Through their ethnological pastiche, Nathan Mabry’s work combines references to art history, South American artefacts, and popular culture, to create provocative monuments entwining high culture, primitive ritual, and contemporary experience. In A Very Touching Moment (Pitching A Tent), Mabry’s figure – inspired by Pre-Columbian Moche sculpture, and suggestive of Rodin’s The Kiss – sits as a grotesque fertility totem atop a plinth reminiscent of the work of John McCracken or Donald Judd. Through juxtaposing these disparate forms, Mabry points to a totemic ascendancy, tracing a narrative lineage between ancient liturgy and modern day systems of museological value.