Justine Cooper "Terminal"
Daneyal Mahmood Gallery
This event has ended.
Daneyal Mahmood Gallery presents TERMINAL a two-part installation by Justine Cooper. Included is RAPT I and II, marking the 10 year anniversary of these seminal works.
Cooper's work expresses multiple ideas of desire, drawing from the fields of medicine and science, which outwardly may seem far from desire. Yet there is a desire by natural science to rationalize our sublime world, to understand where we came from, and perhaps where we are heading. There is a desire by medicine to push the physical and chemical boundaries of our bodies into places that may make us healthier or happier. Through her art, Cooper manifests her curiosity as to how these areas intersect with us as a society and as individuals
The title of the current show refers to her new series of large format photographs depicting medical robots and mannequins. These sophisticated manikins, typically connected up to computers, simulate living situations from crisis to childbirth. At once alien and familiar, they represent the feats of modern medical technology. Far from the public dissections of the 17th century, these private theaters play out imagined traumas for the benefit of doctors and surgeons honing their skills. In this landscape, the abject body of the patient is dispensed with and supplanted by creations that are neither virtual, nor real. At a time when medical intervention can be so de-humanizing, when technology is criticized for removing us from reality, these images create a perverse inversion. The artist found that the personnel charged with the care of the mannequins had humanized these objects into subjects by naming them, dressing them in holiday attire and constructing a narrative through their care. These million dollar manikins embody memories of daily life, offering up their injuries and procedures as rather austere visual diaries in the era of Second Life and the blogosphere.
RAPT (1998) has been celebrated internationally as a work of great complexity and beauty. RAPT I is a computer animation created from hundreds of images produced when Cooper voluntarily underwent six hours of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanning. RAPT II is an installation comprised of 76 of the MRI axial scans, printed on architectural film, suspended and aligned to create a 24 foot long floating body. Rapt is what the artist calls a universal Self Portrait, originally posing the question of if and how new technologies shift the way we can conceive of space, by presenting us with an alternate, elastic interpretation of the body.. "Just as the body is re-codified through medical technology, so its internal spaces and brute physicality are remapped and made accessible in these works. Living flesh is translated into malleable data"
Bringing the two bodies of work together, made 10 years apart, highlights Cooper's continued and inventive use of the body. Whether factual in the case of RAPT, or fictional in the Terminal portraits, her work forges relationships between identity and medicine in a technologically advanced society.
Media
Schedule
from May 08, 2008 to June 14, 2008