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Untitled #8 from the Modern Mythos Series 2: The New Gods, 2022
A Photograph by Christopher W Weeks
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Untitled #8 from the Modern Mythos Series 2: The New Gods
Digital Image / RA-4 C- Print
30x40 / $1000
This piece comes from my current body of work, “Modern Mythos: The New Godsâ€, which was begun in 2017, and fuses art history and popular culture references to explore the human predilection for myth-making as a means of social commentary addressing current events through a conflation of mythological narratives of the past and present.
From mankind’s earliest years, myth-making has been at the core of every recorded human civilization. Fantastical stories of Gods, great heroes, scandalous villains, and menacing monsters have been used to make sense of the world, address social mores and taboos, function as social commentary, and present idealized versions of our best (and sometimes worst) selves. In this context, art functions as a direct reflection of the society that creates it, and therefore becomes an important tool for examining artists’ perceptions of the worlds in which they live.
My work in this series follows in these well-worn historical footsteps. Building upon the current super-hero obsession in popular culture, this work merges contemporary fascinations with celebrity culture and popular media storytelling with art history in order to draw parallels between the the legacies of historical and contemporary myth making.
