April 5 - April 28, 2013

If you can manipulate clay and end up with art, you can manipulate yourself in it as well. It has to do with using the body as a tool, an object to manipulate.
- Bruce Nauman(1990)

In OS X Mountain Lion, you interact with your Mac using your fingers. Tap, scroll, pinch, and swipe your way though your Mac with Multi-touch gestures.
-Apple(2013)

Body: Talk explores a variety of concepts, dynamics and experiments of the body as visual language to understand complex forms of human expression. The show includes topics such as the generation of ideas through painting, sculpting, printmaking, performing, and photographing, the transformation of the body from the real world to the digital world.
The artists in this show have been investigating the human body as a medium for conceptual, feminist, critical, and digital experiments. In the late 1980s, feminist artist Barbara Kruger claimed that your body is a battleground. Ji Yeo's (MFA 13 Photo) The Beauty reminds us of physical presence of pain of young women in Korea after plastic surgery. Vanessa Godden's (MFA 14 Photo) performance Hystera represents transitions of women's body from glamorous youth to motherhood. In terms of historical and cultural influence on the body, Jordan Seaberry's (BFA 13 Painting) work deals with both the history of the oppressed and the oppressor in the African-American body. In the realm of the digital, our body is a device and a controller. Our bodies have been digitized and exist in the virtual world. We move our body in front of machines to play video games or to control mobile gadgets in daily life. Genius Red by Liat Berdugo (MFA 13 DM) shows how we use body gestures to control mobile devices which is significant because her work demonstrates the most up-to-date relationship between our body and technology. Brian James's (MFA 14 GD) Interface has altered the primary material, a digital video, by manipulating digital codes to make glitch video. The primary medium becomes malleable since it now consists solely of discrete digits. The body has been used as an experimental language by a great number of contemporary artists. Through the show, Body: Talk envisions establishing a dialogue with the audience about the possibilities of expressing the body from the conventional to the digital.

Curated by:
Namwoo Bae, MFA 13 DM
Ahrong Kim, MFA 13 CER