Prema Murthy is an Atlanta- and New York-based artist. Her work was recently exhibited at the Queens Museum, NY and the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain.  She has shown widely in the United States and abroad.  As a member of the Fakeshop art collective, she was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial and the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.

I first met her when we both showed our work as part of the 2003 Atlanta Biennial at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and caught up with her recently at the opening of her deStructures exhibit at Saltworks Gallery, in Atlanta.

Hi Prema:

I’m on my way to New Hampshire, sitting on a bus upholstered like some kid’s sixth birthday party, or like a roller rink on wheels.  Even the toilet door is covered in rainbow asteroid velvet. Below (at last) are a few questions for you.

Hope all’s well with you.

Julie

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J: For the body of work you’re showing in ATL, you’ve chosen to work with data on demographic changes in the city’s population. For example, the fact that the number of persons of Hispanic origin in Atlanta more than doubled between 1990 and 2000; or the fact that Atlanta has the 2nd fastest growing Asian population in the US after Las Vegas.  You’ve then mapped these data onto deconstructed virtual bodies using 3D rendering software.  Are the changes applied to some sort of preexisting figure?  Is there in any sense a starting body which reflects initial population makeup, and an ending body which reflects the direction of change?

P: I start with the pre-set, generic human forms given in the CAD program that I use. Points on the figures randomly chosen by me are mapped with changing data. Over time, as more data is mapped onto the figures, they begin to take on different forms, some start to break up.

I’m not really that interested in making a direct correlation between the data and the bodies as graphs. As an artist, I am more interested in using the data as part of my creative process, one that is not entirely cerebral or entirely intuitive, but a melding of the two. My overall goal is to inspire an idea or perception of what the corporeal is or means, to elicit a feeling or emotion that comes from within the viewer. I am not a scientist or a designer, for that matter, though I may incorporate methodologies used in either of those fields, I am ultimately an artist, here to ask questions, not find solutions.

J: Do you think of your DeStructures bodies as undergoing violent upheaval, as in explosion or dismemberment (which seems possible given their shattered forms); or something more like the natural cycles of birth, growth, and decay?  How do you feel personally about the specific changes you reference, or about population growth in Atlanta in general? 

P: I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s either/or, that violence is separate from the “natural” cycles. I think nature has a very violent aspect to it that maybe humans all too often ignore or want to control.

Growth in its many forms can be a very painful, emotional, angry thing, especially when money, power and loss are involved, but it can also be liberating, empowering and necessary for the greater good.

J: As I watched your animated video piece at Saltworks, there was a startling instant where I recognized a rendered hand waving or flailing from within a spiraling vortex.  After that I started to pick up more on clear corporeal references throughout the show.  Is it important to you to be working within a figurative tradition?  How much does it matter to you that viewers realize the bodily aspects of your work?

P: I like working between abstraction and the figurative. It encompasses a whole range of seeing and thinking about identity as unique but distributed at the same time, like seeing a tree as a whole and in parts, at its mostbasic molecular level, and then as an individual thing, and then as part of a whole ecosystem.

J: How do you think 3D rendering technologies have altered early 21st Century perceptions of the body?  The tensile, faceted, aggressive bodies of games and game-based films make squishy, ordinary human bodies seem obsolete.  Meanwhile, the obesity epidemic rages on.  Have rendered, fictional bodies in some ways come to act as surrogates for actual corporeal experience?  Do you think about this in constructing your mutating population-bodies?

P: New (and old) technologies have expanded ways of seeing the body. Like in a game engine, you get these amazing angles and fly-through shots that you could never achieve with a regular camera. Medical technologies have given us views of the body that are so alien it’s hard to believe they came from us. The polygon forms of digital bodies in games have a different feel than smoothly rendered bodies in anime, and hyper-realistic bodies inserted into high-budget films. All speak to the many aspects of who we are and can be interpreted in endless ways.

J: Where are you headed next in your work?  Does digital medical imaging (as in MRI and other technologies) hold any interest for you?