IN contrast to the usual procedure on such occasions, the opening of Danielle Kraay's installation was performed not by someone offering a less than impartial character witness, or indeed a tight, over determined reading of the work on show. Instead, a brief lecture was delivered about the future of biotechnology, and onward march of cosmetic surgical intervention.
Besides side stepping the tedium of the usual suspects, the talk offered a nicely oblique point of entry into Kraay's work, which in its simplest terms might be said to examine some of the psychic fallout from our emerging ability to remake and remodel what constitutes the human body.
But the most impressive quality of Kraay's work remains its ability to skirt several meanings. The work may appear clear, precise and trenchant, but has the flexibility to withdraw with vicious precision whenever plain speaking threatens to mutate into rhetoric.
Kraay works through images of the body, albeit one that has suffered some kind of alteration, or finds itself turned unwillingly into a commodity. Her installation is modelled on a shop display, with mirrors, poster like photographs, spotlights and shiny chrome all on clear view from either side of the gallery's shop like windows. Something in the nature of the goods on display, however, hints also at a more institutional environment, certainly a more threatening one.
Kraay's objects are presented with the cool, sci fi seductiveness. Her translucent silicone bodycasts or leather torsos hang from racks, half flayed carcass after Rembrandt, half catwalk statement; her soft, lumpy plastic shapes, resembling human organs are neatly set out on a shelf. On a nearby wall some colour pictures show an eruption of life, perhaps a foetus pressing through a mutant pelt, or perhaps a tumour fighting for malignant autonomy.
Despite the generally chic display, the objects seem to struggle against being traded, seem to offer violent resistance to commerce by dint of their alien ugliness. In Kraay's uncertain Utopia, all sorts of life forms seem to rise up to demand rights once the preserve of humans. Why shouldn't they, after all, when that part of the continuum formerly known as human life becomes increasingly difficult to isolate?
