Anne Lovett

New Paltz, New York, USA

Conundrum

inkjet print on rag paper, concertina binding

with hard covers

4 ¼ x 6 (closed) 72 (open)

© 1998

no longer available

Conundrum uses photographs, historical medical diagrams, and text to address the ways in which the body is framed by history, science, experience, and desire. Exploring the historic scientific text as a site which functions symbolically as the repository of intellectual knowledge, and the skin as sensor and instrument of desire, it questions the persistent paradigm of Cartesian mind/body division. Historical anatomy diagrams allude to the conceptual framework of the time in which they were made and the fluidity and instability of scientific knowledge. To look at these diagrams is to examine scientific, political, and social belief; images of the classified, organized corpus become metaphors for the belief that rational analysis can explain and control the individual self. Color images emphasize skin as the container of the body and the self, as the barrier which separates self from other, and as a cognitive tool for transmitting the sense of touch and perceiving the world. The cover text is a mirror image of Descartes’ treatise on the mind and the body.

Anne Lovett was born in 1953 in Newtown, Pennsylvania. She received a B.S. in Studio Art from Skidmore College and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art of Temple University. She has exhibited widely, with solo shows at the Dorsky Gallery in New York and elsewhere, and many national and international exhibitions. Notable examples include the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Klingspor-Museum, Offenbach, Germany; Museum fur Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Monique Goldstrom Gallery, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and many others. Her work is represented in national and international collections, and has been recognized by a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography, a New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Grant and the New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artists Program.