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Artist Statement:
The post-human future is here.
What kind of post-humans will
we be? Our origins, our
self-identity, and the
ramifications of genetic
discoveries are my themes.
Please see "The Scientist"
http://www.the-scientist.com/ne
ws/display/25404/
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – TRIBES
GALLERY 285 East 3rd Street,
NYC
...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
SOLO EXHIBITON:
2006 - "MADONNA SERIES" TRIBES
GALLERY, NY, NY
2004 - "OMNI SERIES, Art and
Genetics in a Digital Age,
TRIBES GALLERY, NY, NY
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
2006 - "DIGI 06, SCIArt"
organized by Art and Science
Collaborations, Inc. NY Hall
of Science, NY, NY
2006 - "AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
PROJECT, CMSU Art Center, ...
Further Information
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Collections:
MONA Museum of New Art,
Detroit, MI
RHIZOME, New York, NY
Many private collections...
Further Information
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Chris Twomey:
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Art in America
March 2007
Chris Twomey at Tribes
Chris Twomey's "Madonna" series, consisting of works from 2006, is based on her photographs of fellow moms holding young children. (Twomey herself is a mother of three.) In some cases, the photos were in-jet printed at large scale and pasted onto canvas in such a way that the cuddling figures, their heads framed by hand-drawn haloes, evoke Renaissance paintings. Each rapturous, modern-day Mary-and-Jesus hovers against a vaguely celestial-looking backdrop of freehand bars and circles that appear abstract but are in fact portions of something called a mitochondrial chart - an evolutionary tree tracking DNA passed down matrilineally. (This branch of genetics has lately made news with the theory that we all can be traced, via matrilineal genes, to a common female ancestor in Africa.) The seven canvases present a racially diverse group; in each, the background is an imaginary "close-up" of a larger genetic chart. The details Twomey chooses allow her to locate each mother-and-child pair individually within the globe-spanning matrix of genetic possibilities. A border motif includes maps of the world's continents, each with arrows showing migrations from common point of origin.
This is the artist's second exhibition at Tribes Gallery, an East Village apartment converted into an intriguing salon-exhibition space specializing in socially significant, off-the-beaten track art. Twomey is a former filmmaker; her photos are accomplished and affecting, but there is a somewhat disconcertingly casual, hand-rendered quality to these images that is at odds with the science-based theme. This theme is also manifest in digital photo sequence, shown on a monitor, of the mother-and-child pairs fading into one another, as if we could see genetic identity morphing, sci-fi-like, before out eyes. Similarly, 10 still digital photos feature pairs in mid-morph, creating a kind of conglomerate of maternal affection.
In the "Madonna" series, Twomey stresses the distaff side of a genetics story usually told from the patrilineal point of view, although she doesn't explore the politics of this any further. (Twomey's 2002 Tribes installation, "Omni" series, also examined science and motherhood, focusing on the belly button, umbilical cord and stem cells.) In spirit, though, these images-visually divided into unequal quadrants, as if by a Christian cross-are modern-day equivalents of Byzantine icons, in which Virgin and Child are surrounded by saints, their attributes and their mortal attendants. Historical icons represented a framework of ideas, the best understanding at the time of the meaning of the universe. Similarly, Twomey's gene mapping offers a present-day formulation of life's mystery.
---- Carey Lovelace
"The Scientist" NEWS
Mitochondrial Madonnas
A painter reinvents the Madonna and child genre using imagery from genetics
By Arthur Warwick
[Published 27th October 2006 03:19 PM GMT]
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It's been a long time since the artist Chris Twomey studied any science in an academic setting. She doesn't have a PhD, and she wasn't even a science major in college. But, as a keen amateur, she has in recent years become obsessed with the role DNA plays in our make-up.
That obsession is at the root of her latest project, the Madonna Series, currently part of an art exhibit at the New York Hall of Science and on view as a solo show at the Tribes Gallery in Manhattan throughout November.
The images in the mixed-media paintings, which use digital photographs of Twomey and various friends with their babies, echo the Madonna and Child pose familiar from countless Renaissance pictures. Twomey's twist on the iconic subject was to paint into the background an imaginary phylogenetic map showing the child's haplogroup as traced by mutations in the mother's mitochondrial DNA.
"In each painting I have notated the mutations which put the particular Madonna and child in her haplogroup, giving her and her child an identity in context to the whole of humanity," Twomey explains in an artist's statement on the work. "I have also traced her ancestral journey on the maps around the picture's edge."
To find a model on which to base the maps, Twomey said she relied partly on the work of Vincent Macaulay, from the University of Glasgow, whose research focuses on prehistoric human demography inferred from mitochondrial DNA variation. Macaulay creates skeleton phylogenies of human mtDNA that looked to Twomey like art.
"From early on, I've always been thinking about the effect of science on art," said Twomey, who did her undergraduate degree at Ramapo College, New Jersey, and her MFA at the Pratt Institute in New York. "I'm struck by the importance and significance of science to us as a species, and I think we have a permanent obligation to educate ourselves," she told The Scientist.
To teach herself about genetics, Twomey read materials including Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, the popular book by Matt Ridley. "I'd always been interested in identity," she told The Scientist. "Tools to define ourselves are rampant. When Dolly the sheep was cloned, selfhood became even more fascinating and complicated." Twomey is particularly inspired by the thought that tiny genetic mutations can be responsible for striking differences between people. Her next project, "The Triumph of the Double Helix," still in its embryonic stages, is also DNA-inspired.
The Madonna Series took off once Twomey's interest in DNA collided with a long-term photographic study of working mothers, including herself. She has three children, now ages 15, 13 and eight, and is pictured in the Madonna Series nursing her youngest when the child was an infant.
"I was raised to be an Amazon, a great working woman," said Twomey, who was brought up all over the eastern seaboard, moving every two years as her father changed jobs. "It was pretty tough combining a career and motherhood." Her thoughts on the all-consuming power of motherhood were amplified by the events of 9/11, when she found herself stranded in New York, unable to reach her children.
"It made me start thinking about my mortality," said Twomey, "And the clash between religion and science. Here was a perversion of the Islamic religion bringing about killing and destruction. It reminded me of Galileo almost being excommunicated for his scientific thought."
In the Madonna Series, the strength and dignity of the working mother is accentuated by the random beauty of the genetic maps.
"The maps are so beautiful that I sent off my own saliva to be analyzed for its genetic make-up," said Twomey, "My own haplogroup was late-evolving. I don't go that far back, but I love how vestiges of the past are in our DNA today. We can see where we evolved from. All these religions have some afterlife concepts. And DNA is our own sort of afterlife. We don't die when we die. Our cellular knowledge and our DNA go on and on."
Arthur Warwick
mail@the-scientist.com
Links within this article:
Madonna Series
http://www.neoimages.com/artistportfolio.aspx?pid=1153
Bio/Med SciART exhibit
http://www.asci.org/artikel822.html
Tribes Gallery exhibit
http://www.tribes.org/cgi-bin/form.pl?karticle=782
Madonna and child pose
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ducciomadonna.jpg
L. Pray, "Phylogenetics: Even the Terminology Evolves," The Scientist, June 2, 2003
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/13809
I. Ganguli, "The Name Game" (blog), The Scientist, Feb. 21, 2006
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/23136
Artist's statement on the Madonna Series
http://www.neoimages.com/statement.aspx?id=1018
Vincent Macaulay
http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/~vincent
A. Constans, "2003 Readers' Choice Awards," The Scientist, Dec. 15, 2003
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14317/
M. Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (paperback), Harper Perennial, 2006
http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-Chapters-P-S/dp/0060894083/sr=1-2/qid=1161875621/ref=sr_1_2/102-2504711-3396160?ie=UTF8&s=books
T. Hollon, "Ancient Ancestry," The Scientist, Dec. 10. 2001
http://www.the-scientist.com/2001/12/10/1/1/printerfriendly
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Review by Joel Simpson published on www.tribes.org December 2006
Madonna Series, multi-media installation by Chris Twomey
Tribes Gallery, 285 E. 3rd Street, Nov.2 – Dec.6, 2006
In an age in which liberal churches and synagogues see membership declining and fundamentalist ones grow as they fan hostility to science, it is refreshing to find an artist who uses historical genetics as the basis for a new concept of holiness. Chris Twomey combines her skills as painter and photographer to reinvent and democratize the Madonna ideal by combining joyous photographs of very particular mothers with their naked babies on one hand with graphic evocations of cell structure and mapped intercontinental migrations of mitochondrial DNA on the other. Each 30x40” multi-media canvas places a grand-scale photograph of mother and baby, haloed (of course) against a segment of a drawn diagram of a phylogenetic network, featuring the child’s imagined haplogroup. These amount to radiating webs of lighter colored canals against darker saturations of the same shade, reminiscent of actual medieval icons. Each main photograph is cut into four quadrants, whose sections are separated to form a cross.
Inside the wide margins on all four sides of each canvas Twomey has drawn 14 miniature world maps in a paler version of the main background color, that outline the journey of each pair’s ancestral DNA. On either side of the canvas smaller light colored photos of the same pair in six poses overlay the maps. The effect is striking. Twomey has elevated a compelling series of literal photographs to the level of high concept, whose main theme is that the spiritual dignity of every one of us ultimately derives from the wanderings of our ancestors across the globe—as traceable in our DNA. While not refuting any pious tenets, Twomey has given religious concepts a new gloss, and she has been recognized by Art and Science Collaborations, Inc., who have included one of these works in their current show at the New York Hall of Science, through January 15, 2007.
The other works in the show consist of superimposed images of mother-and-child pairs, each monochromatic image colorized a different tint, and all against a solid color background. Her video is a series of these images moving and mixing with each other. These are pleasing works, offering their share of visual stimulation, but are lighter fare compared to the power of Twomeys’ multi-media canvases.
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Excerpted from www.resolve40.com “From Cradle to Cosmos” The subject is Science, the object is Art, November 2006 by Linda DiGusta
“…With her “Madonna Series,” artist Chris Twomey turns our attention to another intersection between science and the human form - DNA. Modeled after paintings of the Renaissance, the larger works features multiple images from Twomey’s photographic sessions with mother and babies. Intimate and radiant, they appear in these richly colored and texturally complex mixed-media pieces surrounded by intricate maps and sets of mutation numbers, which refer to the fact that each pair represents a specific Haplogroup (a set of genetic mutations which occurred during evolution and are used to define subgroups of human population).
The photographic images also appear with a more ethereal quality in prints and a DVD which, in Twomey’s own words “evoke the changes that occur through time and the briefness with which we are here in physical body. Whereas our DNA, suggesting immortality, goes on forever, mutating and changing.” Examples of both types are on view in her solo exhibition “Madonna Series” at Tribes Gallery in the East Village through November 30th. Haplogroup B” can be seen in the exhibition “DIGI 06” at the New York Hall of Science through January 15th.”
© resolve40 all rights reserved
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NYARTS MAGAZINE: Madonna Series by Chris Twomey:
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