SAVED BY SCIENCE

Spring Exhibition opening April 21st, 2005

Justine Cooper’s artwork investigates the intersections between culture, science and medicine. Her projects are fueled by the ability to visualize ourselves with high-end technologies, the scientific veil of rationality dropped over the complexity of nature, and the promises of western medicine.

She is well-known for incorporating animation, video, installation, and photography, as well as medical imaging technologies such as MRI, DNA sequencing, Ultrasound and SEM (scanning electron microscopy) into her projects.

Cooper’s work is ultimately a cultural investigation. While operating from just outside the borders of medicine, science, and technology, she is neither dismissive nor blindly celebratory of them. Much of her work engages with questions about what it is to have a body, to exist in physical space and to experience one’s self materially when high tech (medical) science and computer imaging are redrawing the borders of the body proper and inverting the scale and dimensions of its appearance.

Her latest series of large-format photographs examine the vast scientific collections stored in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. That passage of the scientific object into the canon of western scientific order is presented as an architecture of desire and a measure of cultural, historical and scientific value.

“It is this combination of aesthetically adept and acute conceptual exploration which makes Justine Cooper’s such a promising artist. She makes work which touches on profound issues for both the practice of art and science today and the practice of everyday life as a human being.”

– Patrick Crogan, Australian Art Collector magazine