In Reach (2000) and Trap
- self portrait (1998) I have had Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans -
a medical imaging technology - taken of my hands and head, respectively.
A restructuring of (my) body space takes place that necessitates the
viewer using their own body to move around the work and reconstitute
the single slices back into a unified space. What I find interesting
are the translations/transformations it is possible to put ourselves
through and how they emblemize technology's ability to impact and shape
our conceptions of space. At the point of imaging, solid organic tissue
is transposed into an ephemeral digital language of zeroes and ones,
in much the same way that a cipher uses substitution to encrypt information.
In the resulting physical work I attempt to retain some of the ephemerality
of that earlier translation into digital space, some of the obscurity
of the cipher, while offsetting them against the apparent tangibility
of the body. Instead of a simple dichotomy between invisible and apparent,
virtual and physical, continuity and displacement, an attempt at a less
distinct or concrete disclosure is being made where the gap becomes
the viewer's space.
click image at left for color enlargement