Marilène Oliver

RE-STITCHED AND RE-TOUCHED: MATERIALIZING THE MEDICAL DATA BODY

December 4, 2017 – March 4, 2018

Artist Talk: February 19, 2018, 6:00pm, free and open to the public

Marilène Oliver works at a crossroads somewhere between new digital technologies, traditional print and sculpture, her finished objects bridging the virtual and the real worlds. She works with the body translated into data form in order to understand how it has become ‘unfleshed’, in the hope of understanding who or what it has become. Oliver uses various scanning technologies, such as MRI, CT and PET, to reclaim the interior of the body and create works that allow us to materially contemplate our increasingly digitized selves.

This exhibition at the International Museum of Surgical Science brings together a small selection of work that Oliver has made since 2010 that employ labor intensive and embodied making methods such as beading, cutting and drilling. The commitment to these techniques that require months of handwork invests the immaterial scan data with the body of the artist.

Marilène Oliver was born in the UK in 1977 and studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and then at the Royal College of Art where she obtained an MPhil with the practice-based research project ‘Flesh to Pixel, Flesh to Voxel, Flesh to XYZ’ on the use of medical imaging in contemporary art. Oliver has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe in both private and public galleries including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Academy, MassMoCA, Knoxville Museum of Art (USA) Frissarias Museum (Greece) and Kunsthalle Ahlen (Germany), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg) and The Glenbow Museum (Canada). Her work is held in a number of private collections around the world as well as a number of public collections such as The Wellcome Trust, Sorigue Foundation, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Knoxville Museum of Art. Marilène Oliver is an Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Alberta, Canada.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.