MANDEM is an artist conglomerate, one of whom lives with a genetic disorder (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) that causes failure of the body’s connective tissues.
Our Hypermobility series uses studio models with connective tissue disorders to capture moments where joints hyperextend or dislocate and the body moves into broken-seeming, impossible configurations.
The paintings in MANDEM's Rooms to Let installation are titled The Pre-Existing Conditions and Hypermobility / Hysteria. Together, they become Dislocation as a Form of Creation – a project that explores the poetics of disability, nerves misfiring, failing connective tissues, pain and transcendence.
As text on the larger painting says:
“To find meaning in suffering is the right only of one who suffers, saying I AM HERE, a Sacrifice of Myself to Myself.”
These images look to find a moment of (self) creation in the embrace of a disabled body. As art objects, though, their larger goal is to reinsert disabled bodies into the often-inaccessible homes of art and mythology and to reassert our agency and right to exist.
About “Rooms to Let: CLE” (May 20-21, 2017)
Rooms To Let: CLE will transform a neighborhood street as the innovative installation returns to Slavic Village for a 4th consecutive year. Artists and makers will create works in vacant homes and vacant lots.
In the neighborhood that was often called 'ground zero' for the foreclosure crisis in the U.S., artists take over abandoned, condemned homes and transform them for a single weekend, referencing both the past devastation and the possibility of a different future and spurring a conversation about vacancy and neglect.
[Work-in-Progress photos of painting & installation, post 4 of 5]