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St. Persephone (Medical Trials of the Saints)

Winter is coming. An infinite-seeming solitude, isolation, lethargy, almost forgetting what it was to get out of bed and walk to the window... Persephone knows this and accepts it with a child’s patience. She alone collected and arranged the flowers. She herself would be the one to set the beatles and the butterflies about their work, decomposing the borders of time and flesh. Once more she breaks open a celebratory pomegranate, feasting with abundance and joy until she is almost satisfied to stop. Its fragrant juices overflow her fingers and stain her lips with royal purple. Here are ...

The Little Prince (Medical Trials of the Saints)

Once upon a time there was a war against facism, and in that war there was a pilot named Saint Exupéry. And as it so happens, this pilot was also a photographer, and a watercolor painter, and a writer. One day he wrote a book so true that it came to life, and he disappeared into the desert inside of it, and was never seen again. No, that’s too factual to be true. Let me start again. Once upon a time there was a little boy, a prince who lived on a tiny planet covered with baobab trees the shape of mushroom clouds, and a single red rose. The boy made an epic journey across a hundred star...

Patron Saint of Stone (Medical Trials of the Saints)

The photographs in MANDEM's "Medical Trials of the Saints" series are designed to be in visual dialog with 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, and a hundred years before 20th century photographers such as Uelsmann adapted the method for darkroom printing). Our photographs remix elements of this 19th century women's craft with contemporary visual and cultural concerns. ...

St. Sebastian, Paion (Medical Trials of the Saints)

This series of mixed-media/oil paintings takes religious memes from classical art history and re-imagines them in a diseased, post-human context. In a truly metamodern way, these images are meant to be simultaneously reverent 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 painting represents not only hours of indirect Old Master-inspired painting, but also hours of research into the syncretic/memetic history of the saints and deities represented. In the Saint Sebastian paintings of...

Translating Theotokos (Medical Trials of the Saints)

Theotokos means literally 'The Bearer of God,' though in religious contexts it is generally translated as 'Mother of God,' and is a common name given to iconographic paintings of the Madonna. This translation is, however, an oversimplifcation. The term tokos, translated as bearer, was, in the ancient world, used to indicate the imposition of a heavy load of debt or oppression (as in English parlance to carry a debt). The title of the Madonna, then, could just as easily be translated 'Mother of God' or 'Usury of God.' In honor of this second, invisible sense of the term, this painting discusses...

Butterfly Eater (Medical Trials of the Saints)

We imagine them frozen with Victorian specimen pins, or fluttering dreamlike over flowers. But the Morpho butterfly is a scavenger, an eater of the dead. It feeds on carcasses and fungi, spreading the spores of mushrooms across the jungle, as integral to decay and death as to pollination. And then there is the child and the digital and the sweep of posthumanity erasing the forest forever. So the painter said: "In the dream where I was dead, I saw a child stained iridescent. Photonic nanostructures blurred its lips, and its mouth was full of wings. Here a jungle of wires devoured the last ps...

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