Maslen & Mehra

Key to Maslen & Mehras’ collaborative practice is an experimental approach to image making often working with different media and materials and combining them in unexpected ways. The photographs in the series Impermanent Collection expands on their previous work: creating and documenting temporary installations featuring mirrored sculptures. Having worked extensively with mirrored silhouettes in the past, they are now exploring the use of drawing on the mirrored surfaces before photographing them with a medium format film camera.

Impermanent Collection comprises a series of photographs based on historical and contemporary objects found in museums across the globe. Multiple visits to the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, London, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Archaeological Museum, the Turkish and Islamic Art Museum, Istanbul and the Asian Museum of Civilization in Singapore have resulted in the study and documentation of particular objects.

Impermanent Collection (La Négresse, Pourquoi! Naître esclave?) features a mirrored sculpture based on a bust by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum New York. Staging the scene in Epping Forest, London the artists placed the mirrored sculpture in an unusual root formation before capturing the scene on film. The composition echoes the sculptures theme of slavery and creates a sense of tension between the cultural object and its’ unusual nature setting.

For the image Impermanent Collection (Ife 14th C West Africa) Maslen & Mehra used materials found on location to create a structure that simulates a museum vitrine. Many of the images in this series use natural structures and materials to subtly evoke the language of museums and ways of displaying objects: a mossy bed or a pile of sticks becomes a plinth.

By shifting the context of these objects from their seemingly permanent existence in museums Maslen & Mehra suggest a far more transient reality: A fragility which has no discrimination and an idea that we are all reflections of our surroundings.