Digital Bodies: Andrew Norman Wilson

Dec. 5–31, 2017

Projection Gallery

Andrew Norman Wilson, <i>Ode to Seekers 2012</i>, 2016. Courtesy the artist.

Andrew Norman Wilson, Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016. Courtesy the artist.

Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016) celebrates mosquitoes, syringes, and oil derricks. Not only are these items symbols of significant threats to human life—mosquito-borne illnesses, drug addiction, the petroleum industry—but they are also causes of personal trauma for the artist, Andrew Norman Wilson. Influenced by John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), wherein the narrator’s sense of mortality is intensified by the presence of the seemingly eternal art object, the video is structured as an infinitely looping ode with three central movements and distinct soundtracks. In the first, the camera, imitating the perspective of a mosquito, roves through the abandoned corridors of the Rockland Psychiatric Center’s children’s ward, where the artist once received treatment. In the second, highly saturated computer-generated 3-D models of the mosquito, syringe, and oil derrick thrust their piercers into a surface that resembles at once magnified human skin, desert salt flats, and a potato casserole. In the final movement, the models are co-opted by an assembly line apparatus that in turn pierces and sucks the color from them. This act of draining becomes a metaphor, a social critique warning of humanity’s dangerous drive towards self-destruction.

Digital Bodies

