NYAB Event - Amanda Turner Pohan “Desiring to be Data for Others”

Amanda Turner Pohan “Desiring to be Data for Others”

FiveMyles

This event has ended.

Amanda Turner Pohan’s practice seems a cool and rational one—at first. It is based on precise scientific manipulation of chemistry, with additional aural and visual elements. While her installation appears clean, methodical, a presentation organized with minimalist clarity and order, one senses a vague urgency to quantify the unquantifiable.

Vials contain various arcane liquids; vapors and perfumed formulas derive from ‘recorded data measured by sensors of the heartbeat of the artist.’ Yet, the clinical easily transmutes into the poetic and the personal. The effect is oddly sensual, even erotic as the artist manages an olfactory manipulation that is subtle and evocative. Finally, Pohan’s creative processing, packaging, and ordering, conjures a self-portrait that becomes a metaphor for the bodied and disembodied nature of human response.

At the entrance of the gallery stands an ablution station filled with coffee beans and lemons to cleanse the olfactory palette; a freestanding glass shower recirculates a heated and steaming perfumed fluid through its system; a four by eight foot sheet of plexiglass adhered with remnants of hair, dust, dirt, and skin from a carpet hangs on the wall; a parabolic speaker playing a looped conversation between two women hangs from the ceiling; a collection of glass jars containing the shower’s fluid stand on a shelf.

The formula for the perfumed shower fluid is derived from recorded data measured by sensors of the heartbeat of the artist; the residue adhered to the plexiglass is taken from the bedroom rug of the artists deceased mother; the conversation playing on loop from the speaker is an interview between a female doctor and nurse attempting to quantify bodily sensations; the bottles of fluid are for replenishing the shower’s liquid content to account for eventual loss by evaporation.