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MOMENTUM AiR
Geraldine Ondrizek
15 August – 15 December 2015
Geraldine Ondrizek is an artist and professor of art at Reed College in Portland Oregon working at the intersection of art and biological science for the last twenty years. She earned her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle, and her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Since 2001 she has worked with geneticists and biologists to gather and compose images of human cellular tissue and genetic tests that relate to ethnic identity and disease. The architectural-scaled works she creates house medical information. They have been shown widely in galleries, museums and research hospitals, including 34 solo exhibitions and numerous group shows.
She is the recipient of the 2014 Hallie Ford Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ford Family Foundation; two Oregon Arts Commission and Hallie Ford Career Development Grants; a Houston Foundation Grant; four Culture Grant, Levine Fund and Mellon Foundation Faculty Research Awards; and an Oregon Council on the Arts Fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at France, England, New York, Germany, Pennsylviana, Colorado, and Germany. Ondrizek has lectured at various universities. Her work has been shown at NASA, The University of Houston, FIU Gallery, the Detroit Museum of Art, The Portland Art Museum, The Sheldon Museum, The Western Washington University Gallery, The Shenman Gallery, The IMSS in Chicago, The Miller Gallery at Carnegie–Mellon University, as well as other places, including ZKM | Center for Art and Media during her stay in Germany.
Geraldine Ondrizek, “Cellular”, Video Still (2012)
Revisiting Eugenics in the Age of Genetics:
Geraldine Ondrizek will continue the research on the history of eugenics practices she began with the exhibition ‘Shades of White’ opening at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon this September. Whereas Shades of White focused on race and skin color, she will now focus on eugenics and mental illness. Eugenicists were convinced that conditions such as insanity, feeblemindedness, epilepsy, pauperism, alcoholism, and other forms of social deviance were fundamentally hereditary. She will visit the most significant archives on eugenics at the Freie University in Berlin that holds the archives of The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.
This research and visual investigation will result in an installation that will be composed of several projections of cellular formations and malformations, genetic sequences that show physical and metal differences, historical, personal and statistical information as well as new and significantly positive research on mental ability. She will make the space a fully interactive, theatrical and space that has a many moveable silk panels that capture projected images when moved by the viewers/participatory audience. This work will enable the viewer to be surrounded by the voices of many and she hopes that they will get a new perspective on racial categorization. She has been invited to show this work at Central Bookings’ Haber Space, A Gallery of Art and Science in New York City in 2016.
Research and Studio Work based on findings from the Max Plank Archive at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Dr. Georg Geipel’s hand and fingerprint studies (1930-1960). Installation by Geraldine Ondrizek for her Berlin Open Studio on 29 Nov 2015.
OPEN STUDIO with GERALDINE ONDRIZEK
29 November 2015
@ Reinickendorfer Strasse 15, 13347 Berlin
6:00 – 19:00
The installation will continue through 15 December 2015 and can be seen by appointment at: ondrizeg@reed.edu
During her Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, Ondrizek’s research at the archives of the Max Planck Institute focus on the work of Dr. Georg Geipel, an anthropologist and statistician who worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin from 1930 -1960. Geipel used methods of dermatoglyphics and dactyloscopy for the study of fingerprints and handprints to link these patterns to inheritance. This sytem was not new, in fact Widler used it beginning in 1904. However Geipel rigorously assigned mathematical coordinates to the lines, curves, breaks, negative spaces and intersections in the hand and fingerprint. Through these measurements he was able to identify inherited hand lines, similarities in identical twins based on embryology and racial difference. Although his ability to identify genetic inheritance was significant, his evaluation and conclusions based on racial difference and mental ability done for the KWI during the war were both incorrect and seriously problematic.(1) However, he did continue to refine his mathematical identification systems after the war and was able to mathematically prove that these marks are unique for each of us and that they are carried within family lines. His system, which primarily measures the breaks and intersections of the lines in the fingerprint and handprint, is used in biometric data scanners today.
The history of biometric data skips the 1930’s-50’s because of the negative associations. However, the effects of taking biometric data then, and the effects of taking it now, as a method of surveillance and identity codes for each human being, is hauntingly similar.
Ondrizek has had the privilege to look at thousands of Geipel’s handprint studies, and has focused on those of identical twins from the 1950’s-60’s. Twin studies have continued to be of vital importance to genetics as they show the subtle difference in the genetic make up of each human being based on embryology. By making a project with these prints, Ondrizek aims to honor those who unknowingly offered their identity markers for science. It is highly unlikely that they would have known how their personal mark would have been used to establish the system we use now. However, the knowledge gained, for better or worse, is part of a system of biometric data collection that begins at birth with the taking of a child’s hand prints and has become the standard measure of our identify worldwide.
The research and art work Ondrizek is doing here in Berlin during the MOMENTUM residency manifests in a series of studio projects to be shown at an Open Studio event on 29 November 2015, and will be comprised of a set of books of the handprints and the geometric patterns used, a video of the archive as well as experiments and proposals for works to be done in the US in 2016-2017. The research done in Berlin will be further developed once Ondrizek returns to the US and will include her own biometric and genetic profile.
WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE OPEN STUDIO ARTIST TALK WITH GERALDINE ONDRIZEK:
