Specimen: Representing the Natural World

…Laura Splan says, “My work explores perceptions of beauty and horror, comfort and discomfort. I use anatomical and medical imagery as a point of departure to explore these dualities and our ambivalence towards the human body. Viruses, blood, and x-rays of bones and viscera can be at once unsetting and enticing. I often combine scientific images and materials with more domestic or familiar ones... This juxtaposition creates a response that fluctuates between seduction and repulsion, comfort and alienation.” Historically, the beauty of the natural world is one that theoretically scientists oft ignored (as it might imply a subjective response to the subject matter at hand) and which the general populace sought to emulate. In the doilies of this exhibition we have three viruses of ill repute that occupy particular spaces in the collective consciousness of the Western world: Hepadna, SARS and Herpes. The Hepadna virus is it best known is Hepatitis B. With more than 350 million people worldwide carrying the virus, it remains more common in Africa and Asia, where up to 20% of the population are infected. Its prevalence speaks about the lack of third world access to a simple immunization, as is common practice in western countries. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is a respiratory disease, which is known to us all via the media as a potential pandemic. It is as much as a political disease as anything, one that threatened to unravel alliances between countries, the result of selective information broadcast by the identified source country, China. In 2002-2003 an unequivocal fear of infection spread at a rate challenging the dispersal of the actual virus, and lack of knowledge about the transfer of the virus from animals to humans compounded the negative effects. Herpes is a virus that can manifest in the body in many ways. It is one the most benign of the Virus featured in Splan’s work…