UNDRGRND ARTIST: DEHISCENCE
JULY 29TH, 2022
Each week artists are commissioned for a piece of art through the UNDRGRND Grant Program. 100 NFTs are minted and are randomly airdropped to UNDRGRND Membership Cardholders. To find out how you can be featured as an UNDRGRND Artist check out our Discord.
What happens when a former forensic anthropologist becomes a cardiovascular healthcare worker and begins creating art?
Everything about Dehiscence makes perfect sense. Her art is an amalgamation of her personal experiences and how they have shaped her worldview. Dehiscence refers to her work in healthcare and means “open wound." And much like an open wound that bleeds and exhumes, Dehiscence is exposing her thoughts, feelings, and what makes her, her.
The pieces are often beautifully grotesque, true representations of the physical form, distorted in complicated ways, imperfect and mutated; mutated from the desire to be perfect and achieve a standing that is beautiful by the narrow standards created by society.
“My creative process stems from a desire to even the playing field by either modifying our external façade or by bringing our internal biological world to the forefront,” Dehiscence says, “I also tend to shift the focus onto the social issues surrounding these gendered standards. Human rights are human rights and no one should be left behind because they don’t fit into the mold which was formed by a white, Christian, patriarchal society.”
Often the decisions we make about our bodies, modifications or judgements, come from a place of fear, vulnerability, or even disgust. That disgust manifests from facing (or avoiding and fighting against) our mortality.
“During my years in healthcare working with people who have advanced heart failure, I’ve had many discussions around the quality of life and mortality. These conversations lead me to think about the relationship between our feelings of vulnerability during illness and how our denial or fear of our mortality impacts our roles within our family units and our roles in society. Those very human feelings combined with my interest in implantable medical technology is what made me expand my art to use the human body as a modifiable subject.”
Even the process of her creations is a metaphor for how our society is tinkering, altering, and striving to create beyond our capabilities. Dehiscence began creating art as a stress reliever in 2016 and now she uses those creations with artificial intelligence. Her use of technology to transmute her creations into new depictions of her ideas can be interpreted as both an inherent human condition of tinkering and evolution as well as a rebellion against the societal world (the art world) and what we consider art.
“I think the whole ‘AI art isn’t art’ debate, is just the most recent misunderstanding of technology, (not unlike people's misunderstanding of NFTs). People used to think art made with photoshop wasn’t art, or photography wasn’t art. It’s a new technology that artists can use in various ways. Art continues to evolve and will continue to evolve. I often use an old artwork as my initial image so the AI can build upon what I have already created, post-processing includes work in photoshop or procreate, including overpainting. So is the AI or computer, creating the final product? I don’t think so. I am the beginning and the end of the process, the AI is the editor of the work in-between. I think artificial intelligence technology is a great way for artists to enhance their creativity, to experiment with subjects, color palettes, compositions, and to open their minds to what is possible within the world of art.”
Our human nature is to edit, change, and evolve both for the better and to our detriment. No matter how much we dress up and alter the outside of our bodies to reach the idealized version we aspire to, we cannot hide it behind an open wound.
But, much like the human the condition, this is just one facet of Dehiscence’s art. She has proven proficient in a variety of styles exploring other avenues. And after all these words attempting to describe and give context to her work, perhaps her thoughtful description for her work is most fitting, “visual anthropological explorations of the human experience.”
