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Maslen &
Mehra
"Mirrored"
May 5 – June
4
Opening reception May
5 from 6 to 10 pm
Artists in
attendance
showcasing photo-works
and a new installation and video by Maslen &
Mehra
General
Hardware Contemporary
1520 Queen St
W
Toronto M6R
1A4
CONTACT is an
annual month long festival of photography with over 1000
local, national and international artists at more than 200
venues across the Greater Toronto Area in May. Founded as a
not-for-profit organization 14 years ago, CONTACT is devoted
to celebrating, and fostering an appreciation of the art and
profession of photography. As the largest photography event in
the world, and a premiere cultural event in Toronto, CONTACT
stimulates excitement and discussion among a diverse audience
that has grown to over 1.5 million and is focused on
cultivating even greater interest and participation this
year.
Maslen & Mehra, Pink Hutt
Lagoon Western Australia 2006
Courtesy
the Artists and Art Es Collecion Madrid
Public
Installation: Mirrored / Maslen &
Mehra
April 25 - June
4
As a prominent
component of the curatorial programming CONTACT annually
presents public installations of photography in high profile
spaces throughout Toronto. CONTACT are very pleased to
announce that this public installation program is extending to
five cities in Canada this year, coast to coast, from
Vancouver to Halifax throughout the month of May.
Maslen & Mehra, Hot Stream
Waimangu New Zealand 2006
Durst
lambda, dibond & acrylic 72 x 52cm
Maslen & Mehra: Culture Lens Nature
Mirror
Text by John K Grande
Maslen & Mehra
have built up a collaborative practice as a duo that involves
site intervention, the locating of mirror outline forms –
human and animal - in a variety of urban, and rural spaces.
Challenging our reading of the photograph as a neutral
document that records an objective truth, these photo-works of
mirror forms interject a human cultural dialogue in diverse
environs. Highway 190 Death Valley (2008) incorporates four
mirror people, three of whom look very urban as if returning
or going to work, while another medic-like personage carries
an object. In Hells Gate, Death Valley (2005) we see a
solitary mirror form casting a shadow on the red rock and sand
landscape. Aesthetics go feral here, for what could be a
beatific wild landscape is peopled by a contradictory urban
intervention. ‘What is civilized?’, this photograph demands?
The artists' intervention is an occupation of space and alters
the way we read the pristine landscape. The suggestion is that
we read content in nature much as we read advertising -
editing it down, rendering it comprehensible, just as the
Romantics once did in the early
19th century.
In their work,
Maslen and Mehra have used mirror forms of soldiers, animals,
birds of prey, or urban personages. The inclusion is a removal
of sorts, for it transposes another reading onto the spaces
Maslen and Mehra’s mirror spirit invaders inhabit as visual
icons for a moment in time. The result is a mirror inversion
of ghost-like forms. A subtle critique of the culture
nature-interchange in contemporary society, Maslen and Mehras’
situational mirror inversions of ghost-like forms are sited in
seemingly interchangeable forums. As a nature, culture
exchange. These photographs challenge any objective reading of
body – human or animal – and of environment.
Maslen & Mehra, Hells Gate
Death Valley 2005
Durst lambda, dibond & acrylic
160 x 120cm
Using a
medium-format camera, Maslen & Mehra cause us to
re-interpret environments as subjective spaces onto which we
layer meanings, interpretations and worldviews. The Horrock’s
Beach Road, Western Australia images come close to being
sculptural interventions. An empty natural field of vision now
has one person, and this alters our reading of the sparse
tree, field and white cloud contents of this photo. The same
applies to Inferno Crater, Waimangu, New Zealand (2006), where
four of these mirror figures occupy a dried out, cracking clay
shoreline like ghosts from an Ibsen play. Again, culture
invades nature. Yet culture is nature, Maslen and Mehras’
Durst Lambda print photographs suggest.
Maslen and Mehras’
situationist photographs affirm the fragile ephemerality of
our relation to nature’s energies. What was objective becomes
subjective. We become aware that our reading of these
photo-works is construed by our perception, memory, and
cultural baggage. Maslen and Mehra remove that cultural
baggage and question our precepts as to what environments,
cultural stereotypes and indoctrinated worldviews are, or
potentially could be. The control levers over what our
potential reading of nature as capital can be, or ever was,
are taken away. We come to recognize that transforming
environments and the use of nature as capital are endemically
linked to the theological and historical viewpoints in which
we are unconsciously indoctrinated to believe. Habitat,
whether in Death Valley, Ramsay Island, New Zealand, Paris,
London or Berlin is a place we read through images. Those
images are constructs. Like these mirror humans and
environments that inhabit Maslen and Mehras’ photo
interventions, culture and nature are interchangeable. The
impermanence, and temporary nature of these set-ups challenge
us with living and sensitive metaphors for the nature culture
gap, personified in photos about life on earth.
John K. Grande
has curated several editions of Earth Art at the Royal
Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Recent books
include Dialogues in Diversity; Art from Marginal to
Mainstream (Pari Publishing, Italy) Bob Verschueren,
Natura Humana (Editions Mardaga, Belgium) and The Landscape
Changes (Prospect/Gaspereau Press, Canada). Eco-Art,
co-curated with Peter Selz is on view at the Pori Art Museum
in Finland until June 2011.
Maslen &
Mehra, Tolaga Bay New Zealand 2005
Durst
lambda, dibond & acrylic 160 x 120cm
Maslen
& Mehra will be included in a group exhibition at
Garboushian Gallery Los Angeles in May and the group
exhibition London International curated by Edward
Lucie-Smith at the KCCC Contemporary Art Center Lithuania in
June. They have been shortlisted along with Graham Dolphin,
Delaine Le Bas, Alice Anderson, and Andy Harper for the
Latitude Contemporary Art Award and Exhibition in the
UK in July. Maslen & Mehra will be featured in the
exhibition, The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a
Changing Environment, on view at the Nevada Museum of Art
in Reno, Nevada from September 24, 2011--January 8, 2012. An
accompanying 288-page, full color, deluxe publication,
published by Skira Rizzoli and the Nevada Museum of Art, will
survey the Museum‘s signature Altered Landscape
photography collection that includes images that examine human
interaction and intervention with the
environment.
All
images courtesy the Artists, General Hardware Contemporary
Toronto, Priska Juschka Fine Art New York unless otherwise
stated
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