This public gallery talk examines a selection of works in the exhibitions Sue Coe: Graphic Resistance and Seth Price: Danny, Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad to discuss how Coe and Price address ways in which technology pervades and destabilizes human identity. Coe’s paintings It Got Away From Them and Baboon Heart Surgery probe the boundaries of human life, respectively depicting a transgenic hormone injection and an interspecies organ transplant. Similarly, Price’s light box portraits question human individuality, displaying digitally flayed skin devoid of bodily context yet rich in biometric detail. Though dramatically different representational strategies and artistic forms, both Coe and Price engage questions of how technology can complicate the relation between a living whole and its lifeless parts.
Presented by Michelangelo DiPietrantonio, Spring 2018 Curatorial Intern, MoMA PS1, and M.A. Candidate in Art History at Hunter College.