ANDREA: Thinking about your choice of color or black and white, if you did these images in black and white they’d be
mentally heavy. But with color, they’re presented in a way that you can look at them without a sense of horror.
ARTHUR: I was playing with that idea, that these are very scary things but by presenting them in bright colors it creates
an ambiguity. I love the word delirious, a surrealist word, which takes the object into another dimension. In the image,
Mother Matrix, you see these things that would be attached to an iron lung to give the person more mobility. In the fifties,
polio was the terrifying thing for a child, so in a way, I’m transforming these objects.
ANDREA: You like to show the vestiges from the past, you achieved this in these images by making artifacts?
ARTHUR: Artifacts, yes. In a certain way these bizarrely painted objects come together and transcend what they are.
Arthur Tress, Throne of Aphrodite, 1987.
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