Collecting Naida Osline

18 Jan Collecting Naida Osline

My most recent addition to the collection. The spirituality/transcendence of the piece hooked me. Her show is still up at Acuna-Hansen. Don’t miss it.

From Mario Cutajar in Artscene Magazine:

The clinical focus on body parts set against flat, empty backgrounds tends to pathologize the mutations portrayed.  To that extent they dwell within the limitations of the freak show and the horror genres, which picture otherness as disease, and the point of view of the artist remains that of the manipulator not the manipulated.  Unlike, say, Cindy Sherman’s grotesques, Osline’s seem like passive accomplices to the voyeur’s gaze.

For the moment Osline seems content to revel in the almost unlimited plasticity and conjuring power of the digital medium.  The plasticity of any medium, however, is only a potential at the service of the far greater plasticity of the imagination.  It is the ability of the imagination to stretch beyond the ego boundary that makes empathy possible.  Elasticity, in that sense, is the basic stuff of compassion.  The alternative is dissociation and the experience of the body as sculptured meat–an experience that yields the absurdities Osline touches on in her photographs.