MANDEM
Artist Statement
MANDEM
Hypermobility: Dislocation as a Form of Creation
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 similar connective tissue disorders to portray those moments where joints hyperextend or dislocate and the body moves into broken-seeming, impossible configurations.
While many of our paintings take a realist approach, our recent addition to the Hypermobility project is more performative. Dislocation as a Form of Creation, documented in the photographs here, explores the poetics of disability through text, paint, and pain.
Over the course of a three-month artist residency at an urban Cleveland gallery (Negative Space), the first of two eight-foot canvases was created through an experiment with painting-as-performance. Hypermobility / Hysteria involved many weeks of painting and writing, including live-painting sessions. Because of the constant “on display” element, the work responded to public feedback, often incorporating things visitors said about our disabled bodies and art into the work itself.
“HAVE YOU TRIED...Meditating Paleo Praying Magnets Pot Jesus Walking Being happy SUICIDE...?” / “People who walk two miles a week live longer, he said to the woman in a wheelchair.” / “NO EXCUSES.”
The text and paint movement on the canvas carries competing voices about disability ranging from personal testimonies about inaccessibility, direct quotes from medical professionals exposing their prejudices and biases in providing adequate care, inspiration/exploitation porn memes, excuses made for dis/ableism apologetics, and emotional responses from the disabled point of view.... It was a long and drawn-out process as the piece evolved and changed in a seemingly endless work, with texts written, erased, re-written, painted over, scratched out, and finally left as a palimpsest of chaotic noise.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU. / “We were taught to be on the lookout for hysterical females who come to the emergency room” / “Performing your disability becomes a matter of survival, now.” / "Dislocation as Metaphor.” / “Women's physical symptoms were interpreted as psychological while men's symptoms were perceived as organic whether or not stressors were present.” / “28% of diagnosis errors result in death or disability” / “Nothing Personal but this is how EVOLUTION WORKS. Survival of the fittest.” / “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words may take my treatment and meds.... and deny me access... and break my support networks... and institutionalize me.... and take my children.... and kill me. Bring me your stones. Rocks are honest.” / FUCK YOUR REPRESENATION.
We speak not of finishing that painting, but of ending the performance.
Several months later, we were curated into Rooms to Let, an art happening that takes over condemned, city-owned houses and turns them into temporary art galleries. For our contribution, we created a second painting, The Pre-Existing Conditions. Very much in response to the unsettling multi-vocal nature of Hysteria, and the way its mixed messages had allowed viewers to define the meaning of the work, this second canvas was interior-focused. All 76 square feet were painted in a private 12-day mania-fueled frenzy (in one 40-hour session, the painter spent 20 hours writing, sealing, and re-writing the text, with hands increasingly broken and text degrading). The text, image, and title relate the disabled experience to private mythology and the long, scrawling text reads like an ancient prophecy.
“A serpent without ears will soothe to music and still they will not listen –
I would give you my blood if you asked, said the tree.
But why do you clear cut my forest?
The choice matters.”
When finally exhibited together, the canvases were knit into the walls and floors of the condemned house, facing each other on opposite walls but connected by an umbilical cord of yarn and paint. The installation took more nights of hard labor in a ruinous environment that had us hacking black gunk from our lungs.
“To find meaning in suffering is the right only of one who
suffers, saying I AM HERE, a Sacrifice of Myself to Myself.”
But the dilapidated building served as metaphor for the failing body, still standing as it faced its imminent destruction. Weaving the heavy canvases into the laith and exposed support beams felt like the suturing of body, the frankensteined magic of holding disparate things together.
“Here where all the forests are dying and no trees grow, we walk home together - I in my chair you holding my hand in hand - and this old man says: ‘You're too young to be sick.’ But I am old as volcano in my spine as roots in my nerves and his wife says ‘Smile’ to me and ‘How lucky you are to have such a faithful boyfriend’ (consort is the word) and then ‘Every time I think I can’t... you’re such an inspiration.’ This. Today? In my pain intractable they ask me for inspiration. So - I fed them to my maenads. And oh the katharsis.”
In the end, these images look to find a moment of (self) creation in the embrace of a disabled body and in the transformation of labor/pain into beauty. 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.
[In-progress photos of Hypermobility / Hysteria taken at Negative Space Gallery (2016) and of The Pre-Existing Conditions at ARTFUL Cleveland (2017). Photos of the Hypermobility: Dislocation as a Form of Creation installation taken at Rooms to Let Cleveland “Up House” (2017). All artwork and photos by MANDEM.]
Hypermobility: Dislocation as a Form of Creation
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 similar connective tissue disorders to portray those moments where joints hyperextend or dislocate and the body moves into broken-seeming, impossible configurations.
While many of our paintings take a realist approach, our recent addition to the Hypermobility project is more performative. Dislocation as a Form of Creation, documented in the photographs here, explores the poetics of disability through text, paint, and pain.
Over the course of a three-month artist residency at an urban Cleveland gallery (Negative Space), the first of two eight-foot canvases was created through an experiment with painting-as-performance. Hypermobility / Hysteria involved many weeks of painting and writing, including live-painting sessions. Because of the constant “on display” element, the work responded to public feedback, often incorporating things visitors said about our disabled bodies and art into the work itself.
“HAVE YOU TRIED...Meditating Paleo Praying Magnets Pot Jesus Walking Being happy SUICIDE...?” / “People who walk two miles a week live longer, he said to the woman in a wheelchair.” / “NO EXCUSES.”
The text and paint movement on the canvas carries competing voices about disability ranging from personal testimonies about inaccessibility, direct quotes from medical professionals exposing their prejudices and biases in providing adequate care, inspiration/exploitation porn memes, excuses made for dis/ableism apologetics, and emotional responses from the disabled point of view.... It was a long and drawn-out process as the piece evolved and changed in a seemingly endless work, with texts written, erased, re-written, painted over, scratched out, and finally left as a palimpsest of chaotic noise.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU. / “We were taught to be on the lookout for hysterical females who come to the emergency room” / “Performing your disability becomes a matter of survival, now.” / "Dislocation as Metaphor.” / “Women's physical symptoms were interpreted as psychological while men's symptoms were perceived as organic whether or not stressors were present.” / “28% of diagnosis errors result in death or disability” / “Nothing Personal but this is how EVOLUTION WORKS. Survival of the fittest.” / “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words may take my treatment and meds.... and deny me access... and break my support networks... and institutionalize me.... and take my children.... and kill me. Bring me your stones. Rocks are honest.” / FUCK YOUR REPRESENATION.
We speak not of finishing that painting, but of ending the performance.
Several months later, we were curated into Rooms to Let, an art happening that takes over condemned, city-owned houses and turns them into temporary art galleries. For our contribution, we created a second painting, The Pre-Existing Conditions. Very much in response to the unsettling multi-vocal nature of Hysteria, and the way its mixed messages had allowed viewers to define the meaning of the work, this second canvas was interior-focused. All 76 square feet were painted in a private 12-day mania-fueled frenzy (in one 40-hour session, the painter spent 20 hours writing, sealing, and re-writing the text, with hands increasingly broken and text degrading). The text, image, and title relate the disabled experience to private mythology and the long, scrawling text reads like an ancient prophecy.
“A serpent without ears will soothe to music and still they will not listen –
I would give you my blood if you asked, said the tree.
But why do you clear cut my forest?
The choice matters.”
When finally exhibited together, the canvases were knit into the walls and floors of the condemned house, facing each other on opposite walls but connected by an umbilical cord of yarn and paint. The installation took more nights of hard labor in a ruinous environment that had us hacking black gunk from our lungs.
“To find meaning in suffering is the right only of one who
suffers, saying I AM HERE, a Sacrifice of Myself to Myself.”
But the dilapidated building served as metaphor for the failing body, still standing as it faced its imminent destruction. Weaving the heavy canvases into the laith and exposed support beams felt like the suturing of body, the frankensteined magic of holding disparate things together.
“Here where all the forests are dying and no trees grow, we walk home together - I in my chair you holding my hand in hand - and this old man says: ‘You're too young to be sick.’ But I am old as volcano in my spine as roots in my nerves and his wife says ‘Smile’ to me and ‘How lucky you are to have such a faithful boyfriend’ (consort is the word) and then ‘Every time I think I can’t... you’re such an inspiration.’ This. Today? In my pain intractable they ask me for inspiration. So - I fed them to my maenads. And oh the katharsis.”
In the end, these images look to find a moment of (self) creation in the embrace of a disabled body and in the transformation of labor/pain into beauty. 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.
[In-progress photos of Hypermobility / Hysteria taken at Negative Space Gallery (2016) and of The Pre-Existing Conditions at ARTFUL Cleveland (2017). Photos of the Hypermobility: Dislocation as a Form of Creation installation taken at Rooms to Let Cleveland “Up House” (2017). All artwork and photos by MANDEM.]
MANDEM is a media-fluid artist conglomerate. Their work frequently examines the visceral body while in critical dialogue with art history and mythology. They recently completed artist residencies at Il Palmerino (Florence, Italy) and Negative Space Gallery (Cleveland, Ohio); they are now long-term studio residents with ARTFUL Cleveland. Mandem serves as the visual arts editor for The Deaf Poets Society, a journal of deaf and disabled art and literature. Their current painting series, Hypermobility, has received multiple grants from the Ohio Arts Council.
- Website: MANDEMart.com
- Tumblr: @MythpunkArt
- Twitter: @MythpunkArt
- Facebook: @MANDEMik
