Lee P Johnson’s ‘Animal Pharm’ Tackles Contemporary Medicine
By Irene Borngraeber • Jun 11th, 2009 • Category: Arts, Featured
“Animal Pharm,” the exhibition by Lee P Johnson currently on view at Fish With Braids, is not for the faint at heart. If you got woozy during the dreaded frog dissection in high school biology or you still twinge at the sight of blood: take a deep breath and gather up your courage before walking in to see the show (or taking a peek at the pics below).
Johnson, an artist and medical professional from Brooklyn, wants to make us more than a little uncomfortable with his new body of work. By subjecting animal carcasses and plants to the same types of medical therapies commonly given to human patients, the artist is “actively exploring the intentions for and interactions among our medical establishment, particularly pharmacotherapeutics” (“pills” for us laypeople).
In “Napoleon,” he’s taken plants of Dusty Miller and “prescribed” them common drugs, mixing medicine into the soil and charting the effects they have on each subject. In “Benjamin” he’s feeding a cactus cough syrup, dripping it over the healthy spike and seeing what the medicated red goo will do. He’s even sealed up unpreserved dead mice (ordered from a medical supply company) in bottles filled with pills, leaving them to decay as the exhibition wears on.
Johnson says that all this appropriation from the medical field is designed to make us think about “the full impact of this system and the implications of our medical practices.” He’s not just grossing us out for the fun of it, but examining his own fundamental uneasiness with the nature of contemporary medical treatments. We should be a little distressed seeing “Mollie” and “Muriel,” two preserved rat carcasses forever sealed in plastic and resin, but we should also think twice about the motivations of a healing profession that Johnson feels treats humans little better.
The aesthetics of this mixture of medical supplies, living organisms, and oddly formed ceramic structures covered in resin are somewhat disconcerting, but the strongest element in this show’s exploration of medical manipulation is its conceptual vision. Stop by and see how many plants have survived an artistic “clinical trial” of human medicines, and — if you have the stomach — how the bottled mice are progressing.
Lee P Johnson: Animal Pharm
June 4-19, 2009
Fish with Braids Gallery
521 Jersey Ave.
Monday-Friday 12-7pm
201-451 4294
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Irene Borngraeber is an artist, art historian, and writer. She has worked in museums in the U.S. and abroad and currently covers the New York art scene for ArtVoices magazine.
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