chemosynth-blog

[chemosynth-blog]

I absolutely love love love your art. Amazing.

thank you!

[chemosynth-blog]

hair as the medium

dress, Kaylin Andres 2008

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back detail of human hair embroidery, in progress, Kaylin Andres 2014

photo Ashley Woo

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mandala print of artist’s hair under an electron microscope, Kaylin Andres 2014

The significance of hair to our own identity becomes magnified when we are forced to lose it. we examine every new strand on the pillowcase, barely noticeable yet part of us, grown from our own DNA and left behind. we didn't even notice til it was gone. we lose ourselves in the complexity and magnitude of the experience.

[chemosynth-blog]

CHEMOSYNTHESIS

"In biochemistry, chemosynthesis is the biological conversion of molecules and nutrients into organic matter using the oxidation of inorganic molecules as a source of energy, rather than sunlight, as in photosynthesis."

 The chemosynthetic process is a dark mirror to the photosynthesis that fuels the plants that in turn, fuel us. It replaces the basic undergirding energy source of life: light, with poison. This process is not simply some aberration found in esoteric microbes-- in the Mariana trench, the black, hot, sulfur-spewing crevice in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean out of which new ocean-surface grows, seven foot long worms line their guts with bacteria for turning methane into a meal. An entire ecosystem has learned to live with no light.

 Artists Kaylin Andres and Max Ritvo met in Memorial Sloane Kettering Hospital. Both in their twenties, their shared diagnosis of metastatic, most likely terminal Ewing’s Sarocoma prematurely cut them off from the literal and metaphorical Sun that lights up the work of most young artists. Kaylin’s physically exhausting work as an up-and-coming fashion designer was impracticable. Max’s activity as a performance artist was impracticable, and his poetry needed to find new footing. It was time to evolve—not in the way birds evolved to soar over the ocean, but in the way worms evolved to live on poison.

 CHEMOSYNETHSIS is a diary of the adaptation of two animals, their creativity, their religion, to a new diet and a new ecosystem. From the materials of a hospital world, Andres and Ritvo set out to build a simulacrum of the world they once loved. The art is in the failure of this art to imitate life. It is in the insurmountable obstacles, psychological and logistical, that the creativity of Andres and Ritvo are forced to take on in the face of hospitalization, isolation, medication, enervation. The art is in their tragic struggle to create despite it. It is a show that is part performance art, part poetry reading, part visual installation. It promises the viewer a scuba suit and immersion not just in a mind quite unlike their own, but in an experience unlike anything they could possibly fathom.

[chemosynth-blog]

We Are Married to Flowers.

Photo by Ashley Woo.

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“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

[chemosynth-blog]

photo by Ashley Woo