Original Installation: Genetics/Memetics, 1998. Pirate Contemporary Art, Denver, CO
Second partial installation: Genetics/Memetics, 2002. Artomatic, Washington, DC
Genetics/Memetics is an installation that brings together the body, culture, and systems of transmission. Large-scale female figures—drawn from art history but altered—carry visible signs of biological and cultural inheritance. In one figure, cell division takes place in the belly; in others, identities shift through the use of appropriated and distorted imagery.
The work combines references that don’t comfortably belong together. Dürer’s witches are reduced and reconfigured. Cartoon heads drawn from 18th-century political satire replace individual identity. A sideways transformation of Jimmy Durante’s eye becomes a vulval form. These shifts are intentional—they interrupt recognition and redirect meaning.
I was thinking about how information moves—through the body, through images, and through culture. Genetics and memetics operate differently, but they overlap. One is biological transmission; the other is cultural repetition. In this work, they are inseparable.
The installation format allows these elements to exist in relation. Scale, proximity, and accumulation matter. The viewer moves through the space rather than looking at a single image, encountering the work as a set of interactions rather than a fixed statement.
This piece comes out of my earlier figurative work, but it shares a core concern with what continues in my practice: how meaning is carried, altered, and experienced. Whether through the body or through abstraction, the question remains how systems of energy and information are held and transmitted.
