Every month, Visual AIDS invites
guest curators, drawn from both the arts and AIDS communities, to
select several works from the Frank Moore Archive Project. For March, Michael Sappol
curated the current on-line exhibition which features the artwork of
Archive Members: Robert Flack, Frank Green, Rebecca Guberman, Nancer
LeMoins, Gin Louie, Eric Rhein, Paul Thek, Richard J. Treitner, Albert
Velasco, Wilmer Velez and Kevin Wesley
From the Curator's Statement:
The body has an ambivalent status as a figuration of self. The flesh we
inhabit is cloaked in, and conditioned by, structures of feeling,
legally-enforced categories, political ideologies, religious beliefs,
cultural appurtenances. Family histories, national histories, global
histories, and the random, accidental conjunctions of individual life,
shape our sexual practices, eating and drinking, work, athletics, even
the most profoundly existential experiences of breathing, touching,
moving in space. Our bodies are put together by forces beyond our
control, beyond our immediate knowledge and consciousness. And the
resultant productions -- the bodies we inhabit and operate -- are
extravagant, prolific, only partly domesticated.... In every piece on
display [in this web gallery], the inner view is the outer view --
views imbued with fear, grief, pleasure, desire, a wish to transcend.
Michael Sappol is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America
(Princeton University Press, 2002) and a curator-historian at the
National Library of Medicine (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. His latest
exhibition at the Library, Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body, runs from February 2006 to February 2008. A new book, Dream Anatomy,
a historical essay on imaginative and evocative representations of
anatomical dissection and the dissected body, is due to appear in fall
2006. Current projects deal with medical authority, the body and
representation, in several registers: a history and iconography of
20th-century popular medical illustration; a collection of essays on
19th-century "odd cases," which looks at cases in which medical, legal
and literary narratives intersect; an edited multi-volume compilation
of historical medical films.
Untitled 3 (Physician Desk Reference), 1993
Gin Louie
book with mixed media
VISUAL AIDS AND THE BODY ANNOUNCE NEW WEB EXHIBITION
Anti-Bodies curated by Michael Sappol
March 2006
Every month, Visual AIDS invites guest curators, drawn from both the arts and AIDS communities, to select several works from the Frank Moore Archive Project. For March, Michael Sappol curated the current on-line exhibition which features the artwork of Archive Members: Robert Flack, Frank Green, Rebecca Guberman, Nancer LeMoins, Gin Louie, Eric Rhein, Paul Thek, Richard J. Treitner, Albert Velasco, Wilmer Velez and Kevin Wesley
From the Curator's Statement:
Michael Sappol is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2002) and a curator-historian at the National Library of Medicine (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. His latest exhibition at the Library, Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body, runs from February 2006 to February 2008. A new book, Dream Anatomy, a historical essay on imaginative and evocative representations of anatomical dissection and the dissected body, is due to appear in fall 2006. Current projects deal with medical authority, the body and representation, in several registers: a history and iconography of 20th-century popular medical illustration; a collection of essays on 19th-century "odd cases," which looks at cases in which medical, legal and literary narratives intersect; an edited multi-volume compilation of historical medical films.