actual color? Could you envision a lifetime of experiences engraved into your memory as a panorama of only black lines and shapes, all intertwined against the white sky of existence? To put it another way, can you see your past simply as symbolic black marks on paper?  In his artist statement, Mr. Bogdan likens this collection of his woodcut prints, made over the last seven years, to “…photo snapshots kept in an album…keepsakes that preserve a moment in time, but with a story before and aft that is meaningful to me.” Bogdan’s personal story is the ‘Biographic’ (or more accurately, autobiographic) component of this exhibit. 

   So, “photo snapshots kept in an album”? While there’s a certain intimacy to the idea of flipping through a photo album to fondly remember the past, I think this exhibit is more akin to reading pages, indeed chapters from a book you can’t put down. A book of remembered people, places, and sensations, of moments poignant and mysterious, or painful or comforting or…  Books. Remember those? Organizations of white papers inscribed with marks made from ink. You’ll notice one of those here, “Bill’s Hill,” made in 2010, visible in one of the gallery’s glass showcases. 

     Then there’s Bogdan’s ‘Xylographic’ component. We don’t hear the word xylography too much these days in reference to the printmaking process of making woodcut images. It’s from the Greek ξύλο (xylo), for wood, and γραφή  (graphé), for writing. The English term arrived in 1816, translated from the French, recalling the Japanese and Chinese techniques (from the 8th and 9thcenturies) of carving text or patterns in relief on a wooden block, which were then inked for applying to paper. Wood-block printing as a fine art form emerged in Europe during the 14th century, and the process would ultimately inspire Gutenberg’s method of printing from movable type in 1439. Voila, books.

   I offer this nutshell history if only as a kind of lyrical appreciation of Bogdan’s methodology. Sourcing a technique originated in the very distant past – making a connection to time-honored art history - the act of carving away at a piece of wood (itself a holder of history) to make a picture can in many ways be seen as a poetic metaphor for cutting through the present to reveal, or uncover something of the past. To remember is to actively make the past present. Right now. At any point in time, what is our right -now if not an accumulation of assimilated back-whens?

   Look at the haunting way Bogdan takes us to a back-when in his piece called “4”, depicting the legendary New York Yankee, Lou Gehrig (who wore number 4), showing us his heartrending gratitude and mortality. In another back-when, “The Picture on the Gallery Wall,” a few folks appear oblivious to Bogdan’s art on the wall, as if imprisoned and isolated by their own passivity. And here we are in our right-now, looking at a picture of them not looking at a picture. Intriguing.

   Bogdan’s representational drawing (or should I say cutting?) style can vary from the relatively tight and crisp, to the loose and spontaneous, sometimes giving way to amorphous passages of generalized or abstract markings amid spatial ambiguities – a tentative yet fascinating conflation of the primitive and the refined. For example, the bright, crisp clarity of detail that we see in such pieces as “1604” has the marvelous effect of beckoning from a distance as you enter the gallery, calling you to perhaps to frolic with the children in the front yard of the house with the 1604 address. On the other hand, the skewed perspective and dramatic figure-ground contrasts in “Man, Bed, Cat” might make you wonder who is dreaming here – the sleeping man, the cat, or that ghostly figure off to the right side, floating in a white void?

   In the 20 works exhibited, there are only two occurrences of color. Miniscule as they are, they function as exclamatory punctuation marks within their respective narratives. In “Simon 23, 26” (a reference to the gospel of Luke, 23: 26, wherein Simon of Cyrene briefly carried the cross for Jesus), one of Simon’s fingertips is covered in blood. That splotch of red is echoed by a red fingerprint at the bottom of the image – a deeply loaded signature, to be sure. There’s a religiosity, too, about “The Orange Chair,” though I’m not convinced that the inclusion of the bright orange stickers – one a circle (eternal cycle of life?), the other a triangle (Holy Trinity?) – are successfully integrated with the intricate imagery. Like a storyboard for a time-lapse film, seven continuous panels comprise a sequential view of a house interior showing the woman who lived and died there, her favorite chair empty and dotted orange, and in the last panel, a young girl standing in a doorway, the orange triangle hovering above her.

   Despite my reservations about the indelicacy of its orange intrusions, the piece is nonetheless exemplary of Bogdan’s capacity for conveying an uncanny, fragile harmony between timidity and fearlessness. His visceral images feel searched out and sifted through,  often as if quickly excavated and recorded before they can fall back into the dusty piles of more peripheral memories. To varying degrees, each one suggests an illustrated transition from the scenic to the psychic, the physical to the spiritual. Bogdan’s Book. He draws like a writer.

   PHOTOS, from top: 4 /  The Picture on the Gallery Wall / 1604 / Simon 23,26 / Man, Bed, Cat / detail from The Orange Chair  / The doe lay dead in a field of asters

A Life in Relief syndicated post

[antmrankings]

The Girl Who Was Eliminated Too Early - Paige

I think we all knew exactly who this award was going to. I never would have thought it before the cycle started, but Paige wound up stealing my heart more and more as each episode went along. She’s such a genuinely kind person, and on top that she had some pretty good modeling abilities to back up her spot in the competition. It seemed like she had everything the judges were looking for in a winner for this cycle...and then they just dropped her for arbitrary reasons. I can understand her not winning, since Rita and Drew seemed fixated on India as the winner from the very beginning, but they couldn’t at least throw Paige a bone and keep her until the top 4 or the finale? Hell, even Law admitted in his exit interview with her that the panel may have made a mistake in eliminating Paige when they did.

[antmrankings]

Special Award: The Girl Who Did Not Belong On Reality TV - CoryAnne

CoryAnne was such a strange character to me. By all means, she should have been the least entertaining person in the cast, because nothing about her personality was made for reality TV, but somehow she wound up becoming one of the most entertaining personalities in the cast? She’s so boring, yet somehow so charming about it and I don’t quite understand how it works. She is completely unrelatable, because she has a supermodel mother (which she never let us forget) and apparently was cute enough to just have things handed to her in LA (by her own admission). That right there should have been enough to make me roll my eyes any time she came on screen, but I wound up instead looking forward to CoryAnne’s unrelatable “my life is so perfect” segments as comedy. She also had an intense emotional segment about wanting to go home, because...wait for it...she was missing a Drake concert. Yes, that’s all. A Drake concert. She’s so out of touch, and it’s absolutely hilarious. I wonder if she watched herself and realized just how much her personality does not match a reality TV contestant.

[antmrankings]

The Girl With The Worst Makeover - India

Thankfully, there were no tragic makeovers in this cycle. They really only ranged from unnecessary to amazing, and I found India’s makeover to be on the unnecessary end. She didn’t need a makeover to begin with, because her original look was amazing, but I understand that this is reality tv and they had to do something. I just feel like India’s run on the show became all about her hair. Her hair took over and became her brand...but it wasn’t even her choice, so is it really her brand? It was clearly intended to make her stand out as it was obvious Rita wanted her as the winner from the beginning, and I just wish she had been able to compete without her hair defining her run on the show.

[antmrankings]

The Girl Who Was Problematic - Marissa

Marissa has to be one of the most annoying ANTM characters I’ve seen in a long time...which is saying a lot. It’s just so frustrating, because I wanted to love her, but her personality was so ugly. She did nothing but complain about the other girls and the competition all day, but also lashed out whenever someone else dared to complain about something. Her relationship with Kyle (if you could even call it that), though probably real, wound up coming off hella one-sided. Plus, she didn’t even manage to stay professional on set. She lashed out at freaking Stacey McKenzie, who seems to be probably the most genuinely sweet coach this show has ever had, and threw tantrums while on set with clients. It’s people like Marissa that give our generation such a bad reputation (though I think she technically falls into the generation after me).

[antmrankings]

The Girl Who Rita Did Dirty - Krislian

There’s debate over whether Krislian’s elimination was about her modeling abilities, like the panel claimed, or whether it had more to do with a longstanding vendetta with Rita. Krislian’s publicized involvement with Calvin Harris after he and Rita broke up meant that the two had at least known of each other before the show, even if not directly. This definitely puts Rita’s judgment in question when it comes to Krislian, and possibly even adds new meaning to Rita’s outburst when she wanted Krislian gone and the rest of the panel didn’t. I wasn’t a major fan of Krislian on the show, but I feel that her elimination was the first real indication that the panel didn’t know what they were looking for in a winner. She fit their early indications of what they wanted, but as the weeks went on it seemed that their justifications for elimination contradicted previous weeks. Overall, I say Krislian was done the most dirty because it seemed Rita was holding a grudge against her all cycle.

[antmrankings]

The Girl Who Most Improved - Cody

I chose Cody for this award because she went from the girl who was always in the shadow of her sister in my eyes, for modeling, to a very strong standalone contender. When the cycle started, Tash was definitely the stronger of the two in photos and they were on pretty equal footing with their runway walks. As the cycle progressed, and especially after her sister’s elimination, there was a notable spike in her photos. She became one of the top contenders and began to stand on her own as a model, rather than being a package deal with her sister.

[art-now-argentina]

HUNT #23 one, Daniel Romano

www.danielromano.com.ar For HUNT project. Surfaces games Federico Baeza, Art curator. Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922. Figures dimly emerge from mist, a barely colored whiteness, so thick that it only allows us to recognize the presence of subtly outlined bodies on a background without horizons or apparent landforms. Insinuated silhouettes, elusive lines and tones. Surrounded by this dense atmosphere, we are examined by the frontal and symmetric presence of deer heads that overlap with these vaguely outlined human anatomies. The grimace on these heads shows an impending threat; something is stalking them. As in TV documentaries about wild life in dense woods, arid steppes or green plains, the face of the deer seems to be frozen in the exact moment it detects the hunter. Its head turns violently, upright ears point at danger, its minute, dark and blank eyes sense us. On the surface of the painting, in this evening clarity suspended in time, the eyes of the deer are cracks, notches of unsaturated colors. In the room you are going through, figures appear to be looking for each other; they observe and suspect each other; they are on guard. Alone, or in pairs, they look at each other. You may think that the face of the deer is a mask, and that the hunter´s imagination has imprinted that deer's mask as a code for what he considers his prey. At the end of the 1950s, Erving Goffman recalls that the original meaning of the word person is mask. The father of microsociology found this etymological origin very useful: in the little scenes of our relationships, in our wishes, in our hunting targets, we create roles, masquerades, surfaces games that we use to decode the enigma that the other represents and, at the same time, to create an image of ourselves. In the clarity of the pictorial surface you are observing, the outline of the hunter does not appear. Maybe his territory is not permanent; this predator can be a floating place, some sort of mist that impregnates all the space in the room. A blurred hunter within the environment. These bodies can be predators and prey at the same time when they look at each other alternately. This is a game of reflections and transparencies, a land of attempts, between actions and predictions, steps forward and setbacks. In the series Hunt, Daniel Romano wonders once again about a situation that has been keeping him awake for some time: the perimeter of our interpersonal relationships, the invisible threads that coordinate calculations and tactics within the winding limit of our closest bonds. Within these personal politics, there are surfaces games, mirrors where we, and the others, create a profile. Masks, skins, cuticles, arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling. In the image, in the painting, wishing appears. It is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts. Federico Baeza (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1978) He is researcher, critic and teacher specializing in contemporary art. He graduated in arts and history and art theory at the Faculty of philosophy and letters by the University of Buenos Aires. He received doctoral scholarships awarded by the University of Buenos Aires and CONICET. It has developed research in the Centre for studies and documentation of the MACBA (Barcelona) around the heritage of the institution on Argentinian conceptual artists. More recently, he works in the field of arts management developing curatorships as the project of a retrospective of Argentine artists of the last ten years to cycles of talks scheduled from the area of University extension of IUNA and OSDE Foundation. It is currently director of extension and institutional linkage, Adjunct Professor of undergraduate and graduate in the area of criticism of Arts IUNA. He is co-author of three books on Visual and performing arts, publishes articles on contemporary art in journals, write catalogues of artists and regularly participates in conferences and other national and international meetings for a decade. It develops research and scripts for Encuentro channel about contemporary art.

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-HUNT-23-one/168670/3414836/view

[antmrankings]

Alright, I’m finally done with Cycle 23 (praise the Lord). I still have to do the Top 10 Least Favorite Photos and the Superlatives for Cycle 4, which I hope to be able to get done in the next two weeks, and then I’ll start my Cycle 3 rewatch. Thank you to everyone for being so patient with me!

[art-now-argentina]

HUNT #23 Pair, Daniel Romano

www.danielromano.com.ar For HUNT project. Surfaces games Federico Baeza, Art curator. Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922. Figures dimly emerge from mist, a barely colored whiteness, so thick that it only allows us to recognize the presence of subtly outlined bodies on a background without horizons or apparent landforms. Insinuated silhouettes, elusive lines and tones. Surrounded by this dense atmosphere, we are examined by the frontal and symmetric presence of deer heads that overlap with these vaguely outlined human anatomies. The grimace on these heads shows an impending threat; something is stalking them. As in TV documentaries about wild life in dense woods, arid steppes or green plains, the face of the deer seems to be frozen in the exact moment it detects the hunter. Its head turns violently, upright ears point at danger, its minute, dark and blank eyes sense us. On the surface of the painting, in this evening clarity suspended in time, the eyes of the deer are cracks, notches of unsaturated colors. In the room you are going through, figures appear to be looking for each other; they observe and suspect each other; they are on guard. Alone, or in pairs, they look at each other. You may think that the face of the deer is a mask, and that the hunter´s imagination has imprinted that deer's mask as a code for what he considers his prey. At the end of the 1950s, Erving Goffman recalls that the original meaning of the word person is mask. The father of microsociology found this etymological origin very useful: in the little scenes of our relationships, in our wishes, in our hunting targets, we create roles, masquerades, surfaces games that we use to decode the enigma that the other represents and, at the same time, to create an image of ourselves. In the clarity of the pictorial surface you are observing, the outline of the hunter does not appear. Maybe his territory is not permanent; this predator can be a floating place, some sort of mist that impregnates all the space in the room. A blurred hunter within the environment. These bodies can be predators and prey at the same time when they look at each other alternately. This is a game of reflections and transparencies, a land of attempts, between actions and predictions, steps forward and setbacks. In the series Hunt, Daniel Romano wonders once again about a situation that has been keeping him awake for some time: the perimeter of our interpersonal relationships, the invisible threads that coordinate calculations and tactics within the winding limit of our closest bonds. Within these personal politics, there are surfaces games, mirrors where we, and the others, create a profile. Masks, skins, cuticles, arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling. In the image, in the painting, wishing appears. It is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts. Federico Baeza (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1978) He is researcher, critic and teacher specializing in contemporary art. He graduated in arts and history and art theory at the Faculty of philosophy and letters by the University of Buenos Aires. He received doctoral scholarships awarded by the University of Buenos Aires and CONICET. It has developed research in the Centre for studies and documentation of the MACBA (Barcelona) around the heritage of the institution on Argentinian conceptual artists. More recently, he works in the field of arts management developing curatorships as the project of a retrospective of Argentine artists of the last ten years to cycles of talks scheduled from the area of University extension of IUNA and OSDE Foundation. It is currently director of extension and institutional linkage, Adjunct Professor of undergraduate and graduate in the area of criticism of Arts IUNA. He is co-author of three books on Visual and performing arts, publishes articles on contemporary art in journals, write catalogues of artists and regularly participates in conferences and other national and international meetings for a decade. It develops research and scripts for Encuentro channel about contemporary art.

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-HUNT-23-Pair/168670/3414827/view

[antmrankings]

The Girl With The Best One-Liners - Cherish

Queen of shade, queen of delusion, queen of entertainment -- Cherish Waters. There was absolutely no way this award was going to anybody else, because Cherish single-handedly made this cycle watchable for all 3 of her weeks in the competition. It’s no wonder that once she was gone, I found myself unable to really enjoy the rest of the cycle. It’s a shame that the judges hated her so much that they couldn’t even bear to suffer through her a few more weeks for the sake of entertainment.

Cherish’s first moments on the show were nothing short of surprising and hilarious. From her pre-show photos, I expected her to be this mild-mannered or shy redhead, but instead we got this --

I’m so glad that I was wrong about her. That quote was the moment I decided I was ready for this cycle, despite initially not being excited about ANTM returning from cancellation. Sadly, this gem was eliminated only 2 weeks into the competition, but that certainly didn’t stop her from adding her two cents about the competition --

When the comeback episode came, I was disappointed because the comeback is a total gimmick for drama, and the comeback contestants never have a real shot at winning. However, it meant that we got to see Cherish on our TV screens again, so I sucked it up and enjoyed the 2 minutes of screentime she got. Someone must have spiked Cherish’s drinks, because she was dancing like someone’s drunk auntie according to the panel, and hearing imaginary compliments shouted at her --

Unfortunately, Auntie Cherish didn’t make the cut to come back into the competition. However, her hilarity was not limited to the aired episodes of ANTM. This cycle they started doing exit interviews with the eliminated contestants, and thank goodness they did. If you still haven’t watched Cherish’s exit interview with Law, please do. It’s so hilariously awkward, and you can feel how much they hate each other in every fake laugh and shared glance. If their body language didn’t make their hatred for each other (as well as Cherish’s hatred of the entire panel) abundantly clear, this is cleared up when Law asks who her favorite judge was --

In short, thank you Cherish for being Cherish. As you said in the first episode, “Cherish Waters was born to be cherished”.