KATHY HIGH

BIO

Kathy High (USA) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator working with technology, art and biology. She considers living systems, empathy, animal sentience, and the social, political and ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and surrounding industries. She has received awards including Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her art works have been shown at documenta 13 (Germany), Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center and Exit Art (NYC), UCLA (Los Angeles), Science Gallery, (Dublin), NGBK, (Berlin), Fesitval Transitio_MX (Mexico), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Para-site (Hong Kong). High is Professor in the Arts, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

She has had artist residencies with SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia (2009-10), in Hong Kong with the Asian Arts Council (2005), with the Finnish Society of Bioart as part of the Field Notes/Deep Time/Journey to the Post-Anthropogenic at the northern Kilpisjärvi Biological Research Station (2013), and was the first artist resident with the Coalesce BioArt Lab at University of Buffalo and Vivo Art Residency in the DePaolo Lab, CMiST and UW/Seattle (ongoing).

www.kathyhigh.com

ARTIST STATEMENT

HLA-B27 is a photographic series of intimate images of the transgenic rats used in the two iterations of the project Embracing Animal. HLA-B27 is the code name for these transgenic rat models. These transgenic rats are developed for pharmaceutical research for various auto-immune diseases. These photographs were taken of the rats that High worked with from 2004-2006. A toy microscope was used in close proximity to the animals capturing moments of play, and also moments of death and dying.

Ratz depicts sculpted heads of decapitated laboratory specimens in a line up. This sculpture was created to honor the albino rats used in pharmaceutical, medical and scientific research.

Lily Does Derrida: A Dog’s Video Essay is a video essay made in collaboration with Lily Dog about companion animal relations, and interspecies communication. How do we think about animals? Or rather – how do our animal companions think? How can we imagine the lives of our (non-human) animal friends? In this video essay, Lily Dog looks at Derrida’s writings and makes a case about human and non-human understanding of each other – or lack thereof – based on her own life and adventures. Jacques Derrida was interested in animal consciousness and animal subjectivity, and he wrote about both in The Animal That Therefore I Am – a text that Lily Dog quotes and speaks to in the video.