Aziz + Cucher

Henry Urbach Architecture
Through February 24

Six of this exhibition's large, vertical photographs displayed what Aziz + Cucher call "chimeras": uncanny biomorphic objects composed of what appear to be an assemblage of ordinary electrical components tightly wrapped in rubberized synthetic skin (as used on prosthetic limbs). The photographs have been digitally manipulated so as to furnish the synthetic epidermis with the hair, pores, spots, and blemishes of actual flesh. At once disturbing and familiar, these chimeras look like the amputated torsos of robots given organic form, squeezed and twisted tubes, incompletely formed mechanical fetuses, and internal organs encapsulated in their own hairy, mottled skin.

Other digitally manipulated images in the show included a series of interior views of unadorned, open, and anonymous quasi-modernist spaces in which all the surfaces—walls, stairs, ceilings, columns—were rendered with the virtual appearance of human skin. In some works this Caucasian skin appears as if it were veined pink marble reflecting natural light from unseen openings in the walls. Surreal in tone, the images take the material that encloses the human body—and thus marks its boundaries—and make it the boundary of the dramatically shadowed architectural space through which the body would move.

Yet, because these architectural images are so obviously the invented product of photographic or computer manipulation, they lose the unsettling and provocative uncertainties of the chimeras and tend to appear as somewhat one-dimensional pictorial curiosities. The third order of works in the show were finely composed digital prints that imitated nineteenth-century anatomical illustrations, but featured the extraordinary organic formations displayed in Aziz + Cucher's earlier work.

Replete with mock scientific diagrams, bibliographic citations, pseudo-technical terminology, and structural drawings of organic molecules and electrical components, these prints exhibited an exquisite awareness of the original illustrations' colors, typography, drawing techniques, and conventions for displaying information. If the bizarre mechanical and organic chimeras could fill a cyborg wunderkammer, these mock anatomy studies could serve as their scientific representation.




Jonathan Gilmore