SKIN
Ingrid Lahti and Harriet Sanderson

September 24 -October 29, 2005

Skin is about the surfaces of bodies and the sensations inside them, the differences between looking and feeling. Exhibition hours are held during regularly scheduled dance classes, creating a symbiotic relationship between the exhibit’s focus and Barefoot Studios’ training of body awareness and control through dance.

Squeeze, Ingrid Lahti’s site-specific installation, gives visitors the chance to feel (but not see) their passage between two closely spaced, elastic, neoprene walls. Onlookers may track the passage of someone inside the tunnel as the walls distend and narrow. Viewed from the outside, such progress through the curved walls of the installation looks a bit like a newly swallowed prey moving through the torso of a serpent.

Lahti also presents a short video documentary created specifically for Skin. In this new work a woman puts on and takes off a neoprene wetsuit. Leo Daedalus directed, videotaped, and edited the video, which is also entitled Squeeze, based on Lahti's original conception.

Naked, Harriet Sanderson's oversized images of the body and its attachments are used to express a way of being and moving that may appear foreign to others but is normal to her. Sanderson wants viewers to consider the state of normalcy, and appreciate that it is highly subjective. Having spent her entire life coping in an able-bodied civilization, she now suggests that viewers adjust their bodies in order to view her work, moving through the space while doubled over in half or crawling along the floor.

The artists encourage visitors to take time to feel their bodily sensations as they move through the exhibition and all of the spaces of Barefoot Studios.

Lahti and Sanderson have collaborated and presented exhibitions together on numerous occasions over the past 15 years, allowing their individual works to reverberate and deepen in the context of their joint exhibitions. This exhibition represents overlapping work initially developed individually, then completed in collaboration.

"The brain knows what the hand knows" is an astounding statement offered by Frank Wilson in his 1998 book of scientific and anecdotal accounts about intuitional “knowing.” In The Hand he discusses at length how the brain and hand grow up together, both through phylogeny (evolution) and ontogeny (sequential development of each individual embryo.) Throughout, he elucidates the process whereby our musculo-skeletal system is able to play a piece of music, for example, or marry the puppeteer’s movements with his marionette’s, without conscious mental involvement.

1906 writings by an early neurologist, C.S. Sherrington, explain similarly:
“(There is a) continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of the body (muscles, tendons, joints), by which their position and tone and motion are continually monitored and adjusted, but in a way which is unknown to us because it is unconscious and automatic. (This "secret sense" is) indispensable for our sense of ourselves: for it is only by courtesy of proprioception, so to speak, that we feel our bodies as proper to us, as our property, as our own.”(The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, Cambridge, 1906; and Man on his Nature, Cambridge, 1940.)

That our specific knowledge of the world is shaped by the body in which we exist is the context in which my images are created. While they originate in deformity, they are not representations of it. The images are in fact ruminations of the complex experience of a life posited along the continuum of paralysis, chronic illness and aging. Most work shown here focuses on the “down-time” of disability, the immense amount of time spent in relative inactivity and, importantly, the mental antics that ensue.

Harriet Sanderson
8/2005
Harriet Sanderson, born 1947, USA. Sanderson received a university degree in the biological sciences, and worked as a scientific illustrator and freelance designer before returning to the university. While there, her studies focused on conceptual and feminist art. Since receiving an advanced degree in fine art, excerpts of her fifteen-year project about living with disability have been exhibited in the US and internationally. In addition to producing her own work, she taught printmaking at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she currently lives, and has designed special courses on low-impact techniques and professional development for persons with disabilities. She also volunteers on art projects for persons with disabilities. Sanderson's work is included in public, private, university and museum collections.
Ingrid Lahti is interested in the intersection of the senses and how one sense may enhance or subvert another in a single artwork, providing a rich and complex experience. Her intent to offer audiences a full range of sensory experience frequently draws her to the formats of sculpture and installation. Examples are artworks which generate haptic sensations (the sense of touch elicited through visual cues), those which present one sense in terms of another (i.e., an auditory experience such as birdsong translated into moving visual imagery in a kinetic sculpture) and installations with a focus on kinesthesia and touch, such as the current installation.

Lahti has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Betty Bowen, and has exhibited widely. She also works in the field of public art, creating site sensitive permanent artworks for communities.

Born in 1943 to Finnish immigrant parents, she received a degree in biology and studied microbiology at the graduate level before devoting herself to art. During university studies toward her advanced degree in sculpture, she concentrated on conceptual art and art history. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, since returning in 1976. From time to time, she collaborates on short video projects with her son Leo Daedalus,a writer, filmmaker and media artist living in Portland.