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Birds by Dagmara Genda, & Sanguinarin Highway by Kristin Ivey

Friday, December 11, 2009 to Friday, February 12, 2010

Birds by Dagmara Genda is an examination of drawing and form through the repetitive use of one motif—the bird. Genda traces birds into brushed on, spilled and splashed latex paint, drawing them out of the material as a direct result of the paint and its surface. Lumps of dry paint become beaks, cracks become fissures that literally “unzip” the bodies of these anthropomorphized figures. But Birds is as much an exercise of recognition as one of breaking habit. How do we see what we see? How much of sight is a process of seeing what we want to see? How can we see in new ways? Genda re-orders the way in which she coaxes form from material and the way in which the viewer perceives it.

Kristin Ivey’s experience of working in various health care institutions over several years lead her to develop the exhibition Sanguinary Highway as a reflection of the ways in which we as patients conceptualize our own inner workings and illnesses. Within medical institutions there is a huge disconnect between scientific explanations offered by physicians and the highly emotional, often paranoid response of the ill or potentially-ill. This sculptural installation gives form to the way in which the imagination processes and understands the physical workings of the body. The resulting sculptural forms are several times larger than life, existing in the space of the viewer, evoking the contradictory responses of both the alien and the familiar; it is in this manner that they mirror our highly imaginative, emotional response to our own physicality.

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