evolving anatomies

Sean Caulfield, Marilène Oliver, & Scott Smallwood  

Sean Caulfield, Marilène Oliver, and Scott Smallwood are working together to create a wall of images that contrast and combine anatomical representations from the Renaissance to the present day. Caulfield’s starting point is the Vesalius man, while Oliver’s is Melanix, an open source full body CT scan of a woman. Together they will create an installation of woodcuts, silkscreen prints, 3D printed models, and video projections. Smallwood infuses and surrounds these objects with a soundscape made of flowing water, heat, ice melt, and data-driven textures, mixed with secret messages, glitches, and distorted broadcasts. 

The work will explore Daniel Laforest’s research into the ways medical technology and specifically diagnostic imaging are shifting the ways we perceive and understand our own bodies and life-stories. The work is also intended to comment on the growing disparity between wealthy nations or communities who have easy access to cutting-edge digital health technology, and poorer ones that do not enjoy the same readily available assets. As biomedical innovations now develop at a breakneck pace, the international community faces urgent ethical and political questions around equality and distribution of health and digital technology.

Photography by Blaine Campbell