Impermanent Collection (6 portrait sculptures) 2011

Bronze Of A Man, Roman Head Of A Youthful Male, Pakistan Head of a Bodhisattva, Afghanistan; Marble Head of a Woman, Roman copy of a Hellenistic statue, A Bronze Of Apollo: The Chatsworth Head, Head of a Bodhisattva, Tang Dynasty

Materials: Wire, paper mache, plaster, archival durst lambda photographic print, wood plinth. The wooden plinths are sculptural sketches rather than replicas of museum presentations.
Installation views:  Exhibition,  London International, KCCC Contemporary Art Center Lithuania 2011

Maslen & Mehra’s, ‘Impermanent Collection’ recontextualizes a series of museum objects; transforming them from static objects usually housed in permanent collections worldwide to an altogether temporary and ephemeral plane. The transience of culture and nature is vividly portrayed in a series of photographs and sculptures. Objects from museums found, for example, in the British, Victoria & Albert Museums and the Metropolitan Museum New York are referenced as the artists suggest an inextricable and conflicted relationship between the history of civilisation and the natural world.

Loosely based on, a museum display of marble busts, at the Victoria & Albert Museum. These sculptural works invoke a museum-like experience of objects. Bronze Of A Man, Roman Head Of A Youthful Male, Pakistan Head of a Bodhisattva, Afghanistan; Marble Head of a Woman, Roman copy of a Hellenistic statue, A Bronze Of Apollo: The Chatsworth Head, Head of a Bodhisattva, Tang Dynasty are all transformed by the superimposition of imagery. Vibrant imagery of moss, lichen, flowers, cracked earth and bark merge with imagery of refuse: tin cans, paper and plastic bags. What is our place in the world as individuals or as cultures throughout history if not fleeting and temporary. Shadows, traces, remnants of lives, come and gone.