archival inkjet print, 100 x 150cm, Techincal help: Pierre Zovilé

ORLAN is perhaps most well known in Australia as being the first artist to use surgery for artistic ends with her surgery performances. In 1998 she launched an international exploration into different standards of beauty, beginning in Mexico with Pre-Columbian civilisation. Having refigured her face through a series of plastic surgeries she hybridizes her new image to the aesthetic values from this other cultures. Working with a digital technician to mingle the real with the virtual, taking the ‘other’ inside under her own skin, she makes digital melds of her face with the stone of the Pre-Columbian sculptures, making self-hybridizations in which the grotesque becomes inseparable from the gorgeous. Works in this exhibition are for sale.