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| EXHIBITIONS |
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| ARTIST’S
ESSAY “You
got your technologies but you lost, you lost your senses.” The Coming To Our Senses project comprises the “third wave” in Anatomic Relationships, a series of diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs. Their main focus is to fragment the human body situated against the background of an ever more quickly changing and an ever more confusing contemporary world. This particular project consists of six mixed-media, multi-paneled, interactive paintings. Our five senses–smell, touch, taste, vision and hearing–are depicted by five individual artworks and culminate in the last artwork, the sixth sense. Experiencing the six artworks as a whole encourages synesthesia, the production of a mental sense impression relating to one sense by the stimulation of another sense, as in colored hearing. The message of Coming To Our Senses is that the separation of body and mind, which is a tendency in our technologically overburdened times, is increasing and may be detrimental to us and our surroundings. Based on this understanding, Coming To Our Senses offers a playful opportunity to reconnect with our senses. By emphasizing the corporeality of the body, the viewer reaches the last of the senses, the sixth sense, where he or she is confronted with the individual’s intuitive side and is challenged to open up to intangible experiences. This playful interaction may ultimately lead to an acceptance that we are more than our physical bodies. In 1994, I started Anatomic Relationships with the realization that the curiosity to know how we look beneath the skin is not morbid but a way of facing our mortality positively. In general, only the medical professionals have the privilege to see our subcutaneous parts through surgery and autopsy. An awareness of our mortality, which by itself brings on a difficulty in accepting and explaining one’s demise, comes with human consciousness. By shutting the doors to our insides, science increases our existent fear of the unknown. I believe that this fear could be diminished if the dead human body would cease to be a taboo subject. Based on this premise, I started transferring photographs of isolated, dissected human body parts from medical anatomy books into painstakingly detailed and oversized acrylic paintings onto canvas. Each painting would consist of at least two separate panels as it takes at least two to form a relationship and the words on the paintings would create a dialogue between the individual panels as well as between the panels and the viewer. The “first wave” of paintings comprises three diptychs, each forming a different pair of human organs. The diptych Look Into My Eyes! joined two eyes and Talk To Me! Listen To Me! brought together a mouth and an ear. Eve And Adam In The Age Of AIDS juxtaposed the female with the male sexual organs, segueing to a “second wave” of Anatomic Relationships through its added focus on our sexuality. Whereas the central painting of the dissected human foot in The Ten Commandments Of The Foot mused on the foot fetish (podophilia), the central depiction of the human digestive system in Tribulations Of Barbie Or The Way To A Man’s Heart Is Through His Stomach described the case of a man’s fetish with Barbie doll heads (pediophilia). The second group introduced an “old” element to the work: hinged doors. “Old” because the concept of vertically hinging panels so as to allow the sides to fold over the central panel goes back to the Altar paintings of the Middle Ages. Religion was the central theme of the altarpieces whose panels were opened on special Christian holidays as part of the church’s liturgical services. Here the doors open up to an opportunity for self-discovery in that the viewers may look directly at their insides to draw conclusions about one’s own existence. The above mentioned paintings laid the groundwork for the “third wave” of Anatomic Relationships. By 1997, I had expanded the central themes of death and sexuality into a rediscovery of our senses. Allowing the viewer to voluntarily open and close the doors of the artwork was only the first step of involvement. The series Coming To Our Senses required that the viewer reconnect with his senses by making his own sensory experience part of the artwork. To do so, I had to increase the viewer’s manipulation of specific parts of the work. In 1001 Smells, the viewer is invited to be part of an olfactory adventure. Upon opening the doors of the mixed-media artwork, two major elements are exposed: the central painting of a dissected human nose and 1,000 labeled bottles attached to the insides of the two doors with elastic string, each bottle containing a different scent ready to be sampled. Odor testing cards further increase the viewer’s participation by allowing the opportunity to grade the selected smells by using the five attributes written on the cards as well as on the bottom panel of the painting: pleasant, neutral, unpleasant, very unpleasant and unbearable. By evaluating the completed odor cards, I will realize that the characterization is a highly subjective matter that is influenced as much by cultural conditioning as it is by individual preference and personal experience. Continuing with our tactile sense, I conceived of Touchy Subjects. The surface of its two doors which are held together by a hook, is imbued with images of hands and pointing fingers. The bottom panel is penetrated 4,000 times in a triangular pattern with small nails. Some volunteers find touching the “bed of nails” pleasurable where others find it painful. To the left and right of the triangle are the words “pain” and “pleasure,” demonstrating that there is a fine line between the two. The subject of touch gets under the skin figuratively and literally as depicted in the central painting of a dissected human arm with its skin removed, its underlying sinews and nerves exposed. The highlight of the touch experience is when the participant probes his or her finger through any of the 114 rubber-covered holes on the inside panel of each door to feel whatever lies behind those circular openings. Again, some people find the experience entertaining and exhilarating whereas others are too timid to blindly thrust their fingers into the abyss. Each hole has two numbers assigned to it, one in Arabic and one in Braille, the alphabet for the blind. A list with a description of all hidden touchy subjects hangs next to the artwork and a second list in Braille may be handed out on request. In looking at the unopened Peep Show, our sense of sight is represented by a large, three dimensional, round structure reminiscent of an oversized eyeball. Its painted surface, consisting of colored eyeball images imprinted with a stamp, is based on Johannes Itten’s color circle. Two artificial goat eyes, transformed into doorknobs, invite the viewer to open the circle’s embedded, hinged rectangular doors. The opened panels reveal the central painting of a dissected human retina. There are 66 holes in the frosted acrylic sheet which covers each inside of the two hinged panels. The viewer looks through the small openings and perceives eyeball-shaped images that I have collected and cut out from magazines, postcards, photographs, etc. All are images that have caught my eye and are meant to hold personal as well as universal significance. A collage of two eyes, also composed of hundreds of cut-out circles, lies behind each frosted acrylic sheet. I selected this particular material to create an optical illusion like a double vision. When the acrylic sheets are viewed up close, only the images behind the cut-out circles are clearly discernible, whereas the entire background remains fuzzy. When the frosted insides are viewed from a distance, the reverse occurs: the whole image of the four eyes becomes clearly perceptible, whereas the individual peephole images are intentionally lost. The tongue-shaped doors and knobs of A Matter Of Taste reveal the central painting of a dissected human tongue. The pink-colored insides of the two side panels of this triptych are covered with multiple photographs of open mouths and their respective tongues sticking out. Each photograph has a slot from which a sealed clear plastic pouch containing a specific food sample peeks through. Each food sample is represented by 10 individually sealed plastic bags which are sewn together into a roll. If a participant wants to taste a specific labeled food, he or she tears off the perforated plastic pouch and opens the seal. The outsides of the panels are saturated with multiple layers of painted and collaged images of food and anything edible. There is an obvious connection between food and sexuality in that the phallus-shaped bananas, which are painted halfway peeled, dance around juicy pomegranates, figs, apples and peaches, fruits that are symbolic for the female sex. Although I am discriminating in what I eat, mostly vegetables and grains and occasionally chicken and fish, I want to be indiscriminate in this project. Therefore, what the viewer perceives is an overview of all that is and can be ingested. The taboos of eating insects and eating humans, or “long pigs” as the cannibals call us, are out in the open. Each of the two ear-shaped doors of Play It By Ear depicts a snail-like creature. This painted image is an abstraction of an oversized cochlea, the spiral cavity of the inner ear in which the sensory reception of sound occurs. Two ear-shaped doorknobs lead the way to the central painting of a dissected human ear. Two additional panels are attached to this painting, one from the top and one from the bottom. Whereas the top panel represents an irregular sound wave indicating noise, the bottom panel represents a regular sound wave indicating a soothing tone. Of all my sense-related projects, Play It By Ear turned out to be the most technical by far. My idea was to record sounds which were accessible to the participant by pushing a button, therefore allowing the playback of a particular sound. The 64 recorded sounds, 32 in each door, needed to be transformed into digital sounds on the computer and ultimately transferred onto analog sound chips. These had to be small enough to fit between the outside and inside panels of each door. A lot of wiring was necessary to make this battery-powered piece work. With the expert technical assistance of my husband and an electronics company in Texas, my concept was realized. The central panel of More Than Meets The Eye… depicts a painting of a longitudinal cut of a dissected human head with its brain and sensory organs exposed. This face- and skinless portrait looks mysterious and alien and is therefore perfectly suited to represent that aspect of our selves that responds to a stimulus beyond our conventional senses. We call this phenomenon intuition, altered state of consciousness, sixth sense or ESP (extra sensory perception). When closed, the two doors complete the picture of a cross, which is one of the five symbols appearing on the inside top and bottom panels. The other four symbols are a square, a star, wavy lines and a circle. These motifs appear in the Zener cards, a deck of 25 cards developed by the Rhine Institute for Parapsychology to test people’s ESP capabilities. This deck of cards, as well as the Tarot, is integrated here to let the viewer explore his or her sixth sense and intuition. Twenty cards of the Zener deck are hidden behind the rectangular compartments of the hinged panels, along with clear and specific instructions, to test the viewer’s clairvoyant and telepathic abilities. The Tarot is represented by my personal interpretation of its 22 major trumps with their unusual names and images such as the Fool or the Empress. Based on the psychological view that the message of each card touches on some aspect of everyone’s life, I have chosen to depict these cards in a specific spread called “The Tree of Life.” Appealing to the viewer’s curiosity, I have placed 10 mirrors etched with words such as “Be The Emperor” and “Be The Hermit” on the front of each door. By adding the word “Be” to each name as well as by depicting the magician and the fool on the faces of the two side panels, I intend to fuel the viewer’s imagination and sense of adventure. Perceived as the language of the unconscious, these painted symbols of the cards may open doors into the hidden reaches of the viewer’s soul. Catya Plate
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