Emerging Artists 2008

Emerging Artists 2008

KATHRYN PARKER ALMANAS

kathrynparkeralmanas.com

Kathryn Parker Almanas's work takes its inspiration from both 17th-century Dutch painting and the early-18th-century Age of Enlightenment enthusiasm for science. The names of her four completed projects (Medical Interior, Pastry Anatomy, Photo Album, and Dissector and Dissected) indicate the ways in which she works: She's part researcher, part physician, and part documentarian. Her desire to understand the source and systems of the body, of food, and perhaps mortality comes through intensely as she cuts and separates her subject matter, creating the scientific evidence and proof of what it is. She has the coolness of a clinician whose subject is etherized on the table.

In the project she is currently working on, Spellato (from the Italian verb spellare, "to skin"), Almanas becomes the creator, making new hybrid foods. The formalistically balanced work explores the darker side of man's desire to rend, then reorder, nature.

Almanas, 27, graduated from Yale's MFA program in 2007; while there she was awarded the Schickle-Collingwood Prize and, after graduating, the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship. -- C.T.