PROJECT STATEMENTS: PAINTINGS

THE BIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE SEQUENCES IS UNKNOWN

Biologists in the Martin Lab at George Washington University taught me how to harvest fresh butterfly eggs, how to deposit them onto double-stick tape in petri dishes, and how to roll them carefully using a paintbrush. From there, the scientists showed me how to inject these eggs with CRISPR-Cas9 and guide RNA to introduce edits into their genomes. These edits alter the patterns of the butterflies’ wings. My paintings depict butterflies whose genomes were edited in this way, and others that scientists are working to bring back from extinction.

We think of CRISPR as new and futuristic, but the bacterial-defense system it derives from is ancient. The title of this series, “The Biological Significance of These Sequences is Not Known,” is excerpted from a 1987 paper in which Japanese scientists first mentioned the repeated bacterial DNA sequences now known as CRISPR. Three decades later, we do know something of their significance: we can use this ancient bacterial technology to edit the genomes of all known organisms. And yet, we cannot pretend to apprehend the full magnitude of the changes CRISPR will give rise to.

What we do know is that, within our lifetimes, synthetic biology will bring about great changes in the ways we live and die—indeed, in what it means to be human. (And, by extension, what it means to be an artist.) Beyond this, it’s anyone’s guess.

The human drive to peer into the future is strong. Throughout history, we’ve attempted to divine the future with tea leaves, sticks, crystal balls, pools of water, the flight of birds. Painting these genetically edited butterflies, I was thinking about divination systems—in particular, how they function as mirrors. Regardless of whether these methods show us the future, they do show us ourselves. In them, we see our own hopes and anxieties mirrored.

In these paintings, I see Ovid’s “forms transformed to bodies new and strange.” Which is to say I see the story of our origins playing out yet again: chaotic, circular, animal.

ON THE GENERATION OF ANIMALS AND OTHER PAINTINGS

Thinking about how synthetic biology and nanotechnology are enabling humans to exert more and more control over the natural world, my thoughts keep returning to the old Northern Renaissance and Baroque paintings that have always intrigued me. This seems like quite the jump, I know, but I began imagining a sort of continuum between imitating nature and controlling it, between copying something and creating something new.

Arguably, the first human efforts to imitate nature were paintings. For centuries, painting was called “the mirror of nature.” And painting was inseparable from mimesis, imitation. The high-point of mimetic painting occurred in Northern Europe in the 17th century. I began researching this tradition of painting from a different angle than I had before and I stumbled upon something that fascinated me. I learned that many early Christian theologians’ were deeply troubled  by paintings that took mimesis to an extreme.

By this, I mean paintings that described each pore, fold, and crevice of a fruit or a flower. These theologians believed that the ability to mimic is closely bound up in the power to create and destroy—the capability to topple existing order and to produce new order. A painter mimicking a life-form was understood to be dangerously close to participating in the act of creation. Which, they believed, is reserved to God—not painters.

What intrigues me, is that this is the same fear surrounding nanotechnology and synthetic bioloy today—that scientists’ creating and modifying life-forms threatens to overturn natural order. So…did painters set this whole thing in motion? Did lifelike paintings of fruit and mice set us on the path to transgenic, glowing mice? That sounds like a bit of a reach to me. But what I find interesting here, is the way these early paintings did set in motion a passionate, contentious conversation about the desires that drive mimesis and the anxieties it produces. Which is a conversation that continues today. And which is a very important conversation to be having.

Questions like these—ones that confound and confuse me and feel very much alive—these are questions I can best explore using paint.