Medusa art series#

Mendick’s filmed face, projected Tony Oursler-style, loudly intones a personal litany of confessions, each one beginning with: “Bless me Father, for I have sinned”. Clad in a modest bonnet and Tudoresque gown, The Sinner is a lifesized figure kneeling on a drift of straw in a dimly lit dungeon-like space. Photo: Ollie Harropīut it is Mendick herself that we encounter first. Installation view of Off With Her Head, Carl Freedman Gallery.Ĭopyright of Lindsey Mendick, Courtesy of Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate. Medusa, Salome, Meghan Markle, Yoko Ono, Lady Jane Grey, Britney Spears and Mendick’s friend and fellow Margate resident Tracey Emin are just some of the illustrious and often infamous line-up of females commemorated and celebrated in a century- spanning extravaganza devoted to the mistreatment of women from ancient myth to contemporary social media. In this three-room multimedia sound-and-vision gesamtkunstwerk she takes on the wholescale shaming and persecution of women throughout history and pulls no punches. Off with Her Head, Mendick’s current solo exhibition at Carl Freedman Gallery is her most full-on and provocative yet. Flailing tentacles, bared claws, genital fissures and infinite varieties of flotsam and creepy crawlies were lovingly modelled and lushly glazed with consummate skill.īut in recent years her ceramics have increasingly been forced into unholy alliances with works in a variety of media-paintings, film, furniture and found objects-to form elaborate mises en scène that mash up the personal and the fantastical to dramatic effect. Mendick first attracted attention with her striking ceramic works exuberantly laden with all manner of meticulously-rendered scary stuff. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, mental health, female sexuality and vampiric relationships have all featured in memorable bodies of work, in which searing honesty blends with full-throttle humour and a hefty dose of grand guignol horror to maximum, maximalist effect.

Through Muniz, we can ponder how images change in meaning over time and in different contexts.Lindsey Mendick has never shied away from grappling with uncomfortable subjects that rarely get much of an airing in life, let alone art.

Medusa art series#

It is part of a series of work Muniz created using famous images from popular culture and art history, translating these images into materials such as chocolate, diamonds, and garbage. In the hands of Muniz, however, the Raft assumes a much more playful significance.

Gericault based this harrowing scene on accounts of an actual French shipwreck off the coast of Africa. The original nineteenth-century Raft of the Medusa depicts shipwreck survivors desperately attempting to flag down a rescue ship. He then photographed the chocolate, and this diptych remains as a document of his creation. Muniz painted the chocolate on a lightbox using a needle. Using Bosco chocolate sauce, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz recreates the composition of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, 1819.

This artwork is an example of a contemporary artist adapting a pre-existing image and making it their own through a new technique. Gift of the New Art Collectors 2000.14.3 a,b Silver dye bleach print (Ilfochrome), two partsĦ8 3/16 × 100 7/16 × 1 3/4 in.