photography in all its forms

Editorial Statement
Inspired by a diverse range of artists, from Surrealist painter Fernand Léger to filmmakers The Brothers Quay and performance artist Orlan, Margot Quan Knight strives to create “fantastic, painful images to talk about the real world and the miraculous human body.” The two series featured as the Portfolio Pick are titled Veins and Taking Care, both of which explore the transgressive and transformative potential in the interaction of animate and inanimate objects.

While Quan Knight uses subtle Photoshop techniques, she draws primarily on her experience at Fabrica, Benetton’s communication arts research center, to construct objects from silicone, resin, sculpey, and other materials. In this way, her work also brings to mind video and filmmaker Michel Gondry’s ability to render perception-challenging optical illusions with simple yet carefully crafted props. The impact is satisfyingly visceral as the viewer attempts to distinguish organic from nonorganic, hand-wrought from natural.

In the Veins series, a hand-stitched blood vessel is the recurring protagonist. In the image Wine, the eponymous vein bursts from the lip of a spilled wine goblet; in Snow 1, the tenacious tendril gropes its way from the spilled entrails of an unidentifiable animal’s body into the snow-covered ground; in Duty 2, perhaps the most pointedly metaphorical of the series, a neatly folded uniform flowers with an artery that burrows its way from an invisible wound into the bedspread below. The tone of each photograph is brooding and dark, rich with atmosphere that further draws the viewer’s eye to the tactile nature of the embroidery and to the juxtaposition of materials Quan Knight has selected.

In Taking Care, the body has been disassembled into tidy, Jeanne Dunning-esque pouches of flesh. She describes the process as follows: “I painted hot wax onto my body, peeled it off and filled the cooled wax shells with plaster, and sanded and painted the plaster pieces. I photographed the plaster body parts on location with the models. I also took photos of the locations without the model so I could knit the photos together in the computer. I used the computer to layer the model’s skin onto the body fragments, so the skin tones match, and to cut off legs and heads in some of the images.”

As with Veins, the effect is somehow neither violent, nor gory. Instead, the peaceful posture of the subjects suggests that these transformations might simply be the next logical step of evolution. Taking into account that scientists are already able to grow human tissue in vats and viruses can be genetically “reprogrammed” to power tiny batteries, such propositions seem not so far outside the bounds of possibility.

Quan Knight, in explaining her work, states, “The images I make provide logical conclusions to my own absurd hypotheses and show how these fabulous possibilities could meld into the daily routine. I begin with objects or bodies or plants and try to give them more life, or a different kind of life. Loneliness, exuberance, and wonder take on physical form.”

LAM