#SETH PRICE DISPERSIO SKIN#

Perhaps this is an ideal imagining of the new Western subject under neoliberalism-the subject-as-data, a techno-organism ripe to be processed for market research. Here, Price deploys this by isolating and expanding minute fragments of the human body, configuring them as data points and using them like code. Artists have long reached into parallel disciplines, but Price’s nebulous approach emphasizes the human subject as a Thing that is produced through the dispersal of creative, intellectual and economic processes. Rather, his practice is suspended in a matrix of creative industries, and within this schema, he acts as a broker of connections. In Price’s work, autonomy seems beside the point. Price digitally maps the human body, a superfluous gesture that implies humans have become technology within a digital landscape.

#SETH PRICE DISPERSIO SKIN#

The absurd degree of overproduction granted to pictures of skin elicits a duality: “real” physical experiences and technological mediations thereupon. But in this case, it is unclear whether the blemishes are real, enhanced by Price’s digital process or are digital wounds-remnants of the process itself. The pictures aren’t pleasant sometimes scarred and burned, jaundiced and bruised, they evoke fragmented limbs from war photographs that pepper today’s media. The body parts that compose each work (a foot, an elbow) become distorted, elongated and discoloured, appearing less like appendages than what one might see peering out of the window of an airplane, flying above a mountain range made of flesh. Price’s recent attention to human skin might, then, indicate an ontological pivot in which the human being now fulfills the role of an envelope or a garment: it contains, carries and delivers.įor each piece in the installation Danny, Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad (2015–2017), thousands of ultra-closeups are captured by a forensic camera, stitched together using satellite-imaging programs like the ones used to make Google Maps, and then rendered with 3D graphics software. Though notoriously hard to locate, a through-line of Price’s restlessly transdisciplinary career is his tendency to intimate the ultimate proximity to human, without actually touching it. His most recognizable works are polystyrene wall pieces, vacuum-formed around consumer goods and body parts plywood cut-outs of negative space between two people and huge textile envelopes, with a corresponding fashion line, manufactured within the production networks of couture. Price has traditionally avoided direct representation, focusing instead on what packages and contains products and people alike.

The unusually corporeal images, which Seth Price began producing in 2015, stand out from what we’ve come to expect from the artist, who often tends to imply or skirt figuration rather than foreground it. Six canvases stretch over lightboxes, each approximately two metres wide and five metres tall an accompanying soundscape of white noise reads more like aerial landscape photos or abstract topographies than ultra-closeups of human skin.

Seth price dispersio