This installation of animation and sculpture is an expression of the digital condition of information: namely that the virtual sculpture can be repurposed to its context at will. From the computer data both animation (time based) and sculpture (space based) are realized. These two states of the virtual sculpture mirror one another in different dimensional modalities: the animation is the condition of the sculpture in 2 dimensional space adding the element of time. The Sculpture is a moment extracted from the animation and made corporeal: a 3 dimensional snap shot of the animation.
Rees
has described these new works as an expression of multiple consciousness,
a state where several entities can occupy a body, influence it and struggle
within it. These works also comment upon aspects of the bioengineering
and the genomic project: its dangers and seductions. The title putto is
a reference to the italian carvings of baby angels.
Rees's work maintains three prongs of the same fork . These can be loosely
related to correspond to a body mind spirit dynamic. The body refers to the
Putto Series and its attendant animations. These are concerned with the manipulated
body and with multiple consciousness folded into an animate constructed body.
The mind refers to the Sculptural User Interface, Rees’s digital texhnique,
with its parallel attendance to tendencies in conceptual art and computer science
(the readymade, an extension of Beuys notion of social sculpture and software
as a kind of ready made made ready.) And finally the spiritual: Rees' Ajna
Series is the conflation of western analytic science and eastern metaphysics
with a special blend of surrealism that reflect the influence of twentieth
century surrealism.
The exhibition includes the sculpture pictured above plus a two screen animation. It also includes sculptures from 1992, 1995, and 1999 which are antecedents to the more recent work Putto 4 over 4.
