MARY MANCHIN

Mary Manchin creates beautiful macabre pieces to make you rethink the past and how we perceive it. Almost all of her photos are original images from the early 1900s that she collects from estate sales and oddity shops around Los Angeles. She scans in her found photos to preserve the original and photo manipulates and digitally paints them in photoshop to make them a past you've never seen. No one really knows the true stories behind old photos if no one kept telling the story. Even then the past starts to blur as details are lost through generations. Mary creates these photos to show a side where maybe you really never knew the story this whole time. 

When she was younger she would create these colorful surreal photoshop pieces. She would incorporate her family and friends, but even then they had a dark twist to them. She had always had a fascination with old photos and the stories behind them. One of her first freelance jobs was working for a a funeral home scanning in old photos from people who had passed and removing all the dust and scratches for their slideshow at their funeral. From there Mary combined her two passions and has been creating these haunting yet beautiful pieces since 2013. 

When Mary isn’t photo manipulating photos she creates taxidermy terrariums. She always wanted pieces that incorporated life and death while still paying respects to the animals that have since passed, but could never really find what she was looking for, so she started to create them herself. Her taxidermy pieces are in an array of antique/antique looking frames, domes and candle holders. She creates these terrariums in vessels that match the feeling that her photos give you. She believes that taxidermy should be more than just framed pieces with nothing else in them looking so lifeless and not celebrating the life they had.