Imagine someone sneaked into your bedroom when you were asleep, peeled back your eyelids and scooped out your very worst nightmares then turned them all into sculptures.
Well, that’s kinda like what Mexican artist Emil Melmoth has achieved with his gruesome, morbid, yet strangely compelling sculptures of deformed creatures and unnamed things that dwell in the night—he has made the terrors of darkness visible.
Melmoth takes his inspiration from religious iconography, medical anatomy, death culture, the circus, the freak show, and the downright macabre. His sculptures may look like expensive props for a deeply disturbing horror movie but they are intended to engage the viewer in some serious thinking. Fusing wax, ceramics, resin, nails, and bone, Melmoth creates meditations on the human condition that juxtapose “ideas of religious immortality and paradise with the reality of bodily imperfection, dissection, and truths of scientific knowledge.”
[His] wax, anatomical models revel in a dark and surreal environment, and where his depraved sculptures live in affliction: fragile beings in an eternally harrowing state of mind. Melmoth projects the sublime and ethereal concepts of death onto his creations, portraying pessimism, nihilism, existentialism, the question of transcendence beyond death, mental instability, and self-destruction, all ideas represented in his invigorating constructs.
An exhibition of his work is currently on show at the Last Rites Gallery (until September 9th) but if you can’t make that then you can follow Emil Melmoth on Instagram and Facebook.
Via Hi-Fructose and Lila Vert.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Dark entries: Conceptual photography that will nourish your nightmares
For the discerning Satanist: Demonic sculptures made from bones
Meat: Strange, disturbing and grotesque sculptures of flesh and bone
Realistic sculptures of free-floating body parts, ‘humans’ trapped in formaldehyde & other oddities