Catherine Wagner

For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability

2024

This 12-part photographic typology, printed on vinyl wallpaper in a large-scale format, documents shelves of frozen boxes and vials, which are labeled with handwritten letters or names and appear slightly disordered. These contents remain abstract in their anonymity, embodying the sheer mass of information contained by the Human Genome Project. In this way, I capture how scientific knowledge is often abstracted from the human lives that contribute to research. In turn, I reference how photography has been enmeshed with the history of medicine and science from the beginning, and that the medium’s seemingly objective reproductions are complex constructions shaped by human choices, politics, and aesthetics.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SAN DIEGO, GETTY FOUNDATION PACIFIC STANDARD TIME INSTALLATION

Using the images from my series, Art & Science: Investigating Matter, -86 Degree Freezers: 12 Areas of Concern & Crisis (1995), which reveal interior views of -86 degree freezers containing the tissue sample archives from the Human Genome Project, I created a site-specific installation between the two galleries at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. These larger-than-life images now activate the corridor and elevator creating an immersive experience as viewers move through the first and second level of the exhibition

Statement courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Jill Dawsey, and Isabel Casso.