Head Shoulders Genes & Toes

Carapace by Judith Rushin Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts

Head, Shoulders, Genes & Toes

“The sciences lift us outside of experience, so that we can more clearly survey it. The arts immerse us in experience, so that we can more fully encounter it.”—Jonathan Keats

Art and science are intersecting with increasing frequency and in some cases becoming harder to differentiate. Artists are gaining access to the growing amount of surplus equipment and laboratories that were once off limits, enabling them to use cutting edge technologies and even living matter as art materials….Art and science have always been linked. Consider Leonardo da Vinci’s fifteenth century inventions or the camera obscura that the Venetian artist Canaletto is believed to have used in composing his paintings. Seurat used the physics of color to create his vibrant pointillist effects. Before he discovered penicillin, Alexander Fleming made detailed polychromatic paintings from pigmented microbes. In the 1950s, op-artist Victor Vasarely was so strongly committed to science and technology that he predicted an art movement that would revolve around the transmission of electronic data and social exchange — the genre we now call new media. In the mid 1960s, engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer joined with artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman to form the now legendary E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) with a mission to encourage the collaboration of artists and engineers across the country. The list goes on.

Head, Shoulders, Genes & Toes is a survey of fifteen artists whose work addresses current scientific practice, explores the social and psychological effects of disease, and questions the effect of contemporary medicine on how we experience the world.

–Judith Rushin

Carolyn Henne, Suspended Self Portrait, 2002, 89 sheets of vinyl, pigmented skinflex paint, aluminum frame with steel rod, 72 x 72 x 22 inches. Photo credit: Terry Brown.

Carolyn Henne “The tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” —Thomas Henry Huxley

My work contends with personal and public states of being. It does not easily ride on the currents of the cool and intellectual. It wallows in the mundane but debilitating sentiments of the inner self that are unclaimed by the self that must maintain its profile in the world.

Carolyn Henne, Stitch, Decaysia and Slab

Carolyn Henne

My process involves the visceral and the sensual. I revel in the supple shapes and volumes that echo the pressure from within. In 2000, I made a set of tools that I have used in some way or another in almost every piece since. I made a casting of my body and gridded it off 3-dimensionally yielding 3-D “tiles” and the miniature or enlarged copies thereof are cast over and over again and reassembled in a variety of ways. I work with this set of tools in conjunction with the Visible Human Project dataset (an anatomical database developed by NIH).

Carolyn Henne, Twin “B” with Seat, castings of polyurethane elastomer skin and foam rubber with SkinFlex paint, Twin “B”: 62 x 21 x 21 inches, Seat: 13 x 21 x 21 inches. Photo credit: Terry Brown.

Carolyn Henne

The tiles chosen are very specific and limited in number. The pieces are like “blasons anatomiques—poetic tributes to the individual parts of the female body.... These can be blazons in praise, laudatio, or counterblazons in blame, vituperatio, expressing the spectrum from adoration to revulsion.” (Adam’s Navel, A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form by Michael Sims).—CH

Carolyn Henne lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida.

Joe Davis, Message in Many Bottles, c. 1986, 1679 generic, 16-ounce “Boston round” glass bottles in 18 partitioned racks, dimensions variable, installation photographed at the Hayden Science Library, MIT.

Message in Many Bottles is a reiteration of astronomer Frank Drake’s famous binary message for extraterrestrial intelligence transmitted from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in November, 1974. Davis’s version challenges purported “universality” of the message. “Ones” are interpreted as water-filled bottles and “zeros” are interpreted as empty bottles. MIT’s Hayden Library contains all the information necessary to decode the message, all of the information which the message refers to, and, supposedly, better-than- average terrestrial intelligence. Library visitors were evidently unable to decode the message.

Joe Davis Joe Davis is a Research Affiliate in the Department of Biology at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an “artist-scientist” at George Church Laboratory in Genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston. An artist who has done extensive research in molecular biology and bioinformatics for the production of genetic databases and new biological art forms, Davis has also produced welded steel permanent public sculpture and pedestrian lighting in Cambridge and has constructed sculptural installation pieces in museums and galleries worldwide. Considered one of the founders of Bioart, Davis has also garnered national/international attention for his several powerful radio transmissions conducted in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and for his laser sculpture in plastics, steel, and stone; laser teleoperator systems; and his sound-to-lightto- sound optoacoustic art.

Davis’s teaching experience in the MIT graduate architecture program (Master of Science in Visual Studies) and in undergraduate painting and mixed media at the Rhode Island School of Design has informed his artistic practice. He has recently been appointed as Visiting Professor of Media Arts at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, where he delivers several seminars and workshops annually. He has exhibited in the United States, Canada, France, Sweden, Portugal, Germany, Greece, Croatia and recently, at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. Davis has been the recipient of two Rockefeller Fellowships and was awarded a prestigious Golden Nica (Prix Ars Electronica) in Linz, Austria, in 2012 for his Bacterial Radio. http:// www.beautyunbound.com/. The World Technology Network named Davis one of 5 finalists for the prestigious 2012 World Technology Award in the Arts.

Davis has authored several articles in the scientific literature including “Genetic Art” in Nature Encylopedia of the Human Genome and “Rubisco Stars and the Riddle of Life” in NASA’s Astrobiology. One project, Microvenus, was recently cited in the journal Science as the first example of encoding human intellectual information into DNA (Science, vol. 337, 28 September, 2012, 1628). He has also penned articles for various books and periodicals in the arts including Leonardo and College Art Association’s Art Journal. His poem “Oasis” was published in 2012 in Wick, a journal of the Harvard Divinity School.

Selected Exhibitions & Projects: 2012 – Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. 2011 – BioFiction, Vienna Museum of Natural History; Resonance: Nature, Glass, and Standing Waves in the Art of Joe Davis, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Davis’s works include the sculpture Galaxy, a landmark fog fountain at Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA, near the MIT campus; Rubisco Stars, a transmission of a message to nearby stars from the Arecibo Observatory radiotelescope in Puerto Rico, carried out in November 2009; Poetica Vaginal, transmitted in 1986 from Millstone Radar at MIT Haystack Observatory in Groton, Massachusetts, and Microvenus, Riddle of Life and Milky Way DNA, the first artworks ever created with genetically modified organisms and the tools and techniques of molecular biology

Paddy Hartley, incisivus labii No. 1, 2002, tan cotton, waxed laces.

Paddy Hartley Throughout Paddy Hartley’s career, a constant theme of investigation in his work is the way in which the human body is changed, modified and reconfigured either by choice or circumstance. Addressing subjects such as steroid use in bodybuilding, the discourse between faith groups and biomedical research, the ethics of human cloning and conflict acquired injury, his work has taken the form of installation, ceramic, assembled objects, garment creation and modification.

Hartley’s artistic enquiry focuses predominantly on the face and how it is transformed or manipulated both through deliberate and unintentional intervention and the way in which we subsequently respond to these changes. Most notably in the design and production of his Face Corsets, producing facial implants for clinical use, and his output for Project Façade, Hartley responds to the surgical and personal stories of injured WWI servicemen.

Parallel to his artistic career, Hartley has also carved out a highly successful niche in the fashion industry under his birth name Patrick Ian Hartley. His Face Corsets and Neck Brace garments feature regularly in premiere fashion publications, most notably in Italian, Japanese and Chinese editions of Vogue, W Magazine, V Magazine, AnOther Magazine, Elle and Tatler. His work has been shot by iconic fashion photographers such as Rankin and Nick Knight and worn by likes of Dree Hemingway, Carmen Kass and Lady Gaga. Hartley’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is collected by museums in the UK and USA including the Wellcome Collection in London and The Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Having presented at many international cultural venues including The Victoria & Albert Museum and Science Museum in London amongst others, he also speaks extensively on artistic professional practice at Universities throughout the UK.

Hartley originates from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire and is a graduate of the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, with a Masters Degree in Sculpture and Ceramics with Distinction. He has been based in London’s East End since 2000. www.paddyhartley.com; www.patrickianhartley.com

Holly Hanessian, Blood and Taste, 2010, porcelain, Plexiglas, test tubes, hair, nail clippings, 10 x 11 x 4 inches.

Holly Hanessian I create art installations, objects and artist’s books, using craft based materials that explore the seemingly chance events that occur in our lives. My artwork responds to cultural shifts examining genetic markers and traits, the daily consumption of pharmaceuticals and adaptive behaviors on our DNA. These ideas are expressed using text as a narrative vehicle and white porcelain signifying a sanitary/ hygienic material.

Holly Hanessian, Touch in Real Time: a project of the senses, 2012.

Holly Hanessian

The element of chance conception has dominated my art practice for over a decade. Initially the focus was a personal narrative exploring the differences of when gender is formed in conception. My recent artwork explores recognizable biological symbols at the moment of inception, specifically, our genetic DNA and all of the information encoded within it.

My interest as an artist is to respond innovatively to what is taking place in our culture and create artwork that observes the predictable and accidental-yielding indescribable patterns of beauty and chaos.—HH

Suzanne Anker, MRI Butterfly, 2008, 15 inkjet prints on watercolor paper, each 13 x 19 inches, overall 65 x 57 inches approximately.

Suzanne Anker

Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Phillips Collection, P.S.1 Museum, the JP Getty Museum, the Mediznhistorisches Museum der Charite in Berlin, the Center for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, the Pera Museum in Istanbul and the Museum of Modern Art in Japan. Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Her writings have appeared in Art and America, Seed Magazine, Nature Reviews Genetics, Art Journal, Tema Celeste and M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Her work has been the subject of reviews and articles in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Nature and has been cited by Barbara Maria Stafford, Donna Haraway and Martin Kemp in their texts. Most recently she has collaborated with anthropologist Sarah Franklin, on an article and interview for Social Text journal. She has hosted twenty episodes of the Bio Blurb show, an Internet radio program originally on WPS1 Art Radio, in collaboration with MoMA in NYC, now archived on Alana Heiss’ Art On Air. She has been a speaker at the Royal Society in London, Cambridge University, Yale University, the London School of Economics, the Max-Planck Institute, University of Leiden, the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Banff Art Center any many others. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and the Nature and Technology BioArt Lab. www.suzanneanker.com

Heidi Kumao, detail of Tether, from the Timed Release series, 2010, mixed media video sculpture, glass case, painted bell jar, picture frame, glass and paper, DVD movie with audio, DVD player, video projector, approximately 36 x 28 x 30 inches.

Heidi Kumao Emerging from the intersection of sculpture, theater and technology, Heidi Kumao’s video and machine artworks challenge our perception of everyday behaviors. Kumao restages private and poetic gestures within cultural constructs to express subtle acts of defiance and the resilient chord of self-preservation. Each work is an intimate performance of minimalist theater that reveals itself in an animated tableau. Projects include: Timed Release, a series of video sculptures about surviving confinement. Part shadow play, part documentary, part optical illusion, these “situated cinema” works use visual storytelling to show how hostages, prisoners, slaves, victims of relocation camps and others have transcended the absurd by devising a survival strategy that necessitates careful navigation between powerlessness and regeneration through creativity. Tether explores the medical condition known as “Locked-in Syndrome” as described by Jean-Dominique Bauby in his book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. After a massive stroke, Bauby was completely paralyzed except for the use of his left eye that he used to “blink out” his memoir letter by letter, and with exceptional humor. Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out, a set of three female “performers:” electronically controlled, mechanical girls’ legs that respond to viewers’ presence through unsettling displays of behavior. Wired Wear, one-of-a-kind women’s clothing embedded with custom circuitry designed to draw attention to, and be worn during, the everyday “performances” of being a woman. Cinema Machines, hybrid projecting machines that use nineteenth century cinematographic technology to present a short filmic loop of a simple task or gesture repeated obsessively. Through the combination of photography, kinetics and sculptural assemblage, each piece explored the psychology of compulsive behavior, discipline and non-verbal communication. A solo exhibition of this work titled, Hidden Mechanisms, toured the U.S., Latin America and Europe.

Heidi Kumao is an Associate Professor at the School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. www.heidikumao.net.

Robert Sherer, Trojan Bouquet, 2006, HIV- blood on paper, 27 x 20 inches.

Robert Sherer Robert Sherer is an internationally exhibiting visual artist who explores race, gender, sexuality, and identity in his work. He is best known for his use of unconventional media (HIV+ blood and pyrography) and for four incidents of art censorship.

Sherer began experimenting with blood as an art medium in 1998. Since then, his Blood Works series has traversed a wide range of subjects: botanical illustration; the genitalia of plants; Gothicism; vampirism; predator and prey; dominance and submission; sexual expression; chastity; virginity; religion; atheism; sexual awakening; abstinence and sublimation; masturbation; narcissism; sexual promiscuity; religious/sexual/chemical ecstasy; maturation and aging; gender identity/expression/privilege; effeminacy and masculinity; male and female homosexuality; socio-religious criticism; southern identity; southern classicism; Greco-Roman classicism; slavery; slave ownership; race; racism; racial metaphors; nature’s imperatives; sexual/romantic relations; friendship; compatibility; dating/mating rituals: flirting pick-up lines; marriage; suffocating passion; sexual infidelity; reproduction, over-population; safe sex practices; serodiscordant relationships, the stigmatization of HIV; HIV status in relationships; AIDS in India; AIDS rage; political dissent; the plague; and, of course, death. The series is the subject of a monographic art book titled Blood Works: the Sanguineous Art of Robert Sherer, published by the Kennesaw State University Press in 2012.

Sherer studied the two-dimensional arts at Walker College, Atlanta College of Art, Georgia State University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania where he received his MFA degree in 1992. He is currently an art professor at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, Georgia. Career Archives: www.robertsherer.com

Erik Geschke, Latitude and Longitude, 2011, mixed media, 65 x 75 x 70 inches.

Erik Geschke My work deals with personal and social narratives more oblique than obvious. The images I use are primarily recognizable, whether human, other animals, the surrounding environment, or our own creations. Through the use of materials, imagery, and titles of varying origins and connotations, an awkwardness is created in which elements of both comedy and tragedy exist.

I am interested in and inspired by a diverse range of sources, including but not limited to, art history, political propaganda, and popular culture. These sources influence both the conceptual and formal aspects of my work.

It is my aim to draw viewers into my work with something that may seem familiar at first. Upon closer inspection, the presence of satire and the absurd in the work confronts the viewers and subverts what, at first, seemed familiar. As a result, the viewers’ perceptions of both the work and, hopefully, everything around them are in some way altered.

Among the themes explored in my current work are issues surrounding mortality, dystopia, and modernism. Within these works, I utilize humor, social commentary, and familiar iconography as a way to address complex subjects. I often reference elements of museum dioramas, cinema special effects, and industrial design. I am interested in the artifice of these working modes, since I believe they act as a metaphor for our own strategies to exist within an uncertain world.—EG

Brian Knep, Healing Pool, 2008, six-channel interactive video installation, computers, six video projectors, three video cameras, custom software, vinyl floor, 30 x 20 feet. Photo credit: John Glembin.

Brian Knep Brian Knep is a media artist working with cutting-edge science and technology. As the artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School, he works side-by-side with scientists, co-opting their tools and techniques to explore alternative meanings and ways of connecting to the world. Knep’s works range from microscopic sculptures for nematodes to large-scale interactive installations. His work has been shown at the RISD Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the New Britain Museum of Art, the McColl Center for Visual Art, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, and others. Knep’s Deep Wounds, commissioned by Harvard University, has won awards from Ars Electronica, the International Association of Art Critics, and Americans for the Arts, who selected it as one of the best public-art projects of 2007. He also has grants and awardsfrom Creative Capital, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the LEF Foundation, among others.

Knep holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science and a Master’s degree in Computer Science, both from Brown University. He also studied ceramics at the Radcliffe Ceramics Studio and glass blowing at Avon and Diablo Glass. Early in his career he worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Industrial Light & Magic, working on films such as Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, and Star Trek: Generations. While there, he developed tools including two for which he and three others were awarded technical Academy Awards. Knep also helped found Nearlife, a high-end design and technology company, creating interactive experiences for science and children’s museums. His publications have appeared in computer graphics and computer-human interaction journals.

Brian Knep lives and works in Boston and is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. www.blep.com

Adam Zaretsky, The Pineal Extendor, 2002, documentary image from research at SymbioticA, the School of Anatomy and Human Biology Art & Science Collaborative Lab, University of Western Australia, Perth. “We are able to grow pineal cells in culture and proliferate them on 3-D biopolymers . . . towards a prosthesis for enlightenment.” www. symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/residents/zarestsky

Adam Zaretsky While humor remains a mainstay in Zaretsky’s artwork and scientific practice, his endeavors are grounded in a very serious and complex understanding of biologic and genetic issues that are very much a part of contemporary society. Adam Zaretsky is an artist, or “bioartist,” who has worked as a research affiliate in Arnold Demain’s Laboratory for Industrial Microbiology and Fermentation in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Biology.

Zaretsky’s bio-artwork is motivated by his own set of ethical quandaries prompted by past history. Biology has been used for aesthetic purposes before, of course to horrifying consequence: “We slide into eugenics... We haven’t always shown the best of taste. Not that artists have always shown better taste, but they have shown obscure taste. If we start engineering for enhanced humans, then somebody has to engineer for ‘punk’ humans, for plaid humans. What I’m realizing is that we are coming close to genetically altering human beings according to popular fads.”

Adam Zaretsky, PhD, is a Wet-Lab Art Practitioner mixing Ecology, Biotechnology, Non-human Relations, Body Performance and Gastronomy. Zaretsky stages lively, hands-on bioart production labs based on topics such as: foreign species invasion (pure/impure), radical food science (edible/inedible), jazz bioinformatics (code/flesh), tissue culture (undead/semi-alive), transgenic design issues (traits/desires), interactive ethology (person/machine/nonhuman) and physiology (performance/stress). For the past decade Zaretsky has been teaching an experimental bioart class called VivoArts at: San Francisco State University (SFSU), SymbioticA (UWA), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), University of Leiden’s The Arts and Genomic Centre (TAGC), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Waag Society. He also runs a public life arts school: VASTAL (The Vivoarts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd.). He focuses on an array of legal, ethical, social and libidinal implications of biotechnological materials and methods with a focus on transgenic humans. www. youtube.com/VASTALschool; vastalschool@gmail.com

Beverly Fishman, Pill Spill, 2012, blown glass capsules, dimensions variable, installation at Galerie Richard, New York, NY.

Beverly Fishman

Beverly Fishman received her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1977, and her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1980. She subsequently taught at the College of New Rochelle, New York, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she has been Artist-in-Residence and Head of Painting since 1992.

Since 2000, Fishman has had over two-dozen one-person exhibitions at galleries in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Thessaloniki, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Her work has also been included in many thematic exhibitions addressing abstraction, technology, medicine, and the body. Recent exhibitions include Infinitesimal Eternity: Making Images in the Face of Spectacle, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT; Op Art: Then and Now at the Columbus Museum in Ohio; and Dreaming of a More Better Future at the Cleveland Art Institute Gallery.

Ms. Fishman has been awarded numerous honors including: the Toledo Museum of Art’s Guest Artist Pavilion Project (2010-2011); the Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2010); Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2005); a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003); a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant (1989); Artist Space Grant (1986/1990); and two Ford Foundation Grants (1979).

Her work has been reviewed and profiled in numerous art magazines, newspapers, and scholarly publications, the most recent of which include Modern Painters (2012), Artnet Magazine (2012), Glass Quarterly (2012), NY Arts Magazine (2012), the Wall Street Journal (2009), Art in America (2008), Barbara Maria Stafford’s Echo Objects: The Cognitive History of Images (2007), and Joe Houston and Dave Hickey’s Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s (2007). Ms. Fishman’s work may be found in many public collections including the Toledo Art Museum, the Miami Art Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Cranbrook Art Museum, the Kresge Art Museum, Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, and the United Nations Embassy in Istanbul. She is also included in the corporate collections of Hallmark, Inc., the Progressive Art Collection, Compuware, UBS Financial Services Inc., Daimler- Chrysler Corporation, Cantor Fitzgerald, and Prudential Life Insurance, among others.

www.beverlyfishmanstudio.com

Hunter Cole, Eody, 2010, photograph by the light of bioluminescent bacteria.

Hunter Cole

With biotechnology becoming a part of our daily lives, there is a movement of the art world to integrate art and biology. Specifically bioart is art that incorporates living organisms or materials from living organisms. Cole is often listed with other artists who create such work and the Artist discusses the unusual results of the integration of art and science in contemporary art in seminars she has given at the University of Michigan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) and the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. In the Living Drawings exhibition, Cole creates controlled line drawings using bioluminescent bacteria. The bacteria then grow in the host environment, becoming collaborators in the art, growing and then dying. Cole also photographs people and objects by the light of bioluminescent bacteria.

Cole created Radioactive Biohazard, reinterpreting science as art by looking at biotechnology from a positive perspective. In this exhibition, the Artist confronts issues related to human cloning, stem cell research and the human genome project, among others.

An experienced geneticist, Hunter Cole, formerly Hunter O’Reilly, teaches biology and art at Loyola University Chicago and reinterprets science as art through abstractions, digital art and installations and her work is shown internationally. She holds a PhD and a Master’s in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Bachelor of Science from the University of California-Berkeley. Cole created a course, Biology Through Art, where students have the opportunity to make innovative artworks in a biology laboratory. www.HunterCole.org

Richard Heipp, Seeing Visible Man Vanitus, 2009, acrylic paint on PVC, enamel paint on Plexiglas, framed, 61 x 99 x 3 inches.

Richard Heipp I work with the traditional genres of still life and figure painting. In my painting process I go to great lengths to mimic what appears to be a precise, mechanically produced, or reproduced, image. My work attempts to confront a critical difference between looking (the superficial and casual manner in which we perceive most images) and seeing (a profound and sustained looking which includes an aspect of the contextual understanding).

“Scanography” serves as the primary source for my paintings. In this process, I carefully arranging a still life consisting of 2D and 3D objects onto the glass of a flat bed scanner, augmenting it with external lighting. The image is then scanned directly into the computer bypassing any photographic lens. This process produces a strangely beautiful index that contains lighting and perspective situations unique to the moving light of the flat bed computer scanner. Through this process, I am attempting to explore metaphors that address the real (natural) and the artificial (cultural). I seek to reveal what I see as three primary modes of contemporary vision: the ocular (human eye, i.e. the natural), the photographic (a ground lens, i.e. the mechanical) and the digital (a computer scan, i.e. the digital) vision. I use this image as a source to create detailed, illusionist paintings that, to the casual observer, mimic a mechanically or digitally produced visual product. However, after a close “reading” – or, I believe, an altering of perception –understanding and appreciation occur when the viewer discovers the true perceptual illusion of the obsessively crafted “hand” painted object.

I am interested in combining aspects of natural and cultural “seeing” exploring how these themes can relate to conditions that affect our perceptions of the real and artificial body. I seek to challenge the way in which we (in both contemporary and historic modes) view ourselves filtered through our media and culture. Another metaphor confronting vision is created by arranging various artificial eyes (eyes that ultimately can not see) into the still life, attempting to address a prosthetic or “cosmeticized” vision. I combine these concepts with various anatomical models (artificial facsimiles of the human body) hoping to address self-identity and how we perceive ourselves through the “lens” of the contemporary world.—RH

Richard Heipp received his MFA from the University of Washington, and his BFA degree from Cleveland Institute of Art. He teaches painting at the University of Florida. Heipp is a painter who also creates large-scale installations and site-specific public art projects that synthesize digital and analogue processes. He has had more than twentyfive solo exhibitions and his work has been featured in well over one hundred group exhibitions. His paintings are included in numerous public and private collections nationally including the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, the Harn Museum of Art, the Progressive Companies, Miami University and the City of Seattle. Professor Heipp has been awarded commissions for nineteen site specific art-in-public-places projects through national competition or direct invitation. He has received four State of Florida, Individual Artist Fellowships, a Southern Arts Federation / National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in painting, and was honored by the Southeastern College Arts Association, receiving the Outstanding Artistic Achievement Award for 2006. Heipp was awarded a UF Research Foundation Professorship in 1999, and was twice honored as UF’s College of Fine Arts Teacher of the Year.

Perrin Ireland, Autopsy of an Anatomist 003, illustration, 11 x 17 inches.

Perrin Ireland My pen and ink explications of science are the love children of graphic novels and dissection manuals. I visually discuss the role research plays in the human relationship to other creatures. My intent is to explore lifestyles other than the human kind, and to make scientific concepts accessible to a general audience that largely believes itself to be scientifically illiterate.

I yearn for the days of yore when everybody was an amateur naturalist, and the world was any illustrator’s oyster. People discovered how things worked by drawing what they found. I drew my way through my biology degree at Brown University. I draw to learn the way life perpetuates itself, moves, and holds itself in space. My mentors and collaborators are scientists who are motivated by image and storytelling.

Perrin Ireland, Allen Human Brain Atlas, 2011, illustration, 15 x 20 inches.

Perrin Ireland

My goal is to invite the lay audience to reclaim science as an intimate practice of embracing the world. I am for a people’s science. In my graphic stories I’m interested in illustrating birth, reproduction, and violence at a microscopic scale; the outrageous ways in which science has historically been conducted; and the juiciest of recent research findings. My calling is to illuminate, to represent the voiceless, minute, creative explosions of life that guide me to continue expanding my perspective.—PI

Perrin Ireland serves as Senior Science Communications Specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, California.

Jordan Vinyard and Hunter Jonakin, Feedback Buffer, Isolation Unit, 2012, plastic, steel, wood, and fan.

Jordan Vinyard We are composed of the tiniest fault lines; each cellular construct is part of our life and our eventual fatality. Safe in our hermetic seals, we wait for just one fracture of a thing that could lead to our complete undoing. As the body threatens to close in on itself, a quiet secession occurs between the boundaries of the body and artificial systems we use to support it.

While limbs and tissue give way, mechanization facilitates recovery and survival. Through the process of life-support and other mechanized devices people are readily sutured to constructs that mimic human anatomy. Although this contingency is often felt at the point of somatic collapse and the offer of subsistence of the mechanical device, I question our dependency on biomechanical support.

Is our relationship to medical prosthesis becoming one of convenience and even recreation? My sculptures and installations suggest the tenuous balance where the point of contact between artificial and biological exists and the threat of disequilibrium is evident. I hold together the pieces of contradiction with the promise of ultimate synthesis.—JV

Paddy Hartley, Spreckley 1 & 2 (2006)

Paddy Hartley Throughout Paddy Hartley’s career, a constant theme of investigation in his work is the way in which the human body is changed, modified and reconfigured either by choice or circumstance. Addressing subjects such as steroid use in bodybuilding, the discourse between faith groups and biomedical research, the ethics of human cloning and conflict acquired injury, his work has taken the form of installation, ceramic, assembled objects, garment creation and modification.

Hartley’s artistic enquiry focuses predominantly on the face and how it is transformed or manipulated both through deliberate and unintentional intervention and the way in which we subsequently respond to these changes. Most notably in the design and production of his Face Corsets, producing facial implants for clinical use, and his output for Project Façade, Hartley responds to the surgical and personal stories of injured WWI servicemen.

Parallel to his artistic career, Hartley has also carved out a highly successful niche in the fashion industry under his birth name Patrick Ian Hartley. His Face Corsets and Neck Brace garments feature regularly in premiere fashion publications, most notably in Italian, Japanese and Chinese editions of Vogue, W Magazine, V Magazine, AnOther Magazine, Elle and Tatler. His work has been shot by iconic fashion photographers such as Rankin and Nick Knight and worn by likes of Dree Hemingway, Carmen Kass and Lady Gaga. Hartley’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is collected by museums in the UK and USA including the Wellcome Collection in London and The Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Having presented at many international cultural venues including The Victoria & Albert Museum and Science Museum in London amongst others, he also speaks extensively on artistic professional practice at Universities throughout the UK.

Hartley originates from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire and is a graduate of the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, with a Masters Degree in Sculpture and Ceramics with Distinction. He has been based in London’s East End since 2000. www.paddyhartley.com; www.patrickianhartley.com

Many of the artists in Head, Shoulders, Genes & Toes borrow freely from the scientific realm, often using scientific discoveries to solve problems in the studio, as well as raising questions and providing raw material to feed back into the sciences. . . . But the conversation should be out in the open, where artists, scientists, doctors, and the wider public can freely engage. In the words of critic and artist Jonathan Keats, “the true third culture is to be found in an educated and interested public, able to embrace each endeavor on its own terms.” —Judith Rushin, Art Department, Florida State University