Double Jointed

These are five overscaled anatomical forms. One is robotic writhing polyp-like arms. It is a body scanner for custom-fit prosthetics. Two is my double-jointed elbow. It is an office medical facility for the production of custom body parts. Three bends at the knees, crouching over Four. It is a stack of sleep-study monastic cells. Four is two distorted radiators torqueing at their joints. It is a repository of crutches and canes from people who have been healed at Three. Five is a leg on ankles supported by tusks. It is a feet and leg armature shop.

I am fixated on prosthesis as body armor, as both an extension and expansion of the body. Prosthesis as bionic enhancement is the specific intervention on the generic, familiar object or type. It can only be understood as prosthesis when it’s done on something recognizable, something familiar.

I examine mechanical gestures, contorted postures—joints, knees, sockets, elbows, hips. I manipulate anatomical forms into building scale creatures, double jointed prostheses—displaced untamed objects that exceed the sum of their parts. These distortions are bent unusually far or to abnormally great extent in the anatomically incorrect direction.

It is only by recognizing the anatomically familiar that I am able to transform its character and exist in the fuzziness between the grotesque and the bodily.

I began to understand the project as a pilgrimage via five forms. One goes for a fitting, a custom-fit device is fabricated, one adjusts to it like stretching out new denims, one sheds the old ones, and then splurges—perhaps get a belt. These seamingly ordinary steps—steps that are familiar to most of us when we have a suit made, or custom in-ear monitors—are, in this block, the 5 essential physical and spiritual transformative phases of a diagnostic machine.

GRADUATE, STUDIO VI, SPRING 16
MONOGRAPH STUDIO
CRITICS: ADA TOLLA, GIUSEPPE LIGNANO, THOMAS DE MONCHAUX