Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Cynthia Blanchette
This short talk will explore microbes as both souvenirs received and gifted, in exchanges of experience imbued with meaning and consequence. Suggesting that these exchanges of experience, whether adapted or rejected direct human evolution. Artistic research is used to investigate the evolutionary emotion ‘disgust’ and its intrinsic task in differentiating the self from other through parasitic souvenirs.
Cynthia Blanchette is a Canadian artist-researcher based in Finland, working as a Doctoral Researcher in Contemporary Art through the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University. Cynthia’s current research interests fall into the abject facets of human-microbial-technological evolution. Within her practice she re-evaluates ubiquitous cultural/societal notions of the lived experience through the artistic practices of ideation drawing, artifact collecting, bioart, and textile architecture. This work builds upon her MA research which focused on wetlands, arguing that the bog is a concrete metaphor for the darker aspects of contemporary life and fears, and as such is considered ‘stray’.
www.cynthiablanchette.com