MANDEM

Our art is an exercise in categorical violations, simulation, and narrative...



We are radically interdisciplinary, working across the spectrum of media and materials, mixing and matching elements from photography, classical painting, printmaking, soft sculpture, and film.

The Medical Trials of the Saints series takes religious/mythical memes from art history and re-imagines them in a posthuman context. These images are designed to be simultaneously reverently beautiful and horrific, to both compel and repel, and in so doing to reflect the complexity of our relationships with our environments, our faiths, and ourselves. Each piece represents months of work both in the studio and in the library, researching the syncretic/memetic history of the saints, deities, and archetypes.

The oil paintings showing here appear relatively straightforward in swearing allegiance to familiar classical painting techniques. In contrast, the photographs are in visual dialogue with the early Pictorialists (in particular, innovator Julia Margaret Cameron — whose photographs of children denied patriarchal expectations, or F. Holland Day — who used the medium to draw links between homoerotic desire and mythic/religious topics). Some of the photographic works also nod to the photo collage and watercolor techniques developed and shared by Victorian women (half a century before male surrealists and Dada artists appropriated collage and cut-up for their own uses).