In The Institute of Isolation, a woman in a beige body suit with padding, cap and sneakers goes through a sequence of actions alone. She runs along a raised concrete platform, she breathes through a mask, she visits an anechoic (sound-absorbtion) chamber, she steps the internal circumference of a microgravity trainer while suspended from the ceiling. A voice-over describes her mission: she is preparing for space travel.
This is the most recent work of Australian-born, LA-based artist Lucy McRae to be included in her first solo exhibition Lucy McRae: Body Architect, currently showing at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and curated by Simone LeAmon. As a filmic imagining of the preparation for a female body to travel to space, The Institute of Isolation encapsulates many of the themes in McRae’s work, including her fascination with testing the limits of the body (physical and psychological) and her preoccupation with the future.
The exhibition shows the evolution of McRae’s art practice from 2006, when she first came to global attention over a series of photographs created in collaboration with Dutch artist Bart Hess. After meeting at Philips, the two began experimenting together – playing with materials and exploring ideas around body manipulation.
Germination shows Hess wearing a series of sacks filled with seed that gradually begin to grow grass, while Hook and Eyes shows a close-up of McRae’s face, which has been manipulated into the ‘perfect shape’ with a series of hooks and wires. “We were talking about the future of plastic surgery and whether we will all end up looking the same,” she says. “If that happens, will there be a revolution of the ugly?”
These are the questions that fascinate McRae. Others works in the series include Pic of sticks, where Hess is shown covered in toothpicks and Grow on you, a series of images where blue foam on the body almost looks like a garment. “It was almost like a play date,” says McRae. “I would put my head in some pink washing up liquid and put my head up and say ‘what do you think?’ and we’d say ‘yep’, we would workshop that and take a photo.”
Interestingly, it was the movement of the washing up liquid bubbles across the body that led McRae from still photography to video work and short films.
In Swallowable Parfum, we see a female body laid out on a slab in a medical laboratory, her body contorts like a dancer. She is encased in a bag that slowly fills with liquid. Meanwhile, the ‘scientists’, also women, prepare the ‘pills’ in a production line. Fascinating, eerie and unsettling, the work questions whether we could or should modify our body odour by changing our chemical makeup through an ingested pill.
In Prepping the Body for Space, McRae investigates whether the body can be trained to handle zero gravity more effectively before space travel. It is as a result of these questions that McRae, for the first time, applies material to the body with a vacuum to create the sensation and physiological response of a hug. The voiceover says it’s “like being hugged by a machine”.
Taking this idea one step further is Future Day Spa, an interactive installation in which members of the public can choose to be ‘hugged’ by the machine, either on their own, with a partner or with a stranger. This gives those who fear human touch an option to feel this comforting sensation. “There’s a touch crisis,” explains McRae. “We’re so connected to our devices and we’re living these avatar digital existence having less physical contact with the world around us. So the speculation is, that if the future lacks human touch, will technology vie for our affection?”
While the Future Day Spa experience is not available to exhibition visitors at the NGV, they do have the chance to interact with one of the exhibits: Biometric Mirror is a project that McRae developed with Dr Niels Wouters, who created an algorithm that reads the face and offers metrics like age, gender but also personality traits, including openness and weirdness. By standing in front of an oval shape, the camera records your face and takes a series of measurements, before relaying these to you on a series of screens.
Having studied Interior Design at RMIT, McRae’s work is not limited by one material but traverses video, photography, installation, costume and fashion, technology and more. She collaborates frequently, but is adamant about her process. “My philosophy is to ask impossible questions, to be very disruptive and to make things I’ve never made before,” she says.
“When I start a project I have no idea what it’s going to look like at the end. It’s thinking through making. It’s very experimental, very intuitive. I work a lot with my own body. I really believe that if you want to make significant work you need to be okay with being uncomfortable.”
What is striking about McRae’s work is the themes in the work – exploring the human body from a female perspective and how it can be manipulated, alongside space and the future, science and technology. Her work not only serves to imagine future technologies and scenarios, but also to question the ethics behind such work – in a world where we can design the human body and remove what some may call imperfections, who is making those decisions?
Lucy McRae: Body Architect is on at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from 30 August 2019 – 9 February 2020.
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