Lynn Hershman Leeson »
Anti-Aging
Exhibition: 4 Apr – 18 May 2024
BRIDGET DONAHUE
99 Bowery, 2nd Floor
NY 10002 New York
+1 646-896-1368
info@bridgetdonahue.nyc
www.bridgetdonahue.nyc
Tue-Sat 12-18
Renowned artist Lynn Hershman Leeson invites audiences to embark on a transformative journey through time, identity, and the future of human existence with her latest exhibition, Anti-Aging. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery and presents a culmination of Hershman Leeson's decades-long exploration of this complex concept. The installation spans myriad forms— drawings, paintings, photographs, sculpture, multi-media works and video — from her earliest images depicting humans merging with machines to her latest experiments with bio-technology.
Hershman Leeson’s new video, Cyborgian Rhapsody: Immortality, 2023, makes its East Coast premiere introducing a cyborg named Sarah (born in 2029). Sarah is looking for human collaborators and finds them easily by infiltrating social media feeds. The cyborg interrupts two young girls, mid-scroll, with an inquisitive monologue telling the children about her military kin, misrepresentations of technology and the true threat to our consciousness: hatred and greed. Cyborgian Rhapsody is the follow-up to Hershman Leeson’s acclaimed 2022 film, Logic Paralyzes the Heart, 2022 which received Special Mention by the jury of the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Eternally Yours, 2023 is a sculpture housing a refrigerated anti-aging vaccine derived from the artist’s 2014 installation, “The Infinity Engine,” which was a replica genetics lab that addressed the ramifications of programming DNA and CRISPR. Hershman Leeson says, “When I followed up with the scientists that I had interviewed for “The Infinity Engine,” ten years ago, I was amazed that all of them were now doing work that dealt with anti-aging. Many scientists now say that "aging" is a disease to be cured. In the United States and Europe, experiments with aging can not be done on humans, though they have been able to experiment on rats. I worked with Swiss scientist Dr. Thomas Huber and we ordered this anti-aging vaccine for humans from a lab in China.”
Interspersed thought the exhibition are Hershman Leeson’s more subtle meditations on aging — a clock running in reverse, a re-cut interview she conducted with Leonora Carrington in the 1980s and pencil portraits on thin skins of paper.