Video: A man in the hands of a collector: the work of Michael Mapes
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Photo portraits made By Michael Mapesrather resemble eerie entomological collections: the pictures are carefully prepared, systematized and combined into a collage. But this is not a dry anatomical approach, but a deep study of human individuality.
Michael Mapes - not a professional photographer, although he uses hundreds of photographs in his works. He is not engaged in science either, but the non-standard use of scientific materials allows him to bring a symbolic dimension to his works.
Michael calls their work Specimens (specimens), playing on the meaning of this word as "kinds of people." His main goal is to capture and "preserve" the individual and typical characteristics of those people with whom he happened to work. With such a desire to sort everything out "on the shelves", he may remind someone of Frederick Clegg, the character of the famous novel "The Collector" John Fowles, although he certainly has no sinister intentions.
Before starting work, Michael spends a lot of time with the person, the subject of his future "research", trying to get to know him better. If the person's personality does not interest him, there will be no photography.
Michael places numerous fragments of the photographs in glass vials, plastic bags and gelatin capsules, places them under magnifying glasses and pins them on pins, like dried insects or herbarium plants. And since the author of the project understands the "individual characteristics" of people, including in the most direct sense, in his collections one can find handwriting samples, fingerprints, and jars with scraps of nails and hair of the object of research.
In search of new means of expression, contemporary artists increasingly often resort to the portrait genre. And if the American Zach Freeman creates his works from household waste, and the Englishman Jamie Poole - from scraps of printed text, then the works Michael Mapes also fit into the framework of current trends, differing only in a greater ideological load.
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