The artificiality of such a scene – an artificially made image showing an artificial production – is typical of Demand’s tautological practice in its ability to question photographic truth in a self-referential manner. Demand creates life-size cardboard models with meticulous detail before photographing and then destroying them. Exemplifying this allusion to its medium is Copyshop (1999), referring to how things are made and to its own artifice.

Nature has been replaced with new forces that are both more resourceful and economical, and presented here as wholly artificial, reminding us that our idea of nature as an idyll is obsolescent and highly fabricated. 

As in Pond, previous representations of nature in Demand’s work such as Clearing (2003) and more recently Bloom (2014) demonstrate how our notion of nature is anachronistic and can border on the kitsch. Archetypes and ideals are exposed as not only false but potentially misleading.

The reality of farming and food supply today is the glowing pink lab, spearheaded by firms that have developed highly efficient vertical farms and other technological solutions for agriculture. 

During our current crisis, the result of excess and poor management of the relationship between humans and nature, we are asked to recalibrate and reconsider how we treat the natural world and try to conquer it.

Canopy (2020) speaks of this moment, showing a solitary balcony with its canopy fully extended, its inhabitants shielding not only from the harshness of the sun’s rays but the trouble in nature that has unfolded around them. The ordered seriality of the balconies is in contrast to both the blind’s decorative yellow edge and the disorder beyond, as the world fails to contain a virulent disease. The lone crumpled paper towel of Tissue (2008) becomes newly pertinent too, alluding both to the state-ordered messages to wash your hands and the carelessness with which we discard what we no longer need.

“The patterns are flat, instructive paper models for making three-dimensional garments, captured in the two-dimensional format of the photograph. They are cut-outs in the shape of the garments, and in that way already in the process of becoming three-dimensional.” –Karen van Godtsenhoven¹

Demand’s studies within the atelier expose its complex working practices whilst the abstraction of his photographic compositions do not reveal full garments, rather the fragments of a greater whole. Like the earlier architecture-based Model Studies, by offering just sections the viewer is left to complete the final product themselves, or delight in the fullness of these fractions.

Annotations, instructions and traces of tape and glue are visual markers of the labor that has worked to create them, bearing witness to their life of use. Shimmering tracing paper patterns testify to the practice of copying and reworking existing patterns.

The rigidity of the multi-colored thick card patterns is in contrast to the seemingly haphazard means of presentation and operations of the atelier. Demand sees a similarity with the fragmented patterns to Matisse’s paper cut-outs, abandoned leftovers on the studio floor that could become part of a work, presented in Atelier (2014).

Unlike the architectural models of his earlier Model Studies, which may be used to trigger a seemingly endless chain of thought, Alaïa’s patterns are designed for use and reuse as a manual for the repetition of an idea in fabric. Whether used in the process of architects or fashion designers, the working model has an inbuilt history and biography. Demand continues to investigate how our interpretation of new and existing models preclude the structures we inhabit, and in his pursuit of technical exactitude and sculptural form, he studies the model as a way of rebuilding an impression of the world.