Demonstration 50.15, Anna Lucas

Dates: 7 November – 5 December 2009 | Location: OVADA Gallery, Oxford

OVADA presents a solo exhibition of new work by Anna Lucas produced during a Wellcome Trust-funded residency in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford in 2007-9. Lucas’s film Demonstration 50.15 is a cool-hued portrait of the University’s anatomy laboratory and follows the repetitive daily activities of the mortuary technician as he embalms and prepares bodies for medical students.

The exhibition also includes the Blind Movies limited edition book featuring 162 drawings, with an accompanying essay by film writer and theorist Silke Panse. Lucas’ technique involves drawing blind onto carbon paper for the duration of an entire movie. The drawings become a disintegrated tangle of marks creating a document of the sound and light of the film as a physical object. During her residency Lucas drew in response to movies that relate to the subject of sensory enhancement, deprivation and perception, focusing on Land of Silence and Darkness by Werner Herzog (1971).

The work was made a part of a Wellcome Trust Fellowship at the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford University and supported by Arts Council England South East.