Monica Bock

(American)
Resisting our post biological future, I make art as a means of marking the time "kept and told by the body." I was raised by an Italian Catholic mother who was also a physical anthropologist and anatomist.  In her home, I absorbed both sacred and medical representations of the body that have led me in my sculpture and installation practice to conflate religious, scientific and domestic imagery. The proximity in my experience of religious reliquaries and medical specimen cases, of promised eternity and mater-of-fact death, has influenced my choice of material and form. My work records the loss of what is subject to change and at the same time registers resistance to that loss. This work, often based on body & found object casting, uses ephemeral substances such as salt and soap as well as ostensibly durable materials such as porcelain and iron. A number of collaborative cross-disciplinary projects also include video, sound, performance, and original poetry. Since 1996, my work has focused thematically on the ordinary and extreme phenomena of maternal life.

 --Monica Bock

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