Past Skin

In today’s technological environment, we can style, extend, and broadcast ourselves at will, projecting into digital realms that in turn shape us. The six artists in Past Skin take up science historian and cyber-feminist Donna Haraway’s provocation, “Why should our body end at the skin?,” testing the growing porosity between our bodies and habitats in a contemporary world where virtuality is ubiquitous and surreality is increasingly normalized. As much as we exert influence on our bodies and surroundings, the technologies that enable this influence also influence us. No longer simply “users” of technology, we become players renegotiating the stakes of our world, engineering natural and synthetic environments to fulfill social imperatives and emotional needs. Featuring 20 works across a variety of media—including painting, sculpture, drawing, sound, video, and virtual reality—by artists Cui Jie, Jordan Kasey, Hannah Levy, Abigail Lucien, Jillian Mayer, MSHR, and Madelon Vriesendorp, Past Skin highlights works that merge figures with landscapes to examine the state of the contemporary body in and beyond nature.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.