Detail of Perfect Specimen, 2004    
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Artist Statement
In moments of vulnerability-when skin peeks out through a run in pantyhose, or when makeup wears thin and leaves just a trace of itself- we can see through the body's façades and the human body reveals itself as compromised. Just as flesh swells after an injury or a bruise rises, the contained body can reemerge to confirm the delicate boundary between internal and external.

By stretching taut materials into architectural spaces, I explore this boundary. I utilize materials of play and seduction to create microscopically inspired models of the body enlarged to an architectural scale. The viewer is no longer life-size; the building's scale expands, becoming a gigantic body for a viewer the size of a red blood cell to explore. While I also use photography to focus on the intimate conflation of real bodies and imagined ones, my installations envelop the viewer in a way still-pictures cannot, allowing them to coexist in real space and time.

My work is playful but not child-like; anatomic models are sanitized but not sexless. I create a body under tension that appears airy and delicate while being confined by structure. Stylized fabric sculptures made of clean, new materials stand in for the gore of viscera and help create a heightened self-consciousness of what is not there-the oily, wrinkled, flaky, sweaty reality of one's own skin.

Skin, the largest organ of the human body, inspires me as a complex site of interchange: a membrane that breathes, an integral whole, comprised of layers, which exists simultaneously inside and outside the body. True Skin is Highly Vascular and Sensitive (2002) is loosely based on a microscopically enlarged cross-section of the dermis (the layers of skin beneath the surface). In this installation, the eight-foot high, eleven-foot wide specimen, grafted from wall to floor, reveals the body on a different scale than either life size or a traditionally smaller scientific model. Pores, nerves and sweat glands made of fishnet stockings, balloons, and glass marbles suggest the sexual and playful nature of touch, the sense of skin.

Glands and Soft Parts (2002) depends on architecture to be complete. Individual elements of this installation-hanging sacs and inflated bulbs-emerge from the gallery wall which itself takes on the role of a connective tissue. Building becomes body, an organism unto itself with glands of fishnet stockings and fetish vinyl filled with balloons, bouncy balls and marbles. The balloons shrink and deflate over time, mimicking the aging process of living flesh, the subsiding of the organs of reproduction after sex.

The site-specific installation Membranes (2002) suggests an enlarged view of a part of the chest or abdomen and goes further towards eliding architecture and skin. The top layer of the piece mimics a real, flesh-colored body and is full of oversized nylon pores, glands and ducts. Layers of increasingly more vibrant color are stretched underneath, emerging from the stairwell that serves as a skeletal system. As the viewer descends the staircase, he goes deeper into the building-thus the body-until he reaches the main floor and has seen the entire piece from above, below and, now, from within itself.

e-Mail | ahonch@artic.edu |