Artist Statement
For 20 years, I have created architectural installations based on cellular and genetic Information to explore personal, political, and ethical issues related to genetics, ethnicity and human disease. My work employs textiles, sound and projection on an architectural scale so the viewer can experience the phenomena of material and information in space. Science informs my work: each piece results from lengthy collaborations with scientists and medical researchers with the goal of producing work that incorporates and comments on medicine and genetics.
In this overview I will cover the works made in the last five years.
The film, Cellular 2010 is a film of Gasterization coupled with the sound recording of cells dividing. This film focused on genetic anomalies in cellular and embryonic development. The sound recordings of cell division was obtained through Andrew Pelling, professor of biophysics at the University of Ottawa. These were made with an atomic force microscope. The Cellular film is of spider embryos showing both healthy and diseased eggs in an endless loop of development. This film is made from 200 hours of still images of each embryo made with Atomics Micro fire digital cameras mounted on Olympus stereomicroscopes; I then made the images into a film using Astor IIDC imaging software. This piece will be show along with others at ZKM in Germany this fall.
From 2009 to 2012, I partnered with the department of medical genetics at the University of Washington to create a body of work. I first created Chromosome 17 a public art work that both commemorates 50 years of medical genetics and honors Dr. Arno Motulsky. In 2011 I worked with Dr. Robin Bennett, head of genetic counseling at the University of Washington department of medical genetics, to make a work about genetic testing entitled Chromosome Paintings is based on the image of a syntiny map, a colorful, striped array that compares gene sequences between species to elucidate the evolution of chromosomes. The technique of chromosome painting, also known as “fluorescence in situ hybridization” can detect chromosomal abnormalities like translocations and structural alterations that are associated with various diseases. For example, chromosome 19 carries a gene implicated in leukemia. I was commissioned to remake this work for the Architecture firm ZGF in 2015.
In 2014 I worked with Dr. Alexandra Stern, a medical historian at the University of Michigan. Stern who researches the history of eugenics and its attendant genetic and racial discrimination as practiced in the United States from 1900-87. I created the installation “Shades of White” for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art which opened in August 2014. This work is based on the “Gates Skin Color Chart,” a tool used by geneticists and anthropologists in the mid-20thcentury for racial classification forced sterilization of children in orphanages, patients in mental health facilities, and prisoners in the United States. This project investigates racially controversial material, and exposes the genetic discrimination at play in the United States beginning in 1900 and links it to the practice of eugenics aimed at achieving racial hygiene in Nazi Germany. The top eugenicists in the U.S. followed the same practices as their Nazi counterparts in 1930’s Germany.
Using organic natural dyes on a variety of silks, “Shades of White” recreates the genetics of skin color as determined by melanin. The pigmentation that makes up our skin color comes from our genetic heritage and the geographic location of our ancestors, which gives each of us various types and levels of melanin. This work is meant to point out the astonishing variety of “shades” that comprise each of us and to point to the fact that no one is pure white or pure black, rather we are a spectrum of colors. Working with the architecture of this space, I designed twenty-four thin steel boxes of various sizes to encase the different shades of silk. As one looks through the layers of steel boxes reflecting the silk colors and moves deeper into the space, one experiences a blending and buildup of tones or pigmentation. To reflect the variations in skin tone, no two pieces of silk are dyed the same, just as no two people are the same .
In 2015-16 I was awarded both a Ford Foundation grant to continue my research on the visualization of genetics and eugenics and a year sabbatical from Reed College where I am a professor of art. In the fall of 2015 I was an Artist in Residence at Momentum in Berlin Germany, a research based artist residency to access the Max Plank Archive of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
I was given access to Archives at the Max Plank in Dahlem to view the work of Dr. Georg Geipel, an anthropologist and statistician who worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin from 1930 through 1960. Geipel used methods of dermatoglyphics and dactyloscopy for the study of fingerprints and handprints to link the pattern to inheritance. Geipel assigned mathematical coordinates to the lines and curve in the hand to create a system of measurement.
Through these measurements he was able to identify inherited hand lines, similarities in identical twins based on embryology, and racial difference. It should be emphasized, that although his ability to identify genetic inheritance was significant, his evaluation and conclusions of racial difference and mental ability had grave consequences on society during the Second World War. However, he did continue to refine mathematical identification systems after the war. Geipel’s mapping and measuring of fingerprints proved that these marks are unique for each of us. He created a system that measured the breaks and intersections of the lines in the hands which is now used in hand and fingerprint scanners today for the collection of Biometric data.
The history of biometric data skips the 1930-50 because of the negative associations. However, the effects of taking biometric data then and the effects of taking it now as a method to keep surveillance and as an identity code for each human being, is hauntingly similar.
I have had the privilege to look at thousands of these studies and have focused on those from the 1950-60 of identical twins. Twin studies have continued to be of vital importance to genetics as they show the subtle difference in the genetic make up of each human being.
I aim to honor those who offered their identity markers for science. It is highly unlikely that they would have known how their personal mark would have been used to establish the system we use now. However, the knowledge gained, for better or worse is part of a system of Biometric Data collection that begins at birth with the taking of a child’s hand prints and has become the standard measure of our identify world wide.