Elaine Whittaker, Cc:me (2012) at Red Head Gallery
Unable to make it for the Festival's opening reception of Elaine Whittaker's exhibition titled Cc:me we managed to catch a lunch break view of her works during the conference. The displays included live salt-thriving bacteria, Halobacterium sp. NRC-1, identified by their pink pigment production. Grown on agar and fixed as wall-mounted petri dishes in an intermix of salvaged fax print outs, the work reflects on the interconnectedness (or disparities) between the inscription of redundant technological communication tools (fascimile) and the living and evolving biological communication entities (bacteria) growing 'over' and 'inbetween' carbon imprints.
Elaine Whittaker, Cc:me (2012) at Red Head Gallery
"The body becomes a site for the infectious nature of language – nuanced, messaged, poetic, copied. Abstracted human figures, sketched using discarded carbon fax typographies, are presented as both wall drawings and insertions in petri dish installations teeming with live bacteria. These spent faxes, of once urgent environmental campaigns, are juxtaposed against crass viral commercial messaging, become shadowy iterations of the body, images of mutable histories, degraded texts, and transformative ecology. Four local poets, Julie Roorda, Jim Johnstone, Ruth Roach Pierson and Larry Sulky, and sound artist, Tom Auger, respond to the work. The poets’ words are, in turn, transformed into evocative tracings of wit, longing, memory, and life. Installations of word, sound and object. The textual, the aural and the visual. The carbon copy of yesterday becomes the transfigured art of today."
