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Even those who don't know very much about visual art are familiar with the Cubist approach to the human body. Pablo Picasso liked to present a person from many angles at once, and compress three-dimensional form into a two-dimensional frame. No matter what step she's on, that nude descending a staircase comes at us all at once. We know we're looking at an individual person, even if it's never clear which of those fields of color represent the present moment and which are afterimages, projections, and vapor trails. Representing human beings like this guarantees that there’ll be distortions: facial features in strange places, unexpected angles, duplicates and odd subtractions, clashes between heads, necks, and torsos, the shuffling of expressions, and the surprise and disquiet that comes when an obviously human figure doesn't look much like a human at all.
