An Introduction:

Karen Holzberg, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C and the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL

The exhibition embodyDISEMBODY brings together seven photographic and installation artists whose work addresses issues of corporeality. For each of these artists, the human form whether in presence, absence, or transformation is a vehicle for exploring the elegance of human existence. Their explorations range from core biological issues and consequences to the mystery of consciousness with all the beauty and fragility of simply being alive. The result is a dialogue between an anatomical view of the body and an emotive or metaphorical view of the body.
This exhibition thus speaks through the equal and eloquent codes of artist and scientist. At first glance, art and science may be viewed as two worlds hosting opposite poles of thought - or at least inhabiting opposite sides of the brain. In truth, they share a creative drive that has both intellectual and emotional dimensions. Both scientists and artists are similarly impassioned by intertwining spirals of ‘discovery,’ ‘experience’ and ‘meaning’ in our world. Yet there exists intangible aspects of living and being that neither art nor science working alone can fully impart. embodyDISEMBODY therefore explores a rich melding of the two.

embodyDISEMBODY reveals the intrinsic beauty in science, its methodology, its rituals and related accouterments. Instruments utilized in the process of scientific observation - glass vessels, precision gauges and scales - impart new realities when transformed into objects of observation themselves. An artist’s juxtaposition or isolation of these instruments gives as much power to their form as to their function, as much metaphor as empirical narrative. And just as scientists read and decode photographs, x-rays, and magnetic resonance images (MRI’s) to gain insight, so does the artist. This consequence of light and film can transform our views and perceptions of our own bodies, especially of the hidden worlds within. In fact, theorist Walter Benjamin once compared the camera to a surgeon’s knife in that the camera operated similarly on the human body by seeing it in fragments and was thus able to penetrate more deeply into its true existence and reality.

Visually, each of these artists utilizes photography in their approach to the theme of corporeality. For example, the x-ray images of Alan Stone and Sabrina Raaf communicate intimate yet anonymous testimonies of the interior structure of the body through the ethereal and sinuous lines of bone. When viewed by a non-scientist’s eye, these luminous sentinels of fragments can take on a lyrical and foreign beauty as well as metaphorical references to our physical being and ultimate temporality. In Karen Holzberg’s work we witness haunting physical and psychological studies of the emotive body through ‘kinesics’. As opposed to traditional scientific approaches, her work does not offer clinical truth or recorded reality but a felt and experienced reality: highly visceral and sensual representations of corporeal drama dissected into two groups, "Heads" and "Bodies." Debra Kaufman appropriates photographs from scientific textbooks documenting human subjects suffering from various physical diseases and maladies. On their bodies she collages faces of Renaissance sitters and thereby lends these deformed beings the poise of martyrs and saints. Kaufman’s compositions impart a new sense of beauty as well as aberration to her ‘models’ who customarily are subject to society's denial. Mary Jo Toles employs scientific processes in creating her art work including MRI’s and high-voltage photograms. Her richly toned images are tableaux or portraits primarily of brain sections - that central core of the human nervous system, home of the mind, seat of the self, sectioned, laid bare, and richly mapped. Holly Morrison’s work contains the most ethereal conceptions of the body. She uses photos of anatomy and other landscapes on which she paints in gouache, graphite, and ink with beautiful fluidity and coloring - rich crimsons and bone yellows - which suggest vital fluids and viscous elements. Her drawn lines vaguely outline human forms and ‘neural structures’ which seem to be both pushing forward and disappearing from the plane of the paper. Ilyse Soutine’s images represent the ultimate clinization of the body: the body as conspicuously absent, present only through the artifacts of institutional settings such as hospitals and prisons. She uses elements such as a box of tissue on a stainless steel table to represent, symbolically, human warmth and empathy but, visually, to emphasize their objectified and sterilized state.
Together, the works included in embodyDISEMBODY contain the resonance, the insight, and the empathy of artistic vision along with the inspiration and analytical tools of science. The result of this union is a penetration of emotional layers and bodily surfaces in order to find visual and intellectual meaning in the texts of corporeal existence.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

Albert Einstein.

This should give you an initial attitude in which to view the ensuing spectra this blog is to introduce.

Yours,

Mr. Roger M. Christian