Xavier Roca: RE-constructing EVE
Artist(s):
Title:
- RE-constructing EVE
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 1999
Medium:
- Ink Jet Print
Size:
- 51 inches x 124 inches
Category:
Artist Statement:
In 1886, Villier de L’lsle Adam, a French pre-symbolist, wrote L’Eve Future, a fictional fantasy about Thomas Edison building “a cybernetic organism, chimera and mythic hybrid of a machine and human being.” RE-constructing EVE is a “blue print,” an “assemblage” of symbolic materials, interactions, and historical anatomies of possible bodies.
Bodies, as in Villier’s work, are conceived as partial identities, as works-in-part as well as whole. The morphology is an animated dynamo organized on an imagined network of metonymic figures, integrated muscles, prosthetic bones, and biotic circuits. The inside and outside substance is a juxtaposition of synthetic models and found recycled digital materials, created or downloaded, stored, manipulated, and rearranged in a mesh of difference I sex/ woman / man I machine/ history/ order I poem.
A topographic evocation of genetic engineering, the work is ultimately transitional, an invitation to explore the “multiplicity” and the complex relationship between organism and machine.
