"Forlorn" Drawing

Visual Artist Miles Ladin creates drawings, photography, and paintings with mordant wit. His satiric art explores contemporary society, both mainstream and the world of privilege, from a critical standpoint. Whether focusing on New York City black tie galas, the world of high fashion, carnival culture or the medical industrial complex, his work is a visual commentary about wealth, power, fame, desire and identity. Dark humor and visual complexity permeate his artistic vision. His photography relating to celebrity culture has been internationally exhibited, and collected. Starting in the 1990s his work was regularly published in The New York Times, W Magazine, and WWD. In addition to photographic prints, his practice includes artist’s books that integrate ideas about literature, biography, and narrative. These editions include the 2015 “Supermodels at the End of Time”, which is included in the MoMA / Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection. This volume combined Ladin’s photography from the 1990s with text by Bret Easton Ellis. In 2016 Ladin created an installation for Hudson Guild, NY that combined 20 years of his imagery that formed a sardonic commentary on the American Dream. In his latest body of work Ladin scalps the glossy veneer of contemporary American health care using the visual language of a classic childhood board game Operation. This series of large scale paintings is a metaphor for our society’s medical practices — under scrutiny, under the knife, and desperately in need of healing.