Artist Showcase – Leigh Anne Langwell
About the Artist Leigh Anne Langwell works as a technical editor of technical documents, graphics, and multimedia. She has been an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of New Mexico, a medical photographer, and as an administrator for fine arts non-profit organizations.
Artist’s Statement My professional background in biological and medical imaging has had a considerable impact on my artistic process. My earlier work was specifically concerned with the historical conventions of scientific imaging that often appeared in outdated scientific texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What I found interesting were the outmoded conventions of logic that dictated how the information was presented in relationship to a body of presumed facts that were either no longer valid or had simply ceased to exist outside of their own obsolete relationships. When the context of these images ceased to adequately inform them, fact became rather pliant metaphor that called into question the veracity of the nature of observation and the presumed objectivity of both the observer and the scientific document itself Surgical and X-ray documents have been of particular interest to me. The removal or pulling back of layers inherent in the process of dissection bespeaks not only revelation, but also the peculiar combination of brutality and finesse often associated with medical practice. The various textures and functions of internal structures were the catalysts for the initial ideas concerning the inside of the body as a landscape. Location or place for exploration. X-rays images have always been a source of great fascination for me and have served as a base in much of my work because of their revelatory nature. They appeal to my personal aesthetic as pictures of the secret life of the body and as photograms of its deepest structure exposed and transformed by invisible light. There is an odd sense of internal illumination in that deep black space with its flowing, smoky highlights that border on a sense of the dimensional. The difficulty inherent in the use of scientific imagery for artistic objectives is that it is constricted by the clinical context of its production and purpose. Hospital documents that served as a conceptual base for my earlier work were made for a specific audience within an institutional intent. Visual conventions embodied in this type of image production speak of technological modes of observation that serve to imbed the subject more deeply within a restricted discourse rather than to open it up to larger themes and metaphors. In an attempt to circumvent the institutional directives in the imagery, I felt that if I could not create my own X-rays and dissection specimens, then I could at least reference their appearance utilizing my own processes. Changing the subject and its context chanced the nature of the discourse. The idea of the body as a larger environment such as a spatial location or a landscape developed earlier in my professional employment as a result of the surgical work I had produced. My focus on types of scientific imagery moved more into scanning electron microscopy and the mosaic panoramas of the surface of the moon made by NASA in the early 1960s. As my attention to various types of imagery began to shift, my work began to move away from the process of the removal of layers to enter into the space revealed beneath them. Exchanges between the macroscopic and the microscopic helped to serve as bridges from the representation of an actual space to one that could more fully embrace possibility and metaphor. I had often heard the interior of the body described as a moist, dark, densely packed miniversion of hell. The description fits on the level of gross anatomy, but I prefer to think on much smaller terms. Interstitial spaces between cells become vast in atomic and microscopic conditions. The body itself becomes oceanic; everything exists in a saline medium and is subject to the tides and imperatives of that environment. It was important to create a space that enveloped the viewer, combining elements both alien and familiar to convey a sense of entry into a microcosm with its own macrocosmic layers of interpretation. Last fall I witnessed a swarm of bees temporarily ensconce itself within the east wall of my apartment. They hung collectively like a large, living bag from one of the trees in the yard and then singly entered the wall through an opening for electrical wiring. I was struck by the manner in which each insect acted as an individual while simultaneously serving as part of a larger entity. The poet Paul Valery describes the body as a set of material and perceptual bodies that, in concert, make up the idea and substance of physical experience. He has also described his own body as a “swarm of cells.” Implied within these ideas is the concept that the body divided down to even a minute level would still manifest an overarching principle that both is, and is more than, a sum of components. As unity and complexity are broken down, it seems that some level of connection or interaction remains between the parts. There is some sense of internal communication, or possibly self-knowledge, in the body’s pathways of electrical and chemical exchange of information; the molecular conversations that the body carries on within itself. In relation to the idea of internal communication, I found myself thinking of the body as having its own terms of self-revelation by containing an interior source of illumination; as if the nuclear glow of an X-ray image would have some counterpart in the burst of a neuron firing. All of the work sculpturally, photographically and conceptually culminated with the photogram mural in two-second pulses of light. The three-dimensional work was traced, described and fixed in time in a document similar in appearance to dark-field microscopy and with a similar intent to reveal more subtle information, or at least different permutations of the familiar. The images were constructed under a low-level safelight with two-second bursts from a low wattage light bulb to expose them. Because I could only organize large blocks of information under such low light levels, a leap of faith was required that the details would support the whole. Much like an X-ray image, a wealth of information not immediately observable in the pieces manifested itself in the photograms. Hopefully, I have managed to transcend the technology and visual mechanics of scientific imaging to bring the observational into the realms of space and sensual experience. The body as an existent space has already been well traveled, identified and documented. As a conceptual landscape, however, I have only just begun to explore the body as a location where intersections of possibility and metaphor can unfold into larger terrains. |
 
 
 
 
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