MUSCLEWORLD
Matthew Mifsud
10.01.25-13.01.25
The titan of the digital looms over the visual language of modernity. Digital image and video dominate the perceptive language of materiality, the world and self are understood not through their inherent corporeality but through the heightened lens of the digital. Through cultural omnipresence, the image has become flesh, this ouroboric amalgam forsaking the permanence of the digital; now succumbing to the inevitable rot of materiality. In MUSCLEWORLD, the wrestler/fighter embodies this entwining of degradation and immortality; their existence predicated on the duality of self-destruction and legendary spectacle. To build muscle is to destroy the body; through digitalisation the self distorts. The breadth of photographic hyperabundance and ubiquity of visual cliches have broken from the constraints of the pictorial, bleeding into the frameworks of corporeal perception. The simulacra of the image exists outside of perceptive neutrality, the language of memory has been entirely reconstructed as an effigy of the image; the distortive gaze of digital artifice suffocates the physical, the hyperreality of replication exists in a state of visual monopoly. The body and image become inseparable. The body is recalled only as it is depicted and too as the image is echoed back through the screen. The bulging muscle is akin to the perceived fixity of the digital; the guise of spectacle and perpetuity erodes as the colossus crumbles under the weight of abundance and temporality. Discarded images are inevitably relegated to digital junkyards, only to be plundered as effigies of forgotten pertinence, the memory of significance long abstracted; the image calcifies, removed from meaning. A digital Ozymandias, buried by compression and dead links. The ephemeral biomechanical relationship between screen and flesh is magnified as form and language fragment through the hauntological lens. The avatar is indivisible from the self; the image becomes a herald of the unconscious digitisation of self-perception and memory. A vampiric palimpsest of simulacratic mimicry bastardises the image to a crude refraction of its origin as it is fettered to the artifice of both hyperreality and unreality; the fighter’s visage a champion of the collective degradation and inevitable collapse of body, image, and meaning.
Matthew Mifsud is an multidisciplinary artist from the western suburbs of Melbourne. His work examines the distortive capabilities of the corporeal figure and its symbiotic, degradative relation to archival media and subculture. Plundering forgotten images from digital junkyards, Mifsud collages new forms from their remains, embracing compression and artifact. Mifsud fetters the
intangible liminality of lowbrow cultural memory to the static immovability and finality of the sculptural form. Amalgamated allusions to memory, body, and their ouroboric impermanence compound, the simulacra blistering in saturated distortion. Crude iconography and abjection are embraced as a herald to the reflexive digital-escapism bred in response to materiality. Mifsud magnifies the ephemeral biomechanical relationship between screen and flesh; fragmenting form and language under the hauntological gaze.