2019 - Diego Ramirez Signs of the Undead - MARS Art Gallery Melbourne

Diego Ramirez | Signs Of The Undead

13 July – 3 August 2019

Artist Talk: Saturday 27th July at 3:30 pm

Diego Ramriez, Eternal Arrival (instalation view), 2019

Diego Ramriez, New Vampire, 2019<br/>duratran print, lightbox, 59.4 x 42 cm, edition of 3 +2 A/P

Diego Ramirez, Phantasmagorical Heart, 2019<br/>Duratran print, lightbox, 73.4 x 48.9 cm, edition of 3 + 2 A/P

Diego Ramirez, The infinity of the past, 2019<br/>neon, 133 x 120 cm, edition of 3 +2 A/P

Diego Ramirez, Wrestler Vs Vampire No 1, 2019<br/> reverse print on clear acrylic, 118.9 x 84.1 cm, edition of 3 + 2 A/P

VIEW CATALOGUE WITH ESSAY BY AINSLEE MEREDITH

Signs Of The Undead employs mediums associated with commercial signage to unpack the symbology of the vampire. This exhibition focuses on how the undead is a creature that embodies complex anxieties about race and memory: the vampire is an immigrant who belongs to a different time, place, and race. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire simultaneously stands for the colonized (as a foreign, racialized figure feared by the British Empire) and the colonizer (as a monstrous entity decided to feed on England’s population). The coffin—one of the most ubiquitous clichés associated with this creature—is a monument to the vampire’s aberrant existence. Neither dead or alive, the undead is an immigrant or settler who crosses the sacrosanct border of life (a threshold patrolled by the holiest powers of Heaven in Western thought) to claim the world of the living.