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Our Lady of Guadalupe

A well-known fact among my friends, I am obsessed with religious art. The gaudier the better. I am especially intrigued by gothic religious art that depicts gruesome acts, peculiar because I can’t stand gore. One of my favorite subsets of this subject is the wide variety of Our Lady of Guadalupe imagery that can be often found in what seems like odd and inappropriate places.

When Amanda posted pictures of her new religious bathroom art, I had to share my favorite gaudy find.

Guadalupe Mirror

This is my Guadalupe mirror, the light of my interior decorating life. Literally. A flip of a switch on the back of this thing makes it light up like a sign on the Vegas strip, flashing bright red dots at lightning speed. When I found this in a Chicago dollar store I had a hard time choosing between this and the matching Last Supper mirror. The cash flow only allowed for one or the other, and Guadalupe won.

For another example of bizarre artwork I have in the house, see my bedroom art featuring three big-eyed emo kids, two of which look like they’re on heroin.

I’m confident we could have a tacky interior decorating contest among bloggers. We’re so damned geeky you know that 90% of us collect bizarre stuff. If you have anything to share, post pictures and leave a link.


16 thoughts on Our Lady of Guadalupe

  1. We have a Guadaloupe in the porch–it’s tile, and it was my grandmother’s. And admittedly it isn’t the best-rendered thing in the entire world–the expression on one of the cherub-type things below her feet is distinctly odd–but I actually love it unironically.

  2. I love most religious art unironically, including the Guadalupes, but this piece can’t be viewed with anything but an ironic eye.

  3. Glass Chicken (sorry, you’ll have to scroll down to see the chicken)

    It isn’t religious, but I received it when a relative died. Now my husband can’t bear to part with it, he thinks it rocks in a very ironical sort of way. When friends come over, he shows it off.

    Of course, we also have the line up of beer mugs the Hub brought back from his year in Austria, and the tons or glass paperweights his grandmother felt obligated to give us each time we visited her, and the antique Sprite salt and pepper shakers. However, I am far too lazy to clean, dust, take pictures and then post. Aside, from that, it might make us look crazier than we already are.

  4. I was once at a dollar store in So-Cal and I found something that wasn’t a dollar – it was a clock for a mantle and it had a hologram in the background of it, if you turned it one way, you saw Jesus, and the other way, the Virgin Mary.

    I wanted it so badly but it was like 40 dollars and I still hadn’t made it to Disneyland yet :o)

  5. I’m not too much of a collector or decorator, apart from the guest room which doubles as my vinyl repository… its “wallpaper” consists of silly and/or iconic record covers and inserts from pop and country music history (including a small Jim Nabors shrine). I do have a few pieces of strange art from my minimal contact with the Austin art community and their friends, including this print, which I guess could be semi-religious.

  6. I had no idea you were such a fan of tacky religious icons/art. I don’t have any trips scheduled in the near future, but from now on I will make sure I try to get decent pics of the tacky stuff as well as other religious art – I’ll also try to get a better shot of Czar Alexander II’s blood preserved on the cobblestones in the Church of the Resurrection of Christ aka “Saviour on the spilled blood” if I ever get back to St. Petersburg.

  7. My mother most unironically got a St. Francis bird bath, but she doesn’t know anything about saints and I had to explain to her that his name is St. Francis of Assisi and why specifically he is associated with birds. But yeah, I have an ironic, mean-spirited attitude towards religious art.

    My friend Mel is in love with Dia de los Muertos art. She is a morbid person, to say the least, and loves horror movie stuff, but she is attracted to Dia de los Muertos stuff in part because of the death thing but also because I think it gives her a way to relate to her Catholic background. But it gives people a sort of odd feeling–her entire living room is a mess of skeletons done in a Mexican folk art way. With a punk rock feel.

    Thinking of, she is one of the few people I know who does flame art the way I like it. I need her to paint shit for me….

  8. I used to have some flashing Jesus pictures, which was my only Christmas decoration one year, but I think I left it behind moving one time, too bad. It was deliciously tacky.

  9. When I was in Rome two years ago, I bought rosary beads in a plastic case, with a hologram of the Pope on the front. That’s about as tacky as it gets.

    Sadly, they’re at home in Seattle, so I can’t take a picture. But holograms never photograph well anyway, right?

  10. i love Guadelupes as well, and have a glow-in-the-dark one on my dining room mantle, as well as a magnet on my fridge, and some other ones too.

    just like amanda’s friend, it’s a way for me to fumble towards some kind of connection with my Catholic upbringing and my progressive present, while trying to bypass all the awful institutional stuff (like the Pope, say).

  11. What, no one likes 70s psychadelic Hare Krsna paintings? I mean, Catholics aren’t the only ones with an abundance of religious art, tacky or otherwise.

    Do vintage typewriters count as tacky decorating items? How about piles of stuff I’ll never get around to organizing?

    Is tacky good or bad?

  12. Years ago, one of my sisters bought a house choked with oh-so-bad religious art. One time I visited her and was gifted with a mother lode, including a Virgin Mary statue so bad as to look deformed. I was living in a group house at the time and we named her, “Our Lady of Perpetual Bathrooms”. If you didn’t clean the bathroom when it was your turn, you were required to display the horrid thing in a prominent place in your room until the next miscreant forgot their turn. As I recall, Mickey had it for about 6 months….

    The rest has drifted away until I am now left with only a really, really bad copy of the Last Supper, with a clock on one side and a mirror on the other. I think I do miss the blinking Jesus clock the most!

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