Starkwhite presents new work by Berlin / Australian based artist Alicia Frankovich. In her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery Frankovich continues her exploration into the possibilities and interactions of the body. A multi-dimensional practice at the intersection of sculpture, video, performance and installation, Frankovich’s work pits the design and impulses of our primal bodies against radical changes in technology, thought, society and the ecosystem. From an early practice that investigated how the physicality and behaviour of a body operates within social settings and constructs – including plays of dominance and re-negotiating the audience/performer relationship – in this exhibition Frankovich has directed her work within a microscopic focus, in order to reveal outer worlds.
Alicia Frankovich’s practice has long explored the equivalency between physical forms and the potential for new modes of imagining both human and non-human form and behaviour. Performances are matched by a parallel practice that asks us to reconsider the body as a critical landscape through which various discourses of encounter, technology, and self can be reconsidered. This new body of work reflects a recent interest in microchimerism (the existence of the DNA of others within our own bodies) and microscopic imaging.[1] Intrigued by the unknown worlds inside the body, Microchimerism (2018) explores this phenomenon through a composition of gold and pink metallic shapes across the gallery wall. The wall work takes a female karyotype, or number and appearance of chromosomes in the nucleus of a cell, as its form. This karyotype is the artist’s own, identified from blood taken and visualised by scientists in Australia. Accompanying the wall work are three works on paper which offer different views of raw data, images of how Frankovich’s karyotype presented on the glass plates in the laboratory. Isolated, stained, and examined under a microscope, the arrangement of Frankovich’s own chromosomes offers up her DNA, but is it really all hers? If microchimerism is defined as the presence of more than one genetically distinct cell population in the same individual, what does this mean for common understandings of the body and where does it leave individual identity?
Opening Hours
- Tuesday - Friday 11am - 6pm,
- Saturday 11am - 3pm or by appointment
Address
- 510 Karangahape Road
- Auckland 1010
Starkwhite presents new work by Berlin / Australian based artist Alicia Frankovich. In her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery Frankovich continues her exploration into the possibilities and interactions of the body. A multi-dimensional practice at the intersection of sculpture, video, performance and installation, Frankovich’s work pits the design and impulses of our primal bodies against radical changes in technology, thought, society and the ecosystem. From an early practice that investigated how the physicality and behaviour of a body operates within social settings and constructs – including plays of dominance and re-negotiating the audience/performer relationship – in this exhibition Frankovich has directed her work within a microscopic focus, in order to reveal outer worlds.
Alicia Frankovich’s practice has long explored the equivalency between physical forms and the potential for new modes of imagining both human and non-human form and behaviour. Performances are matched by a parallel practice that asks us to reconsider the body as a critical landscape through which various discourses of encounter, technology, and self can be reconsidered. This new body of work reflects a recent interest in microchimerism (the existence of the DNA of others within our own bodies) and microscopic imaging.[1] Intrigued by the unknown worlds inside the body, Microchimerism (2018) explores this phenomenon through a composition of gold and pink metallic shapes across the gallery wall. The wall work takes a female karyotype, or number and appearance of chromosomes in the nucleus of a cell, as its form. This karyotype is the artist’s own, identified from blood taken and visualised by scientists in Australia. Accompanying the wall work are three works on paper which offer different views of raw data, images of how Frankovich’s karyotype presented on the glass plates in the laboratory. Isolated, stained, and examined under a microscope, the arrangement of Frankovich’s own chromosomes offers up her DNA, but is it really all hers? If microchimerism is defined as the presence of more than one genetically distinct cell population in the same individual, what does this mean for common understandings of the body and where does it leave individual identity?
