Normally, the act of taking a toy stuffed animal, cutting it open to empty the stuffing, then meticulously turning the remains inside-out and photographing the results comes off as a bit serial-killerish.

But not to worry! Kent Rogowski, who published a book of such results, is packing a Master of Fine Arts degree. So his inside-out teddy bears, which are at once creepy and cuddly, are actually avant-garde.

Not to mention thought-provoking:

I think you create a simple and surprising conflict between what we like to think childhood represents, and the icon of that, with the realities of that experience. Teddy bears are designed to be innocuous and non-threatening creatures. Inside-out the bears are still sometimes recognizable but are now much more complicated and contradictory. The seams of the bear now look like scars, and some bears lose their limbs and other appendages depending on how they were constructed. When you look at the inside-out bears they appear to have a history or a past. They no longer offer comfort but instead seem to want our empathy.

Still disturbing, but worth a consideration. I hope I don’t wind up with something like this from the Build-A-Bear visit I’m planning for my little niece next weekend.

(Via Babble Soft’s Blog)