Ms & Mr - Profile

"Essentially we wanted to create a new history, a shared history, where we both existed in each other's past," says Richard Nova-Milne. "And in doing so we sort of created a parallel world."

Richard and wife Stephanie, aka Ms & Mr, are two young Sydney artists in this year's Primavera exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Their exhibit, I Need You Here and Not Here Too, consists of juvenalia such as bright watercolours telling the Macbeth story that Stephanie did in primary school, and home movies of Richard as a child. These relics have been manipulated by the adult artists, inserting each other magically into each other's younger years, before they had even met.

Stephanie's Macbeth paintings, clearly the work of a talented kid, now have two extra characters – Ms & Mr themselves, hanging out, interacting with the cast and in one hilarious image, fucking like Scottish bunnies. A copy she painted in year seven of William Dobell's The Cypriot (1940)is hung next to a contemporary portrait of Richard in the same pose – and the physical similarities between the two are startling.

Home videos of "little Richard", meanwhile, now feature the grown-up Stephanie, interacting with her future husband like a ghostly beckoning presence.

"We're trying to explore relationships that can't exist beyond the screen," says Stephanie. "And so the age gap, and being able to work with another person across time and space, is like the sci-fi, trippy and intellectually interesting core of it."

"The heart of it is that we just wanted to be with each other, prior to knowing each other," says Richard.

And what's the significance of the duo's name? "We wanted to create an identity that was the one artist, because that was really what the work was, that collaborative element," explains Stephanie. "It kind of disrupts the natural order of things, which is important for us. And also it contains our initials – Stephanie, Richard, S, R."

Primavera 08 exhibits at the MCA until 30 Nov.

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