Seven international artists whose works question our understandings of the human body are featured in the next exhibition at the New Westminster New Media Gallery.
Corpus opens on Jan. 25, running until April at the gallery at Anvil Centre.
“The works are poetic, disturbing, playful and profound,” says a press release. “These seven are extraordinary, innovative practitioners; exploring the boundaries of the human body and then questioning those very boundaries and ethics. Each conducts research with scientists, engineers, researchers and specialists in biogenetics. These emergent art-science-technology interactions have been described as biogenetic, transgenic, biotech, bioart. They point towards future creative practices.”
Included in the show are:
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Canada/Mexico) – Ultimo Suspiro (Last Breath)
Lozano-Hemmer is a prolific Canadian artist and 2015 Governor General’s Award winner whose works have been collected by the likes of the Museum of Modern Art and Tate. Ultimo Suspiro was one of the works for which he won the Governor General’s Award. It’s a biometric portrait machine that has captured and forever holds a single human breath. The machine breathes 10,000 times a day and sighs 158 times. This edition holds the breath of Cuban singer Omara Portuondo.
Catherine Richards (Canada) – L’intrus
Richards’s work includes a sculptural glass heart in a glass bell jar, using the spectator as part of a greater electromagnetic system. Visitors are invited to hold the work, at which point it excites, lights and begins to beat. This work was created as part of the Hybrid Bodies project, an investigation into heart transplantation.
Eduardo Kac (U.S.A./Brazil) – The Natural History of the Enigma
Kac is an award-winning pioneer in bioart who teaches at the Chicago Art Institute. Over six years, Kac and plant biologist Neil Olszewski create a new life form, a plantimal called Edunia – a genetically engineered hybrid of the artist and a petunia. The flower expresses the artist’s DNA through its red veins. The seed is on display in Corpus along with the biogenetic documentation that forms the basis of the work; the flowering plant will be exhibited in Corpus Part II.
Revital Cohen (Israel) and Tuur Van Balen (Belgium) – Electrocyte Appendix
Cohen and Van Balen’s work is held by major collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art. Electrocyte Appendix is a video and sound work that documents some future scenario in which a useless organ could be exchanged for a more useful artificial organ and implanted into the body, allowing people to become electric organisms.
Verena Friedrich (Germany) - Transducers
Friedrich is an artist in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Aging. In this work, she has collected a single hair from a number of different donors. Using an electronic transducer, each hair is stimulated to reach, generating a unique sound based on the donor’s hair sample. The work questions the dominance of science in describing and classifying life.
Agi Haines (U.K.) – Drones With Desires
For this work, an MRI of the artist’s brain was taken and then coded into an algorithm and imprinted on a human-scale balloon that learns about its own anatomy and environment as it moves through the space via a drone. As the drone learns, the network updates, showing us how the brain might change if it was in a completely different anatomical structure.
The New Westminster New Media Gallery is at Anvil Centre, 777 Columbia St. For information, see www.newmediagallery.ca or call 604-875-1865.
