Fresh off an opening of a solo exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Australian artist Patricia Piccinini will travel to 21c Museum Hotel to speak about her work at a free artist lecture on Monday, April 16 at 6pm.

In 2006, 21c featured Piccinini’s Surrogate in its inaugural exhibition Hybridity: The Evolution of Species and Spaces in Contemporary Art. 21c Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites who organized that exhibition, says “Hybridity is a defining characteristic of contemporary existence: the mysteries of identity—both aesthetic and genetic—are increasingly complex and potentially fantastical. Our global village shelters both the human and animal kingdoms, and the boundaries between them may be dissolving, as many of these artworks suggest: animals transform, merge, and mutate, with others, with humans, and with machines, offering both a provocative vision of the future and an incisive examination of human behavior and psychology—what drives, delights, and frightens us—in the new millennium.”

About the artist

Patricia Piccinini creates uncannily lifelike sculptures, photographs, and videos in which art, science, feminism, and ethics merge to pose provocative questions about identity, ethics, and love. Her sculptural installation We Are Family, with which she represented Australia in the 2003 Venice Biennale, propelled her to international acclaim. As with much of her work, this installation comprised astonishingly realistic-looking creatures that seemed to be enchanted mixtures of human and animal. Such works raise questions about the future of the body as we enter an age in which genetic engineering, stem cell research, advanced prosthetics, cloning, and other medical breakthroughs will lead to radical changes in human identity and psychology, and to our relationship to other species with whom we might find kinship.

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