Sharp lines
Sharp Lines, a recent exhibition by Brad Nunn and Tracey Benson, offered a playfully macabre and personally motivated examination of medical modes of display and objectification. Courting the uncanny task of lending visual form to modern medicine's historically repressed underbelly of minority exploitation and social segregation, the artist's calculated use of grotesquery could be seen to open up the question of a meta-anatomy, one that took as its subject the surgical gaze itself, along with related normative social discourses on the body. Explicit surgical ropes like anatomical diagrams, profiles of surgical implements, skeletal models and specimen catalogues, were combined with more subtle , formal metaphors of probing, severing and dissection to produce a discursive gross clinic, which attempted to make a kind of endoscopic counter-spectacle of various choice-cuts from the corpus of medical and socio-biological pretence.
Each of the assorted sculptural and pictorial pieces in the exhibition contested, in its own way, the suspect and seemingly contradictory aim of medical optics to render the body, with its unruly affectations and heterogeneous morphologies, absent from the production of knowledge: a process tacitly understood as disincarnate, specular and as such termed objective. In place of this panoptic or holistic ambition to reduce the intractable density of the organism and its experiences to a universal catalogue of imagistic models or types, was an impetus to consider how the body, as both the subject and object of investigation, introduces certain cognitive blindspots and libidinal blockages that disable empirical quantification.
Much of the work in the exhibition could be seen to be playing on this planar limitation of surgical visuality, the problem of knowing the inimitable fullness of the three dimensional through the severe frame