Mirror: Collaborative Pictures by Merrick d'Arcy Irvine x Julia Bajanova

We humans are social creatures. Without others to reflect our behavior back to us, we lose what defines us— language, culture, the capacity for creative expression. That is why the photographer Merrick d’ Arcy-Irvine and the fashion designer Julia Bajanova are invested in intense encounters: with the people who appear in their pictures, but also with each other, as artists and as humans, and between their media and the materials out of which they are made. The materiality and sensual experience of those media in the physical world are the focus of the pictures gathered in this volume, which is why d’ Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova eschewed all digital technologies. Sensuality forges an emotional bond between their creative universes, whose boundaries become permeable, as do the dividing lines between genres. Colors and forms are fused in a shared language of visual art and fashion in which d’ Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova write their messages in light on the photographic paper. They speak to what makes us human: creative energies untrammeled by the necessities of everyday life. The pictures in Mirror, then, are reflections of our existence and portals of self-knowledge.

Merrick d’ Arcy-Irvine is a British/French photographer based in London. He is a graduate of Cambridge University, with a BA degree in Art History. He is, along with Royal Ballet Soloist Hannah Grennell, the co-founder of Flux Projects. His work is about the human body, movement and materiality. Using mostly analog methods, such as medium format film, luminography and paint, he is drawn to the tactile, transient qualities of photochemical processes, especially in the context of the proliferation of digital media. Julia Bajanova is a fashion designer and artist based in Berlin. The city subtly informs her artistic practice, which blurs the line between the ephemeral and the material. Expressed through her distinctive use of tulle, at once robust and delicate, her creations navigate the space between the real and the imaginary. The defined seams of the fabric she uses in her design act like deliberate strokes on a translucent canvas and merge with the wearer into a living work of art.