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Human ears are showing up in the strangest places. There was the guy who had one surgically implanted in his forearm. Now there’s the woman who had one artistically implanted in an iPhone 5 case.
That woman is Sarah Sitkin, a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist. Her custom-made ear case is creepy-looking, to say the least. But it’s also incredibly eye-catching.
It features uber-realistic details — a reddish tinge at the top of the ear (are your ears burning Sarah?), tiny snaking veins and visible pores rendered with tiny paintbrushes and subtle airbrushing. Plus, all phone buttons remain fully functional. Yes, you can ear me now.
Sitkin’s portfolio on Instagram reveals a fascination with human anatomy. There are sculptures of heads, hands, hands coming out of heads, teeth, feet and tangles of body parts that are hard to delineate. The haunting works, made mostly out of silicone, clay, plaster, resin and latex, look like they’d be right at home in a horror museum.
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An Australian embroidery artist named Josh, who sells his work under the handle adipocere, commissioned the ear case from Sitkin. He uses it with care, he tells CNET’s Crave blog, to protect if from damage. “It depends on what I’m wearing whether I’ll trust it’s safe in my pocket,” he says.
So what kind of reactions does it evoke? Not surprisingly, rather loud ones, he says. “Mostly ‘gross!’ or ‘ew!’ and ‘it feels so real’ by those who aren’t too repulsed to touch it.”
