Anatamation: where Anatomy meets Animation: 8/19/12

Recently Yvette Deas installed her "Dissection Series" in our hallway. I can't tell you how excited I was (and still remain) to have this art in our halls. I got her to give me a few paragraphs to give to anyone interested, and I printed up small placards to place next to each painting. They are quite lovely, and I enjoy looking at them every day.

"Dissection Series, seven paintings installed at the School of Anatomy at Stanford, takes dissection as both subject and process. Considered as an examination of portraiture (which is, itself, always a process of dissection), the subject is variously centralized and decentralized, alternating between the seductive amorphous absorption of flesh and the idiosyncratic vestiges we leave behind. Body parts: belly buttons, painted fingernails, tattoos, and the gesture of a face under cloth become traces of a life once lived, even as the surgeon's hands becomes the artist's hands and the viewer's eyes.

These paintings were wholly unintended, the result of taking my figure drawing students to the Anatomy lab at Stanford. Welcomed and encouraged by the doctors and students, most especially by Dr. Srivastava, they allowed me to poke and prod and mush the bodies, and rearrange their parts (I put them back, though, I promise). I asked the students questions: was there a part of the body that popped you out of the dissection – a minute in which you were suddenly reminded of the body as a person? I found that their answers were the same as mine and my students. These paintings explore those strange moments of absence and presence, person and non-person, a psychic dislocation impossible to reconcile. The paintings, still multiplying in my studio, are alternately strange and indecipherable, familiar and tactile. For me, they are a source of endless fascination and beauty."