SubscribeWONDERLAND behind the scenes: Kill the Rabbit!
31 March 2010 | By HUSVAR
So at this point, I had built the Hotel Wonderland of my dreams (dark, I know) and remade Alice into a woman who would actually live there. Next, I needed some guests for her mad party. Attending the original party were Alice, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse. Seeing how mad my Alice turned out to be, I skipped the Mad Hatter. And assuming that the rest of the Hotel Wonderland was as decrepit as this particular unit, I left the mice in the walls where they belong . . . which left me with the March Hare.
As you can see from the above shot of the completed set (read Building Hotel Wonderland for that story), I had thought ahead enough to book three different “models” to fill the role of the March Hare, each very different from the next, to see which one would end up working the best. The realistic small brown bunny sitting on the high chair just was too small and harmless to attend the cocktail hour I had planned. And the medium-sized pink one just screamed Easter and drew too much attention away from the hostess. So the big (but otherwise nondescript) wallflower was invited.
It looked crazy and perfectly out of place on top of that little high chair, but it still wasn’t right. Since it was brand new, it looked like Alice had just brought it home from the store. Much like the character in the book, I wanted this March Hare to have belonged to Wonderland long before Alice set foot there. So with its permission, our stylists began the magical transformation that every model goes through for a shoot. Well, maybe not every model has their eyes removed and abdomen sliced open.
It was a little creepy at first, gutting an innocent bunny like this. We feared that some higher power was looking down at us in judgment for stuffie abuse! But it never complained, not even once, so we just kept going. With each handful of dirt, with every carefully misplaced smear of permanent marker, it belonged more and more in Alice’s kitchen. In the end, we will openly admit it, without any guilt or shame—it was fun to completely destroy this rabbit.
We tried to imagine what this thing had gone through in all those years at the Hotel Wonderland . . . at least a year shoved under the sink, forgotten next to the rusted leaky pipes . . . perhaps a decade collecting dust on top of the refrigerator . . . and when it wasn’t out of sight, it was being dragged around these floors by some sad child, the same child that probably taped over its eyes when they rescued it from the dumpster in the alley.
When we were done, the March Hare sat in the high chair and held its cup for tea. Well, it held the cup as best as it could with one of its hands missing. If you think what we did was inhumane—if only in the sense that this particular “model” is going to have a hard time booking a gig with X’s for eyes—well, I like to believe that this was the role it was born to play, transformed from a simple stuffed bunny into a March Hare as complex and ominous as the blind prophet Tiriesas from Homer’s Odyssey.
Besides, don’t you think these look much better on me? Who’s the Mad Hatter now!
Visit WONDERLAND for more behind-the-scenes features and to view the photo series!
Tags: Alice, Alice In Wonderland, art, artist, behind-the-scenes, Dormouse, HusVar, Mad Hatter, March Hare, photo, photograph, photographer, photography, Sean HusVar, Tea Party, Wonderland | No Comments
Loading ...