Matthew Rolston. Untitled, #Pa1061-1554, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series, “Vanitas” © MRPI
Matthew Rolston: I stumbled into the uncanny valley, so to speak. I’m interested in depictions of human simulacra. Of course that’s because portraiture has always been my subject; I’m coming at it from a different angle.
Matthew Rolston. Untitled, #Pa748-105, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series, “Vanitas” © MRPI
Matthew Rolston. Untitled, #Pa487-1318, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series, “Vanitas” © MRPI
About 500 years ago, the first of the Brothers of the Capuchin Order in Palermo were placed in the cellar below the Church when they died. There was no way of preserving the body at that time, so the practice was to remove the internal organs and leave the body to drain on a stone slab for a year, then return to stuff the body with straw and intern it in a tomb. After a year had passed, the Brothers went down and saw that the first of their dead had not visibly decomposed, and to them it was a miracle.
It was a very long process. We were shooting at night from six in the evening till three in the morning. It was positively vampiric. I slept all day in a shuttered room, got up at dusk, and went to the crypt [Laughs]. I had to get permission to be there for a week and brought a team of six people and a truckload of photographic equipment from Milan to Palermo, traveling down the autostrada to Genoa, and then on a ferry to cross the sea. What a production!Because we were also filming a short documentary to contextualize the project, we set up the shoot to correspond with the various days of the dead, so that the very last night of our shoot was the Eve of All Saints' Day, October 31. In Italy, it is a thoughtful time to commune with one’s dead and maybe think about the infinite.
Matthew Rolston. Untitled, #Pa458-1071, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series, “Vanitas” © MRPI
If you went there as a visitor, you’d see a dim, grayish, fluorescent lit chamber, which looks nothing like it does in my images. My photos use theatrical lighting in gold and blue tones. There are touches of turquoise, blue, green, gold, blood red—the colors of a bruise. The touchstones for this approach were Weimar Republic artists like Otto Dix (who, in 1924, painted some of the mummies I photographed), Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, and Egon Schiele.
Matthew Rolston. Untitled, #Pa314-583, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series, “Vanitas” © MRPI
The desire to cheat death, or at least uncover its mysteries, has existed as long as we’ve recorded our history. It is both a spiritual motivator and the scourge of humanity, and it continues today with technology.I believe that if we don’t self-immolate, in time we will evolve beyond our current form into something else. Many people call that idea transhumanism, and it feels like everything in our culture is pointing that way, as we become more and more disembodied and meld into a kind of hive mind through social media interactions. Of course, many of our mythologies and films have been predicting this for years. Maybe it’s our destiny.Our form is relatively recent. The human species is not that old. Homo sapiens only go back about 300,000 years. And if you believe the theories of evolution, how different is our form today from protozoa? Why shouldn’t our form be radically different in the future? I especially wanted to explore that in this work. It asks: Is the human body even necessary? Or can we discard it?
Matthew Rolston. Untitled, #Pa486-1305, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series, “Vanitas” © MRPI
Matthew Rolston. Untitled, #Pa834-460, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series, “Vanitas” © MRPI
Matthew Rolston. Untitled, #Pa492-1345, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series, “Vanitas” © MRPI