Underflesh:
Exploring Human Fragility and Resilience
By installation artist and 2001–2002 McKnight Fellowship recipient,
Kathyrn Nobbe
January 31 – March 2, 2003
See
artists bio ...
Visit artist's Web site ...
Below,
are individual pieces of the exhibit and a description of the work by
writer Patricia Briggs ...
Nobbe’s
core imagery originates in a series of photographic slides that the
artist persuaded her surgeon to take during the progress of her mastectomy
surgeries. These photographs document the way that surgery translates
and transforms her body into cut skin, bits of flesh and biopsy specimens.
Nobbe reconfigures these visceral and disturbing documents into contemplative,
even pleasing images. Using computer graphics in combination with traditional
manual processes like painting and collage to manipulate the original
photographic sources, Nobbe produced gorgeous kaleidoscopic patterns
of color and texture that look like snowflakes or medieval stained glass
windows, and which paradoxically register the disturbing matter of their
making while encouraging in the viewer a state of transcendence and
well being. Kaleidoscope I-XVIII, a series of large photographic
digital prints opens with fragmented glimpses of blue surgical blankets,
bloody human tissue, plastic medical implements and sutures, which speak
of the painful physical aspects of the artist’s surgery. As the
series unfolds the patterns metamorphose into bursts of light that look
like sacred mandalas or glowing haloes. With this abstract narrative
Nobbe suggests a progression from physical pain to spiritual awareness,
from despair to grace.
