Amanda Mehl's Amehlica Part III: Divinity at Picture Theory

Amanda Mehl, Installation views, Amehlica Part III: Divinity, Picture Theory, 2025.

By MARK BLOCH, May, 2025

Is the earliest example of a fictional world Plato’s mythical city and lost civilization from “Ancient Athens” in the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantis in 360 BC? Dante's Divine Comedy, begun in 1308 AD, conjures up more recent worlds constructed by  J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis--everything between Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels and the country Freedonia in Duck Soup, the 1933 Marx Brothers film. The comtemporary word worldbuilding seems to have originated in Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs a 1965 book by Richard A. Lupoff exploring the work of the creator of Tarzan and other science-fiction, fantasy, and adventure novels. The book created renewed interest in  Burroughs’ work during the 1960s when black and white Tarzan movies from earlier in the century were easy to find on TV starring the vegetarian hunk Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympian swimmer turned actor, now largely forgotten by all but a few boomers and Mia Farrow, whose mother played Tarzan's partner, Jane.

Other examples of constructed worlds include the Conan series, the planet Arrakis in the Dune series, and the work of Ursula K. Le Guin. Wakanda from Black Panther or Genovia from The Princess Diaries are not real places, but vividly imagined and now more memorable than Tarzan. In George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divided into three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia fighting each other in a perpetual war with Oceania's citizens only knowing about the world what the government tells them. Gilead from The Handmaid's Tale and The Hunger Games' dystopian Panem are other inventions, used to explore dark themes and cautionary tales.

Amanda Mehl, Installation view, Amehlica Part III: Divinity, Picture Theory, 2025.

Artists have always created imaginary worlds. A conceptual country founded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono called Nutopia, was founded to address the couple's immigration problems when J. Edgar Hoover wanted to kick them out of the country. Fook Island was an imagined island created by the South African artist Walter Battiss. A Dutch pre-mail artist named Donald Evans was an expatriot American known for creating hand-painted postage stamps (known as artistamps) of fictional countries. Between 1971 and 1977, he painted faux stamps issued by forty-two countries he conjured in his imagination and catalogued all of his creations in a book he called the Catalogue of the World, a would-be stamp-collecting catalogue.

Carl T. Chew, another mail artist, who called himself, “Pluto's Most Famous Unknown Artist” sent designs for gorgeous 7’ by 8’ wool rugs to be weaved by natives in Katmandu, Nepal from 1983-1998: postage stamp designs writ large for his own imaginary domains. Fluxnotes aka Flux Buxnots  or Fluxus Bucks are an artistic project from Julie Jefferies aka “ex posto facto” (her nom de plume) which she started in 1994. It is an artists' fake banknote distributed in the Mail Art network as an homage to the movement Fluxus by her and others. Many other artists in the international mail art network have created imaginary worlds with imaginary currency, stamps, rubber stamps and other ephemera. You could say it is part of their modus operandi.

Amanda Mehl, Installation view, Amehlica Part III: Divinity, Picture Theory, 2025. Courtesy Picture Theory.

An enormous 2014 tapestry Comfort Blanket by Sir Grayson Perry was based on the design of a very familiar monetary object – the £10 banknote.  Several artists use money as a subject or material in their work, exploring its symbolic weight and material properties. Artists like Mark Wagner create art featuring currency, often with themes of wealth, identity, and cultural representation. Amai Rawls uses currency as his primary medium; J.S.G. Boggs is famous for his hand-drawn depictions of banknotes, often with humorous or satirical details; Ron Rotter is an origami artist who transforms U.S. banknotes into three-dimensional designs.  Of course, Andy Warhol is famous for his “dollar bill" paintings, comments on consumerism and the value of money which he did in 1962—the same year he chose Campbell’s Soup cans as a subject and perhaps equally important to his personal mythology.

This is the third installment of Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist Amanda Mehl’s manifestation of her fictional nation, Amehlica, cleverly bridging the worlds of visual art, film and local culture and exploding the boundaries between politics, religion and the physical body to create her own new planet or land or country, modelled after herself and created in her own image.

Amanda Mehl, Video Still from There is no “I” in Team, 2022. Courtesy Picture Theory.

The Buenos Aires-born founder of the experimental fashion label Amehl works in various mediums including installation, sculpture, video, photography, digital art, performance, and fashion. She has organized several shows for the brand that were covered by The Cut, NY Post, CBS, Elle, and featured in Vogue Italia, Brazil, Mexico and Latin America.

Her previous  2022 and 2023 exhibitions in this series interrogated Amehlica’s imagined political and athletic institutions, exposing tensions and absurdities within overlapping systems of governance and competition. Now Mehl continues to blur fiction and reality as well as media, as she offers a thought-provoking critique of the forces that define culture, bringing spirituality and money into the mix.

Amanda Mehl, Installation view at Times Square, Amehlica Part I: Hustle for the Muscle, 2022. Courtesy Picture Theory.

In this third act, Divinity, her focus shifts to another trio: a three-part sci-fi saga looking back (within her imagined reality) on Mesoamehlica, the dreamy but detailed Industrial Revolution that created it, and then ahead to a dystopian 2065—where a fascist named Trumpelona rules as a dictator, reminiscent of a cross between the uncertain future of her native country’s military coup from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, a Simón Bolívar-like ruler-oligarch-entrepeneur, perhaps the recently rejected strongman, Jair Bolsonaro and of course, her internal world. Mehl plays every part in this narcissistic passion play, sometimes earnestly, but mostly deadpan, hilariously tongue in cheek.

Her narrative highlighting religious rituals, expanding the nation’s mythology and exploring how collective identity are shaped by introducing her own belief system, Techneon, parallels and points to eerily prescient real-world histories and possible futures.

Amanda Mehl, Installation at Times Square, 2023. Courtesy Picture Theory.

Her visual palette of churches, humor, performance, storytelling and universe-building read like a delusional QVC infomercial all glitched up with nowhere but a pandemic and its aftermath to go.

Layered wall hangings on metal rods present printed textured computer imagery that include four memorable scenes from Mehl’s personal mythology: a mystical glam cat queen under a satellite formation of icons; her awkward 19th century Simón Bolívar-meets-Jeff Bezos type (with bride) surrounded by banknotes and coins; a Star Trek-like homage to space travel with melodramatic iconographic Socialist Realism circles; and finally18 geometrically placed iconic pope-angels surrounding a techy kaballa tree full of symbols.

Amanda Mehl, Amehlica Part II: Bread & Circuses (2023). Courtesy Picture Theory.

There are also large facsimiles of currency from her new country and shiny, cheesey, cringey but thoughtful well-executed still images that fade into each other like touristy bus advertisements for her strange land mounted among other props. And finally, a magnificent altar brings the entire scene into focus, launching the entire gallery into orbit like a 4D shrine. 

Mehl’s previous installments of this project, Amehlica Part I: Hustle for that Muscle (2022), her narrative that unfolded in a 2023 Times Square billboard installation with ZAZ10 during the pandemic and “There is no ‘I’ in Team” in which she played every character competing in a national sporting championship which also showed at Times Square, 2022. That role-play evolved into a fully realized world—one that serves as both a satire and a reflection of societal structures and set her future course.

Amanda Mehl, Installation view, Amehlica Part II: Bread and Circuses, 2023. Courtesy Picture Theory.

Amehlica Part I: Hustle for that Muscle (2022) began as the conceptual film for her fashion brand Amehl. “There is no ‘I’ in Team--is when the project Amehlica started,” said Rebekah Kim, owner of Picture Theory on West 28th Street in Chelsea. “Amanda plays every character in a national sporting championship. She's pretty brilliant! Then in 2023 came Amehlica Part II: Bread & Circuses.”

Amanda added, “The phrase Bread and Circuses is from a collection of ancient Roman satirical poems. It refers to keeping the people fed and entertained to prevent revolution. Amehlica’s Olympic-style sporting competition can be seen as a microcosm of Trump’s America.  Both are characterized by mania and sensationalism of a victory, pride, ‘greatnesss’, commercialization, and corporate sponsorship.”

“The circus in my work is a sporting event called the ‘Semiannual Amehl National Spirit Games’ which take place in my fictional country. The reoccurring trophy imagery is a metaphor for the American Dream. The national competition is a metaphor for capitalism. ”

Amanda Mehl, Amehlican Peso 5000, 2025. Courtesy Picture Theory.

Sometimes as many as 40 images of her ended up in a frame together in the very entertaining “There is no ‘I’ in Team.” Each unique visage was battling for my attention. Every gesture wanted to control the imaginary news cycle, 100% fake, making a play for world peace as conceived at the height of the COVID lockdown. A dizzying assault of flags, loving cups, harps, buildings, cobblestoned streets, gymnasiums, pedestals, newscasts, necklaces, made up faces, phallic trophies, costumes, hairstyles, wigs, and costume changes in the video were inspiring, multi-pronged and funny. Impressive. Compelling. False starts,  awkward pauses, stiff gestures and blatant product placement, all intentional, threw me off repeatedly as I watched, never getting used to them. In the end the chaos was disarming transporting me to this well-fortified but still somehow vulnerable new world.

Perhaps this a good time to note that the the 1966 ‘Dressed Head’ sculpture of Queen Elizabeth II in profile by Arnold Machin is considered the ‘most reproduced artwork’ in the world ever, as it was printed over three billion times on postage stamps. It is a reminder for me and the Amanda Mehl's of this world that artists and political types have always tried to get ahead by creating worlds or issuing money containing their own image.WM

PICTURE THEORY
Amanda Mehl Amehlica Part III: Divinity
April 3–May 3, 2025