When a Rose is Not a Rose · Claudia Hart

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce a second solo exhibition with the Chicago-based artist Claudia Hart. When A Rose is Not a Rose, Hart's reflection on the ubiquitous Gertrude Stein poem from 1913, presents the artist's recent explorations on her own denial of death. The exhibition's muted wall text, "When this you see remember me", also quotes the title of W.G. Roger's biography on Stein, functioning as a cold reminder of mortality, a memento mori. Primarily using photography and animated video, Hart crafts compelling metaphors for Freud's das unheimlich (the uncanny) in virtual statues and models that are filled with human emotion, such as loss, pain and the fear of death. Psychically charged, these pieces present the viewer with objects that are simultaneously dead and alive – uncanny in the sense that they are realistic, but impossibly so. In addition to working with the human figure, Hart's recent musings on the death of food also feature in this debut of The Real and The Fake, a new series of photographs. "The impulse to use technology as a means to control nature is inherently Modernist," says Hart. "There is a built in uncanniness in the tools, which create meta-planes that fix a user's body into a virtual space that is beyond time and death." Using 3-D digital media as a means to consider our culture's detachment from human vulnerability, Hart plays with the grotesque edge of the uncanny valley.

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