Statement

"We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe," writes J.L. Borges. What we know about dragons and other monstrous creatures is that their convoluted bodies usually lurk along the edges of what is normal, natural and real. They serve as conceptual phantoms who reside on the other side of a boundary separating us from them, normal from aberrant, and good from evil. In more subtle ways, fantastic creatures also embody a disorienting richness and critical potency capable of undermining our reliance on reasoned understanding and confidence in a clear separation of opposites. Their mutable, radically hybrid, and often humorous bodies present impossible bonds between disparate parts and unsettling mixtures of contradictory feelings that reveal the complexity of which we ourselves are comprised.

I use computers because they, like monsters, enable a confluence of real and imagined experience in that they replicate many but not all characteristics of the real world. In the virtual 3-D world, for example, gravity can be turned on or off and objects can be scaled or reproduced infinitely. Things (bodies) can also be turned inside out, altered, and combined in ways that would not be possible in the physical world. The extra-worldly computer environment is a place where real and unreal co-exist and where our usual assumptions about life are partially but not entirely in play. Here, too, be dragons.

Bio

Elona Van Gent is a new media artist whose creative investigations integrate the history and philosophy of science, genetics, evolution, teratology, and three dimensional computer technologies. Exhibitions of her work include Artifacts and Anomalies: Cabinets of Wonder and the Play of Technology at Peter the Great Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Today in Paradise at Roda Sten, Gothenburg, Sweden, the International Rapid Prototyping Sculpture Exhibition, traveling internationally, and Beings: A Preview to Human Nature at the School of Fine Arts Gallery, Indiana University. She is the recipient of grants and commissions from the Michigan Arts Council, Grand Valley State University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including Frederick Meijer Sculpture Park and Herman Miller, Inc. in Michigan, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and Alpha Genesis of Boston. Elona has lectured at museums and universities in America and Europe, is an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan and has also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Kendall College of Art and Design, and Grand Valley State University.

Elona Van Gent