Roy Ward Baker’s The Monster Club (1981),

Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body shows how X-rays and other medical technologies changed the way we see the human body. One of the best examples is a 33-second clip from Roy Ward Baker’s The Monster Club (1981), shown on a monitor with headphones. The clip connects the science of seeing through the body with pop culture’s love of spectacle, transformation, and surprise.

In the clip, two men in suits watch a dancer in underwear perform under bright pink stage lights. As she takes off her clothes one piece at a time, their curiosity and desire grow, making us think about the act of looking. The X-ray becomes a way to show the urge to uncover what is hidden beneath the body’s surface. But when the lights change, it reveals a dancing skeleton instead of bare skin. The surprise turns the scene into a joke, and one man says, “Beautiful bones, don’t you think?” A glowing skeleton is usually a gag used when a character gets struck by lightning or electricity, so putting it in a striptease feels funny and original. It also turns a familiar movie joke into a comment on desire, visibility, and how much we can really see.

Overall, the exhibition works as the museum calls it: overexposed, because it uses a playful, easy-to-understand example to show the irony of our desire to look beneath the flesh. Instead of treating the subject in a dry or purely historical way, it makes the connection between technology, the body, and spectatorship feel lively and engaging. Its mix of humor, clarity, and thoughtful commentary is what makes it so effective. 

- Seunghwa Woo

 

FRANK GILLETE: SPECTRA OBSCURA AT MICROSCOPE

FRANK GILLETE: SPECTRA OBSCURA AT MICROSCOPE

The Symbiotic Blues (2017-22)

For Gillette, ecology has never limited itself to the natural world, for it also includes media ecology, which is the idea that technological systems give rise to awareness and eventually create new cultures. The title nods to the camera obscura, the first instrument known to render the world as an image. 

The clearest expression of the idea is found in The Symbiotic Blues (2017-22), which consists of nine channels spread over three pieces, each channel being a different length so that the combinations never repeat. Gillette shot all nine channels around the woodlands and beaches of eastern Long Island, and he’s described being immersed in that environment as a kind of data bank for the exchange between nature and culture. Mirrors show up constantly, propped on sand and among trees to throw off your sense of depth. The broken ones read as a direct statement about how fragile the whole system is. 

The work involving still images is more strange: Chthonic Chimera (1987), which was created using one of the very few 20x24 inch Polaroid cameras that was ever made, puts together shells, coral, butterfly wings and insects to form compositions that look like specimen cases constructed by someone who doesn't care about taxonomy.

The oldest work is the quietest one. Rio Grande River Bed (1974) presents 81 Polaroids of a cracked riverbed in a grid format: there is no sound, no movement, and nothing to decode. Fifty years on, it functions less as documentation than as a warning that went unheeded.

-Anshuta Jadhav

 

Seeing in Blue- Torkwase Dyson

Pace Gallery, New York

In Seeing in Blue, Torkwase Dyson explores the relationship between water, space, and the human body through a series of abstract paintings. The body of work reflects water as an environmental condition that actively shapes movement, perception, and the ways viewers and perceivers occupy space.

What stands out most across the pieces is the tension between fluidity and geometry. Dyson's use of deep blues, layered surfaces, and subtle shifts in visible texture creates a sense of depth and movement (in a way reminiscent of Rothko), while precise lines and structured forms present a contrasting sense of control and precision. These compositions feel very architectural, resembling spatial studies about emotional atmospheres. The compositions are suggestive of seemingly unending environments being understood through systems of relational conditions like boundaries, structure, and constraints.

Another compelling aspect is the physicality of the work. The thickness of the canvases, the traces of dripping paint on the sides, and the way the surfaces project into the gallery space make them come across as inhabitable spatial extensions and not flat images. This encourages viewers to consider their own bodies in relation to the work, reinforcing the exhibition's interest in spatial experience.

The exhibition’s strength lies in its resistance to literal description. Dyson does not need to depict an underwater landscape to convey its disorienting qualities. Through contrasts between precision and fluidity, she makes looking feel exploratory. The result is a restrained and simultaneously absorbing exhibition that asks viewers to spend time being immersed in what they cannot immediately locate or fully understand.

Museum of the Moving Image: “Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body”

 

By Miles Westrich

Etienne-Jules Marey’s Selected Chronophotographic Films (1891-1900) greet viewers at the entrance of “Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body”, an exhibition currently on display at the Museum of the Moving Image. The French physiologist’s work documents how the development of late 19th-century motion recording technology was used by scientists and artists to expand our vision and understanding of the body. Through a unique curation of artists and artworks, this show walks viewers through the dynamic relationship between medical science and the arts. In Barbara Hammer's piece Sanctus (1990), the artist uses innovative filmmaking techniques to edit and manipulate James Sibley Watson Jr.’s X-ray archives. Thus, she comments on the health implications of X-ray technology via her artistic practice. 

The three-channel video installation Opera Medica (2025) by Agnes Questionmark showcases the artist as a doctor performing surgery on an alien-like transhuman figure, reflecting her personal experience with gender-corrective surgery. The theatricalized performance acts as a vehicle for regaining agency as a patient and explores themes of liberation from the medical system. Investigating diverse and adversarial experiences with healthcare is a key throughline among many works in this show. By drawing on the multifaceted histories of Western medicine, a wide range of archival material and self-critical contemporary artwork resonates with said subject matter. This led to the show being over-curated at times, with back-to-back installations crowding the exhibition space. Despite this oversaturation in quantity, the collection’s quality was strong, with each artwork contributing significant insight on the thesis of the exhibition.

Justine Kurland: A Retrospective

Justine Kurland: A Retrospective at OSMOS reads the female body through a queer feminist lens. Through various photographs from her Of Woman Born (2005–2007) series, this lens comes through as direct and sharp. The series features nude mothers and infants staged in the wilds of the American West. The title comes from Adrienne Rich's 1976 book, which frames motherhood as an institution that binds women to domestic service. Kurland adds a question of her own. Would we still exploit the earth if we imagined it as a father rather than a mother?

Sister of the Light (2006)

Wahclella Falls (2006)

One memorable print, Sister of the Light (2006), holds the soft, damp light of a casual morning in the woods. Several mothers and their children gather close, and sunlight filters through the trees onto their bare skin. The group seems less like a family portrait than a small, self-sufficient community. In Wahclella Falls (2006), mothers breastfeed their children beneath a waterfall. The spray falls around them as freely as the milk they give.

The photographs create a world built on matriarchal terms. Here the breast is neither erotic nor shameful. It is as ordinary as water moving through a stream. Kurland suggests the body only takes on meaning once society looks at it and judges it.

The show's strength is its refusal to apologize for pleasure, rest, or nakedness. Yet the work leans on the same "mother earth" myth it claims to test. Kurland's Eden is beautiful, but escaping society is not the same as changing it. 

Xinlei Lin

Lynda Benglis - Knotting, Tying, Folding

Lynda Benglis' Knotted, Tying, Folding explores what's possible of material through the process of folding, twisting, tying, and stretching. Benglis' exhibition challenges conventional ideas of sculpture, transforming hard materials into soft, flowing, organic forms. Her works focus on movement and physical transformation, as well as the relationship between material and motion, rather than fixed or controlled forms.

Metal is one of the most surprising materials Benglis uses in the exhibition. The smooth metal sculpture looks fluid and irregular, as if it has been bent or touched by hand. What makes the sculpture interesting is the contrast between the hardness of the metal and the softness implied by the form. The reflective surface also moves in relation to its surroundings, resulting in a piece that responds to light and the viewer's movement throughout the gallery.

The black sculptural forms that highlight the floor are another example of Benglis' approach to repetition and form. The repetition in the work creates a rhythm and requires the viewer to see each object as both an individual and a part of a larger composition.

Knotted, Tying, Folding  demonstrates how sculpture can imply movement without actually representing it. Benglis' physical language of making opens up new possibilities for sculpture, and her materials become tactile and expressive in seemingly spontaneous ways.

Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body at the Museum of the Moving Image

Museum of the Moving Image - Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body

by Can Bartu Catal

Barbara Hammer, “Sanctus,” 1990. 16mm film transferred to HD video. (Courtesy the artist’s estate and Electronic Arts Intermix)

Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body at the Museum of the Moving Image captures the complexity of the relationship between technology and the human body. The exhibition is a journey of overlapping section that explore how film and X-ray technologies shaped Western claims to scientific objectivity, how artist interact with found footage and investigate their own bodies to expose and challenge the normative assumptions embedded in medical imagery, and how imaging tools have transformed practices of care with works ranging from 1891 to 2025.

  

One of the exhibition’s most interesting explorations is showcasing how X-rays moved beyond medicine and became exposed to popular culture and how it impacted it. In these two pieces, Naked Truth (1899) and X-ray Spex (2022, produced in 1964), we see how women were among the feel the threat of the X-ray gaze, about how and invention like the X-ray was used in media to immediately single out women's bodies for the "de-facto male gaze". It speaks to how, in popular culture the X-ray was marketed to men for centuries to reveal nakedness, to see beneath clothing and such, yet in reality, X-ray images do the opposite, obscuring gender markers. It makes you take a step back, makes the familiar act of looking at the human body feel strange again and shows how images of the body are not completely neutral and how they're shaped by technology, the culture, and whoever is doing the looking.