Me and Mommy Drinking II

Robert Melee’s deliberately-campy photographs explore themes of intimacy, kitsch, sexuality and subculture. Many of these works take as their subject the artist’s relationship with his outlandish mother, Rose Melee, who often appears in flashy, provocative clothing and heavy make-up, and in various states of intoxication. The artist’s staged compositions offer an intimate glimpse at this bizarre mother-and-son dynamic, blurring the boundaries between private life and theater. In Me and Mommy Drinking II, the pair becomes an unsettling modern Pietà, the mother cradling her grown son in her lap in an unconventional updating of traditional depictions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.