As an artist and a scientist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg is used to questioning where science and technology are headed and how their trajectories might affect our lives.
“Making people uncomfortable is really squarely the point of my work,” she wrote in an email to HuffPost. For example, her project “Stranger Visions” consists of a series of portraits based solely on human DNA she’d gathered from discarded items found in New York City ― think: hair, cigarettes, gum.
Most recently, Dewey-Hagborg has been collaborating with a rather unlikely partner: Chelsea Manning. Together, they’ve created a series of “portrait masks” derived from Manning’s DNA, retrieved while she was incarcerated and undergoing hormone replacement therapy.
“I guess [they’re] a bit creepy on purpose,” she explained of the portraits, on view this August at Fridman Gallery in New York City. “But hopefully a creepiness that provokes cultural reflection.”
