Curated by: Universal Concepts Unlimited

Suzanne Anker’s work investigates the semiotics of the genetic code and its conjunction with other forms of language systems. The genetic revolution is likened to the decipherment of the most ancient text: the hereditary code of DNA. Pictogrammatic signs act through time and space as messengers of this supermolecule’s vanguard evolutionary thread.

Protean in styles and size, chromosomes are microscopic representatives of the variety of life forms emerging from a genetic tableaux: fish, alligator, bat, wallaby, human, etc. In code.X:genome a fifteen part set of metallic silkscreen panels, the artist visually compares the calligraphic gesture of a chromosome to the technologies of writing. The viewer is presented with a novel and eccentric symbiotic system of icons, the lingua franca of life. In Difference and Repetition (the body), a sculpture consisting of 500 letterforms, the nucleotide symbol sequence A,C,T, and G cascade into a sedimentary pile dispersed onto the floor. Included in this elusive piece are the enigmatic x forms representing “junk DNA.”

Other pieces in the exhibition (Micro Glyph, Movable Type (Soma font) are large-scale paintings whose sensual intelligence converts materiality into information. In these scripts of life, a painterly substructure is a foil to the superimposed linguistic field intersecting in striated space. In addition, an optical device, For Leibniz, employs a double kaleidoscopic lens, which fractures and infinitely deconstructs perception. The exhibition is a proposition itself, probing the ways in which the body has become metonymically reduced to a shifting “code-script,” as the remnants of one life form are intermingled and cannibalized by one another.

In a confounding visual juxtaposition synthesizing minimalism and the anxiety of vaccui that nature attempts to suppress through profusive permutations, Suzanne Anker’s work alludes to the mechanisms of evolution and consciousness. This pictorial shift is irreducible to abstraction and conceptualism and poetically allies aesthetic distance with the furthest intimacy.