Foreign Bodies

An exhibition of hundreds of micro-drawings and beautiful multiplicities of life-sized appendages.

Foreign Bodies Poster

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Los Angeles, (November 18th, 2013) — Marymount California University Department of Arts & Media are proud to present Foreign Bodies. This exhibition bridges the idealized external figure and the abstract internal body through a dissection of the inner and multiplication of the outer. Both artists start with drawing inspired in part by the figurative body, but end up with artwork at opposite ends of scale. Daina Mattis follows the path outward and produces life size drawing installations and figurative wooden sculptures while Caitlin Foley focusses inward and creates arrangements of hundreds of tiny drawings on microscope slides intermingled with displays of audio. Emanating into the macro and the micro spectrums, Foley and Mattis's work shares the common origin of daily social experience.

Ouroboros by Daina Mattis

Mattis interrogates social constructions using life-sized monochrome drawings on tightly crafted and precisely stacked or interlocked wood panels. She challenges shared complicity and value abstraction in Pyramid Scheme, models community building in Cairn Copy, and problematizes ritual in Prayer Circle. Her exquisitely drawn hands are homogenized both by her medium of choice and because the limbs could belong to anyone and everyone. (On the left: Ouroboros by Daina Mattis)

In Toxic Remedies Caitlin Foley archives invented pathogen bodies/antibodies using colorful treatments of small uniform pieces of glass that are usually used for scientific microscope analysis. Foley's delicate use of line quality—which shows great variation even within a tiny scale—amplifies the contrast between the phantasms captured within the slides. Foley's artwork looks deep within the internal body: that space which is both familiar to us yet invisible and thus constantly abstracted with metaphors. Yet the work is cognizant of the social ramifications of these internal abstractions. According to Foley, Toxic Remedies "questions and celebrates the way we reconcile our everyday external reality with our internal body."

Toxic Remedies by Caitlin Foley

Foley uses technological, even medical imagery not for functional or symbolic purposes but as an index to the unseen and a tool for organizing contingent daily experiences. Mattis uses large scale figurative drawing to interrogate social arrangements using monolithic and iconic installation resembling pyramids, wreathes, and tombstones in order to "better understand our being outside of our singular bodies". Foley's installations produce the affect of witnessing abstract models colliding with reality. She zooms in to expose the hidden forces behind the scenes which are both drivers and consequences of social interaction. Mattis transcends the idealization of the figure by repeating an element of the body into a sprawling meta body. She zooms out to contextualize the individual as an appendage of a social whole. Taken together their works suture our surprisingly opposite conceptions to the internal body and the external figure. (Image: Caitlin Foley: Toxic Remedies - Micro Drawings)

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