The work of visual artist Douglas Mandry includes photography, video, sculpture, and installation. He works multidisciplinary and often closely collaborates with earth scientists. Mandry's reflections on landscape and its material elements ask what the sublime - that fascinating mixture of horror and beauty - could mean today. Is the sublime still possible in an era of sophisticated technologies and ecological disruptions, that are collapsing any presumed safe distance between mankind and nature? By letting his images interfere with natural elements like ice or dust, Mandry shows that matter matters. This approach has consequences, too, for outdated notions of the romantic genius, the ultimate author to the detriment of others, especially non-human agents. For Mandry, the artist is rather an agent or vector, co-creating with what shapes and materials are giving themselves. He is the 'connection point that evolves in fluent ways with what you receive'. Following this, the sublime might be more about 'being impressed' rather than 'to impress', about feeling rather than seeing.
One example of the coming-together of image and material is the series Retardant Panels (2023). Mandry torched wood panels on whose blackened background vernacular photographs were then printed by means of the vivid red carmine pigment mixed with retardant. This industrially produced red powder used to be sprayed over wildfires to slow down the burning of (tropical) forests, nature's cathedrals that have been critical agents in the relative stable climate of the Holocene.
Mandry loves the beauty of the unfinished. He doesn't create standalone images as much as he slowly works on serial works and constellations, that might take many forms, akin to his working method of sampling existing things and assembling them together. He wants to break down reality and present it in alternative, non-linear ways, because "reality," in his own words, "is quickly catching up with science-fiction." Taco Hidde Bakker
ABOUT THE SERIES MONUMENTS
Collecting found images of Engadine glaciers from the early 20th century, Mandry transferred them onto actual pieces of geotextile, which have themselves been brought down from the alps after a season on the ice. Through the antique process of lithography, a double-exposure phenomenon happens: the images, fading memories of golden age in Switzerland’s tourism, become part of the nowadays technological attempts to preserve a past which no longer exists. As result, an effect of collage where time and space are consciously and playfully shifted by the artist, a product of the digital age where images are reproduced endlessly in virtual formats. Mandry questions materiality. By using physical materials and printing methods, he examines notions of tangibility and permanence. In constant dialogue with his means of making, subject and surroundings, Mandry opens up new ways of engaging with the world around us.