NEW YORK, NY.- The New Museum’s summer 2021 exhibition line-up features a monographic presentation installed in the Museum’s main galleries, on view from June 30 to October 3, 2021. On the Second Floor, “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” is the artist’s first solo exhibition at a New York museum.
For over fifty years, Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941, Cleveland, OH) has created an innovative and prescient body of work that mines the intersections between technology and the self. Known for her groundbreaking contributions to media art, Hershman Leeson has consistently worked with the latest technologies, from artificial intelligence to DNA programming, often anticipating their impact on society. As the artist posited in 1998, “Imagine a world in which there is a blurring between the soul and the chip, a world in which artificially implanted DNA is genetically bred to create an enlightened and self-replicating intelligent machine, which perhaps uses a human body as a vehicle for mobility.”
The exhibition brings together a selection of Hershman Leeson’s wide-ranging work in drawing, sculpture, video, and photography, along with interactive and net-based works, focusing on themes of transmutation, identity construction, and the cyborg self. The presentation includes over sixty early drawings and wax-cast sculptures from the 1960s; her well-known durational performance project Roberta Breitmore series (1972–79), selections from her series Water Women (1976–present), Phantom Limb (1985–88), and Cyborg (1996– 2006), among others, as well as video works from the 1970s through the present.
The exhibition also features Hershman Leeson’s most recent large-scale project, The Infinity Engine (2014– present), a multimedia installation based on a genetics laboratory that explores the impact of genetic engineering on society; and a new commission, Twisted Gravity (2020–2021), produced in collaboration with the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, that incorporates new technologies to purify toxicities in water. Together, the works in the exhibition trace the ever-intertwined relationship between the technological and the corporeal, illuminating the political and social consequences of scientific advances on our most intimate lives.
“Twisted” is curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by Karen Archey, Martine Syms, texts by Lynn Hershman Leeson, and an interview with the artist conducted by Margot Norton.
