Dematerialized

Curated by Bella Anastasio

Artists: Sophie Kahn

January 2021 

Dematerialized is a solo exhibition featuring works by Sophie Kahn that examine the link between technology and death. Kahn is an Australian artist working in New York City whose artistic practice uses new technology to dematerialize, sculpt, and re-materialize the human body. Featured in the show are a new series of 3D printed reliefs, digital prints with watercolor, and one freestanding sculpture.

The works featured in Dematerialized explore manifestations of the body as an avatar in digital space and the nature of this space these avatars inhabit. The weightless data-bodies in Kahn’s work spin and float in an empty void. The transitory spaces in which they exist are defined and visualized through Kahn’s artistic practice. The forms of these bodies have been digitized, altered, and re-materialized as art objects. They have been forever changed by this process. 

Kahn is operating within a new movement defined by artist Claudia Hart as “post-photography,” in which artists work in a critical manner with new 3D imaging technologies that were designed to capture and simulate life. She embraces technology’s failures to reproduce the flawed, unstable human body and teases out the unintended emotional resonances of the resulting forms. Her fragmented avatars are ghostly, incomplete reflections of the complete human being. These specters traverse the elusive space of technology and act as a visualization of that journey. The work selected for this exhibition references the language of mourning, comparing the transmitted digital body to the soul, and the art object to a memorial object. Dematerialized considers the various ways we record and transmit our bodies in digital spaces and the reverberations of death within these territories.