Manifold: The Body Divided

…Along with yellow and blue, red is, of course, a primary color. Red is also the most primary color, the original color, the color that is always at hand. ln this exhibition Laura Splan is represented by a delicate red drawing rendered in her own blood. While we might be able to pretend that linseed oil and charcoal and gum arabic are emotionally neutral, blood is always fraught (especially so in the age of AIDS). Splan’s drawing quotes 19th-century domestic handwork: just as handmade objects (like doilies) are passed down from one generation to the next, genetic information is passed down through the ‘blood-line.’ Splan’s Elaborative Encoding is not so much a representation as an actuality. All the artists in this exhibition assert something specific about themselves in their work. While all the others do so abstractly, Splan does so genetically. The most common genetic relic is hair because it is the substance that lasts. Made of the fibrous protein keratin, hair decomposes very slowly. In the Victorian period, when public mourning was especially codified, wreaths crafted from human hair were made to acknowledge a death in the family. This exhibition includes a complete wreath on loan from the Customs House Museum. Victorian hair art also included the practice of knotting hair into jewelry as a gift for a suitor. Late 19th-century ladies’ magazines were full of instructions for making watch chains and other things from hair, an art form that required nothing extraordinary beyond patience and devotion, with the final assistance of a jeweler to mount the token…