The objects represented by Linda Carrara come from everyday life, but are here utilised as primary forms rather than mundane objects. They assemble into a metastructure and reassemble in forever changing compositions while questioning the visible world. This still-life no longer refers to inanimate everyday objects. This is the painting itself that becomes the object; of unknown origin, ageless, and endlessly processable. The painting itself is made into a malleable thing prone to a long questioning gaze. The object of representation has always been a mediator of thought.

I’m a Still-Life is a documented action shot in a single sequence. If it can be defined technically as a video, it has neither beginning nor end, nor duration and it is not unique. Every movement causes a break, generates a new scene and involves the future whose potential is yet infinite. These interactions become the tool of a mental dialogue between the neutral presence of the material object and the evocative potential it inspires.

Cellular is a film of a blast pore, or a multiple cell embryo.  More than 200 hours of still images of each embryo were made with Atonics Micro fire digital cameras mounted on Olympus stereomicroscopes and made into a film using Astor IIDC imaging software. My colleague at Reed College, Steve Black, professor of developmental Biology and Zoology., provided me with a lab space to make the films of the blast pore. I worked with his lab assistant Allison Egar to make a film of development which was used for the still images.  To make my film, I edited 10 film sections to overlap and repeat the phases of development just before a recognizable body is evident. Each segment represents the different eggs in the process of development. Each is edited prior to full gestation, creating a loop of endless potential.

The film Cellular is overlayed with the recording of The Sound of Cells Dividing.

The Sounds of Cells Dividing

Since 2003, nanotechnology and the AMF (atomic force microscope) pioneered by James Giminski, Professor of Chemistry at UCLA  and Andrew Pelling Associate Professor of Biophysics at the University of Ottawa, enables researchers to also touch a cell. Like the blind reading brail or a hand touching the pulse, the needle of the AMF can touch cells which are less than half the diameter of a human hair. This touch can also record the sound the cell emits when dividing or dieing. Through touching and hearing rather than only seeing, an entirely new knowledge base has emerged, one that artists have known, that of multiple sensory knowledge.  What we can now listen to within a cell has revolutionized our knowledge of cellular gestation, division and the relationships within the interior architecture of our body.