Each month, BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn reviews newly created artist profiles in the BRIC Contemporary Artist Registry and selects one of exceptional merit to feature on the Registry homepage and in BRIC Contemporary Art e-blasts.
Current Artist of the Month
Two busts, each of young woman, are born into a state of disintegration. A bronze-cast beauty, constructed with metal shards of flesh and artful hollow spaces, appears eroded by wind. Her laser-sintered, nylon counterpart decays through a succession of erratic, geometric layers—a face in flux, slipping backwards under an onslaught of elements. The young artist Sophie Kahn deliberately manufactures this deconstruction, suggestive of the trace that a body leaves in time and space before death. Interested in what she terms the “erotics of death” and the body’s trace, Kahn’s work is comprised of delicate renderings of the human form suspended in voids. Strange to Inhabit the Earth No Longer is a series of chromogenic prints of female figures that embody her aesthetic. The bodies are the artist’s own, though they are interpreted by a 3D laser body scanner, resulting in a precise, futuristic anatomy. Imperfections in the artist’s high-end technology, amplified by subtle motions of the body, result in fragmentation and whispering double imagery. The outcome is a number of ghostly, dynamic stills, replete with symbolic and emotional allusions to ephemeral physical existence and eternal, comfortable rest.
Strange to Inhabit the Earth No Longer exemplifies the basics of Kahn’s methodology. She edits her body scans with 3D imaging software and utilizes them in projects as diverse as large-scale prints, stop-motion animations, laser-defected crystal sculptures, and bronze-cast and laser-sintered nylon busts and sculptures. Sophie Kahn is Artist of the Month because of her innovative use of 3D technology to produce compelling and thought-provoking work. She reveals artistic possibility in scientific tools, exploiting their qualities and defects to imagine the body in wholly new ways. Kahn’s experimentation with technologies and her fearless desire to integrate it into her work, is further explored on her blog.
– Shannon Mulshine
Shannon Mulshine was a summer 2010 intern at BRIC Rotunda Gallery. She is a member of the Harvard College Class of 2012, studying Studio Art and Art History.
Artist profile on the BRIC Contemporary Artist Registry