MDAM, 2017

MDAM is a collaboration between The Plantation Journal and artists Mia Dudek and Alix Marie made on the occasion of their eponymous exhibition at Roman Road. This publication takes a compelling look at the artists' experimental approaches to photography and sculpture. While their current exhibition gathers installations and more sculpture-based works, the MDAM book is a playful puzzle that brings together their photographic practices exploring bodily matters.

MDAM is exploring the format of an exhibition catalogue, introducing work that is not necessarily seen in the show, but that has been essential for the creation of the exhibition at Roman Road. MDAM received the Special Jury Anamorphosis Prize for the self-published book MDAM, which is now part of the MoMA Library Collection in New York.

Publication Idea: Trine Stephensen

Artists: Mia Dudek and Alix Marie

Words by John Phelan: 

A curious eros, this.

Book as sculpture. Only this time for real. A de-con-struct-ion. Heavy on the hyphens. Parts.

A welcome receptacle of grand grotesque gestures.

The first page a torn sheet of latex that flops about its silver spiral binding like some impotent flounder fish skin, a prophylactic. But against what? Itself? Things turn inward; the crab discards his shell only in search of a bigger one. Inside there is a hum. Hold this book to your ear. Hear the ocean whoosh of an artificial heart.

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Consider the images:
Skin.

Stretch marks, fingerprints, tongues.

Wet washcloth a blue rat, its spiky fibers fur.

A balloon knot that rises not; a concrete hand cast from a rubber glove.
Here a pipe is a pipe. That is a steel pipe, connected to a tubular sex toy, sinister. Together they make a right angle. Cardinal direction. Orifices likely and unlikely. The not so sweet imitation of life.

Nipples, sacs, sacred folds. Things that deliver. Things that take. Systems, vivisections, parts.

Parts familiar but disguised, recognizable but distorted.
Cavities, sacred caves. The velvet places imagined but not meant to be seen.

VENUS.

Made from man parts and woman parts, both.
Holy grotto.
Sublingual, we dose. Speak in bumpy tongues.

Flesh tones both real and manufactured sing, but off key. And the tune is pleasantly unsettling, an industrial grind atonal that hints with fey notes, but whose score, purposefully disheveled, leaves one unsure whether or not to grab a chair when the music stops. It does not. An auto loop organic of timeless skin slapping skin punctured by occasional crisp blank pages—paper squares and rectangles that fill in the mind’s eye like a palimpsest with an invisible ink, skin tattooed from the inside. Out. Sticky notes unstuck, their glue rubbed off, reused and repurposed into the artificial mucus that fill the molds that will pop out a type of mold designed to be filled. Cyclic, chemical, pining for the biological only to ultimately fall short, fail. This smear. A wet glass slide freshly prepared to be placed under the lens of the microscope, its god-like all seeing eye.

These parts.

These glorious messy parts.