Sophie Kahn
Page 1 | 2 | Biography
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Installation at Performance Space, Sydney, 2009
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Sophie Kahn was born in London in 1980, and grew up in Melbourne, Australia. She returned to London to study Fine Art & Art History at Goldsmiths College, graduating in 2001.
Her work owes its Victorian-futurist aesthetic to a complex process involving 3d scanning, computer-aided design, 3d printing and bronze casting. The precise scanning technology she uses was never designed to represent the body, which is always in flux. When confronted with a moving body, it receives conflicting spatial co-ordinates and generates fragmentary results.
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Head of a Young Woman, 2004
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Darren Tofts writes:
"This creative misuse of a high-tech medium yields a fascinating interpretation of what it means to photograph life... Kahn's veiled data-body is a liminal image caught in between different visual media. Its mortuary, uncomfortable stillness portrays a limbo appropriate to the memorial theme of the work."
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Torso of a Young Woman, proposed bronze, 2008
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Untitled (Detail), Lambda print, 2005
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Installation view at Stills Gallery, Sydney, 2006
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Jeff Khan writes:
Sophie Kahn’s digital prints and sculptural works mobilise the intersection of technology and the body to enact anxieties around the limits of our knowledge and perception, especially with regards to the less visible aspects of our corporeity.
How much of the body’s inner state can be known, let alone communicated? What of our vulnerabilities, and the connections and slippages between body, psyche, and culture? Kahn’s elaborate and elusive portraits are borne of technological advancement, yet question the use of such technologies in fixing and defining our own embodiment and selfhood. In a culture in which every aspect of the material and corporeal world – including our own physicality – is increasingly visible, quantified and commodified, Kahn’s work poetically yet powerfully insists on the body as a site of flux and change: of transgression and fragility which elides as much as depends upon the technologies which sustain deliver it into the present cultural moment.
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Recent solo exhibitions include 'The Waxen And The Fleshy' (2006), Spacement Gallery, Melbourne; 'Strange To Inhabit The Earth No Longer' (2005), also at Spacement; Panorama (2003), 24Seven, Melbourne; Reconstruction (2003), Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; and Transparency, West Space Inc, Melbourne.
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Face of a Young Woman, Lambda print, 2005
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Recent group exhibitions include 'Sophie Kahn, Van Sowerwine and Martine Corompt'(2006), Stills Gallery, Sydney; 'Through A Stranger's Eyes' (2005-6), Arts Aporia, Osaka; 'Bitmap International Digital Photography Project' (2005), Loop, Seoul; and 'A Short Ride in a Fast Machine' (2005), Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne.
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