Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

James G. Mundie’s critically acclaimed portrait drawings of real sideshow performers take real “freak show” oddities and put them into compositions borrowed from famous paintings. The result is a pairing of high and low art that compels the viewer to engage their own curiosity about the physically different.

It is in the fantastical and bombastic spirit of the circus sideshow, where even a three-legged man would be reinvented to appear more interesting, that Mundie has created new “histories” for his subjects in which fact and fancy are liberally mingled. In Mundie’s work, conjoined twins and bearded women mix with paintings by Holbein and Goya, creating a hybrid, which ShowHistory.com [http://showhistory.com/] said “merges the classical with the curious, and succeeds by capturing what is most human in the anomalous form.”

In discussing the reasons for depicting these unusual individuals in his portraits, Mundie notes, “There is a visceral attraction to those things that terrify us. And in the case of human ‘freaks,’ people continue to be interested because they feel that ‘but for the grace of God, that could have been me.’ It forces them to confront their own situation, their own humanity.”

Mundie’s work is itself something of an anomaly. The richly textured and highly detailed ink drawings of “Prodigies” lure the viewer in through the beautiful physicality of their technique and composition. It is only when one considers the depictions themselves that the “otherness” of the subject becomes apparent. It’s this mixture of reverence and humor that, as Edward Sozanski of The Philadelphia Inquirer put it, “transforms them from sideshow performers into empathetic characters.” Mundie’s work gives viewers permission to indulge their curiosity, while at the same time honoring the memories of these extraordinary performers.

There is a subtext to the draw of the “freak show” that speaks in equal parts to one’s own misfit status and the desire to experience the forbidden. “These are things that I struggle with myself,” Mundie says, “so I want the viewer to experience these drawings and challenge their conceptions of standardized beauty. There is often beauty within the grotesque, if we would only open ourselves to the possibility.”