Doug and Mike Starn

(American, born 1961)

Doug and Mike Starn are collaborative American artists and identical twins. Working across photography, printmaking, and sculptural installations, their work poses questions about existence and its central primacy in our lives. Their photo-based mixed-media works include unconventional materials such as Plexiglas, wood, nails, and transparency film, allowing them to reinterpret images from art history, and incorporate them into their own aesthetic. “We're trying to show that photography isn't an image, it's a three-dimensional object,” they have explained. “It can have the same kind of growth and limitations or non-limitations as the other arts. It doesn't have to be confined to a craft, or simply the photographer's eye and then the skill of printing.” Their recent work has dealt mainly with notions of light and dark both as perceivable phenomena and psychological states, manifesting itself in photographs of moths and silhouettes of bare branches. They were born in 1961 in New Jersey and have been collaborating since the age of 13. The brothers went on to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before moving to New York City in the 1980s. Today, the Starns' works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among others. The artists live and work in Beacon, NY.