CEPA Gallery : the ART of PHOTOGRAPHY












Paul Vanouse
Paul Vanouse (Buffalo, NY) is an Associate Professor of Art in the Visual Studies Department and the Co-Director of the Emerging Practices MFA program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Working in Emerging Media forms, radical interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism guide his practice. Since the early 1990s his artwork has addressed complex issues raised by varied new techno-sciences using these very techno-sciences as a medium. His artworks have included data collection devices that examine the ramifications of polling and categorization, genetic experiments that undermine scientific constructions of race and identity, and temporary organizations that playfully critique institutionalization and corporatization. These "Operational Fictions" are hybrid entities - simultaneously real things and fanciful representations - intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary electronic landscape.
Latent Figure Protocol
Latent Figure Protocol takes the form of a media installation that uses DNA samples to create emergent representational images. Employing a reactive gel and electrical current, Latent Figure Protocol produces images that relate directly to the DNA samples used. In one experiment, a copyright symbol is derived from the DNA of an industrially-produced organism (a plasmid called "pET-11a"), illuminating ethical questions around the changing status of organic life and the ownership of living organisms.

A "DNA fingerprint" is often misunderstood by the lay public to be a single, unique human identifier, with complex banding patterns imagined as an unchanging sentence written by nature and corresponding to each living creature. In actuality, there are hundreds of different enzymes, primers and molecular probes that can be used to segment DNA and produce revealing banding patterns. Vanouse's artwork demonstrates that the DNA gel image is therefore a cultural construct that is often naturalized.



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