Introduction

This exhibition features, among other bodies of work, Ellen Garvens’s signature photo/sculpture pieces—hybrid constructions which hang elegantly off the wall in clustered suites.

Garvens’s manner of working—her photographic allusions to organic form and the various inert or inorganic supports that surround these images—recalls historic modes of display. Her specimen-like constructions suggest the interconnected practices of biology, the medical sciences and the natural history museum.

It would seem more than a coincidence that Garvens has held positions as a beekeeper, an electron microscope operator, and a scientific illustrator at a natural history museum. Her constructions seem redolent less of new technologies, than of the nineteenth century mind, a time in which the sciences and arts exhibited a surpassing curiosity about the physical description and classification of the plant and animal world. In many senses, Garvens’s apparatuses move beyond such sources of inspiration and take on a new, animated life of their own. Nevertheless, their metal armatures, their use of manual tools and quaint medical instruments, their specimen-like method of display, and even their use of photography—are all reminiscent of anachronistic systems.

Logically, photography itself was born in the early nineteenth century, in an age that sought to understand the world by observing structure and variation in nature. Early photographs were considered profoundly at one with, and revealing of nature. Garvens’s photographic sensibility—evidenced in part by her use of warm-toned, monochromatic images—seems rooted in the nineteenth century, in a passionate description of the visible, the better to understand what lies beneath it. At the same time, her subtle, transient and fractured use of the medium is contemporary. There is a distinct artifactuality, and an immateriality, about these images and their presentation. The delicateness of these images on paper is accentuated by the way in which they are contrasted with their surrounding supports. In Garvens’s oeuvre, paper photographs, depicting often the soft epidermis of the body, become membranes themselves, stretched over rigid, skeleton-like structures.

With this exhibition, Garvens also premieres her new Prosthetics series—digital color prints that are an outgrowth of her recent work with the prosthetics department at the University of Washington Medical School in Seattle. These images of prosthetic and orthotic prototypes produced at the medical school are deceptive in their seeming straightforwardness. Although the Prosthetics are a departure from Garvens’s mixed media work, there are instructive affinities between the two. Garvens’s constructions often represent the body as fragmentary and enigmatic, and this is similar to the manner in which she interprets prosthetic artifacts. Perhaps most importantly for Garvens, her prosthetic images, like her insect constructions, achieve an odd convergence of the organic and inorganic. Of course, the inert, synthetic materials of which prosthetic and orthotic products are made, are not only designed to take on organic form, color and finish, but they are engineered to perform various human functions.

Garvens’s prosthetics recall in some way the early twentieth century vision of Hans Bellmer. Bellmer’s sexually charged compositions feature female dolls and doll parts as vulnerable objects of desire. Garvens’s, too, interprets her translucent, fleshy subjects as fetish objects. While Bellmer’s surrealistic photographs are suggestive of private male fantasy, many of Garvens’s phallic forms would seem to be engaged in a restorative process of new growth or becoming—perhaps a reflection of their medical function and experimental genesis.

Dan Younger
Director

Essay by Jessica Burstein

Ellen Garvens, Criquet, toned silver gelatin
photograph, brass, 10" x 12" x 4", 1999

Ellen Garvens, Narrow, c-print, 24" x 30", 2003