The New Flesh

Opens June 18, – July 3, 2021

Available for sale on Artsy until July 3, 2021

Curator: M. Charlene Stevens

Arcade Project Curatorial is pleased to present The New Flesh, featuring Phillip Birch, Claudia Hart, Auriea Harvey, and Sophie Kahn. 

Curated by M. Charlene Stevens. 

"In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. Embodiment never coincides exactly with 'the body,' however that normalized concept is understood."
— N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 196.

Inspired by David Cronenberg's classic films Videodrome and eXistenZ and the writings of N. Katherine Hayles, The New Flesh explores posthuman visions of embodiment. Who are we without our bodies? Can what some call the "soul" be neurochemically and electronically captured and uploaded onto a machine? What remains of our humanity when the body is fragmented, reduced to data, and reconstituted in another form? The flesh is the body's starting point, but posthuman embodiment also includes electromechanical augmentations and digital information. This new flesh isn't purely flesh at all: it's a hybrid of the natural and the artificial, the digital and the spiritual — a mode of cyborg existence that encompasses the human body and the flow of information that surrounds it.

Phillip Birch presents the flesh as a relic of humanity's past, something to be technologically transcended in the information age. The body decays into disorganized masses of protein and fat while the information generated by it becomes deified in neuromorphic space. The soul becomes the only remaining currency, which individuals are all too happy to sell off to keep participating in the capitalist system as consumers until they are themselves consumed.

Claudia Hart's Mortifications are a series of heavy plastic figurines output from a Rapid Prototype machine for Individual 3D computer models produced via a process normal to industrial manufacturing. In the Mortifications, a realistic model of a nude is digitally "mutilated" and subjected to irregular and apparently organic deformations. Hart creates forms that evoke decay out of non-biodegradable ABS plastic, using a process intended to produce prototypes for mass production. The plastic has been covered in chrome and stained in a custom finish that Hart calls "Kryptonite." The Mortifications proposes a digital Baroque. Related to the intentions of the historical Baroque, the emotionally expressive, personal style of this imagery is intended to breathe irregularity and life into a conformist techno/consumer culture. 

Aureia Harvey begins her sculptural process by making scans from life that mutate. They are combined with others from her extensive library: 3D models based on her clay sculptures, works of imagination digitally sculpted, and artworks encountered in museums. Harvey sculpts the composite elements within 3D modeling software. She filters well-known narratives through her retellings, bringing together ancient Western forms, video game avatars, and the African diaspora – filtering the Western art historical canon through the Black gaze.

Sophie Kahn scans her body with lasers, reducing the flesh to a set of digital data points, reconstructed using 3D printing technology. From one original body, an endless procession of digital ghosts and plastic doppelgangers emerges. Kahn updates and subverts the fetishism and male gaze of Hans Bellmer's La Poupée — dolls that questioned the bodily and psychic ideal presented by German fascist propaganda in the 1930s.