Exhibitions

Jenny Nordquist -
plastic surgery

17th - 30th January 2006

Our media today is full of graphic and often sensationalist images and information. Plastic surgery does not escape this public demand and interest. In these terms we seem to be far from what you might term a ‘look away’ culture. Notions of beauty and non-beauty are under the spotlight as is so often the case. But the rules are always changing and the argument is battled out on different playing fields. Jenny Nordquist dramatically addresses this.

The programming of this show has not been to directly comment on current popular media trends. These photographs encourage us to address the possibilities of external surgical metamorphosis, and how these conflict with, and relate to our wellbeing, health and emotions.

Nordquist raises issues and questions relating to composition and portraiture. The series becomes a bridge of contention between that of the portrait and the anti-portrait. The concealment of the patients’ facial identity means that we are confronted with other fragments of a body as a means of identification of the individual. It is these fragments – in this case the breasts – that are deemed important enough to ‘beautify’ and ‘perfect’ through artificial, painful and intrusive means. With Nordquist’s series – the body fragments, and the depicted process of dramatic change, become the identity of the individual – from the point of view of the surgeon as well as of the viewer of the photographs. The commodification of our bodies questions our relationship to the idea of ‘self’.

In these compositions we might go as far as to see certain religious, iconographic and early scientific correlations. These are monumental stills of captured process, combining natural and artificial light. They might recall Rembrandt’s life-size studies of dissections. Although commenting implicitly on the science of decay, the fallibility of the body, and the transience of life - Nordquist provides us with a challenge to address our belief in – and our endeavors for perfection by external physical improvements and the subsequent negation of what had once been definitive physical boundaries.

This exhibition unites the presence of the surgical glow and non-beautified clinical space of the operating room with the blank white walls and lights of a gallery – and directly confronts this
space in a new way. Your own reaction becomes paramount.

Other Artist information: Jenny Nordquist's website