As spouses and artistic collaborators, Nicholas and Sheila Pye extract their content from daily life, using themselves as subjects and models. “Vanitas,” this exhibition of five digital C-prints and one video, examined marriage through the tropes of Northern European painting. Skulls, fire, rotten fruit, and flowers act as props and symbols as the couple take on different theatrical roles, sometimes in costume, sometimes naked.

Animism I and Animism II (both 2008) are a pair of larger-than-life portraits. The husband and wife peer out from a shadowy bramble of dead leaves, weeds, and vines with confrontational gazes. Their faces are caked in mud or stage makeup, that has cracked away from their eyes, suggesting decomposition. In both portraits the combination of scale, props, and facial expressions connotes a powerful, primal sensuality.

In the eleven-minute film Loudly Death Unties (2007) the Pyes pose as a husband and wife living in a dilapidated shack rich with decaying texture—a set they created in their studio. The plot refers to various folktales and culminates in a dramatic climax. Subdued in color and sound, with original violin music used to haunting effect, the movie is theatrically beautiful yet expresses the anxiety inherent in every coupling: which one of us will die first?

The Pyes’ greatest talent is their ability to take such common, albeit disquieting, ideas and translate them into taut and intelligent imagery filled with both emotion and art-historical allusions.

—Cara Ober