"Lucy McRae Body Architect" Exhibit (Melbourne, Australia)

 

Lucy McRae Body Architect

Brush (2007)

Lucy McRae Body Architect, the first survey exhibition of “body architect,” interior designer, architect, science fiction artist and former ballerina Lucy McRae’s provocative and beguiling work, explores the Los Angeles-based Australian artist’s collaborations with scientists, through to pop musicians, in her creative research practice over the past thirteen years. Opened last August 30, 2019 at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, the show runs until February 9, 2020. 

Lucy, one of the youngest ever TED Fellows and listed by Fast Company as one of the “fifty people shaping the future,” lives between Melbourne and Los Angeles. 

She has presented at international events, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Being Material conference on wearables, and her award-winning science fiction artwork has been exhibited worldwide. In 2018, at the World EconomicForum, she was selected as a Young Global Leader.

Check out "Ian Potter Center: NGV Australia"

 

L-R: Exploded View (2008), Evolution (2008) and Grow On You (2007)

Dripping Color
No. 1 (2010)

To consider how technology could transform the human body in the future, she produces short films and images that raise questions about what it means to be human and what is it that makes us human, effectively blurring the lines between fashion, design, art, architecture and science. 

Through the areas of biology, beauty and health, her work encourages conversations on the future of human existence. The exhibition features seven of McRae’s videos that combine storytelling with speculative science including Future Day Spa and her seminal work Institute of Isolation. 

Also included in the exhibition are McRae’s music videos for Australian and Danish pop bands Architecture in Helsinki and Reptile Youth. Her collaboration with Swedish pop-star Robyn is represented by McRae’s iconic image created for the Body Talk album cover.

 

Future Day Spa (short film)

Grow On You
# 3 (2008)

Future Day Spa, presenting an immersive experience, is a hypothetical therapy designed to prepare human subjects for space travel.  Here, participants enter a vacuum pressure chamber, evoking the feeling of being hugged which helps induce the body into a state of relaxation. 

Institute of Isolation, an observational documentary, contemplates whether isolation or extreme experience might be used to increase human resilience for space travel. McRae questions what happens to people when they are travelling in a confined space for decades and how people will prepare for the physiological and mental impacts of this experience. 

The exhibition also features Lucy’s grotesquely beautiful, color digital images created in collaboration with Bart Hess, a Dutch textile artist, between 2007 and 2009. Lucy and Bart met at Philips Design in Eindhoven while working in the Probes Program, a far future design research lab where they speculated on what design technologies might look like in 20 years’ time. In both their images, low-tech materials (including balloons, pantyhose, safety pins, grass and bath foam) are used to initiate high-tech conversations about the body. By speculating on fictional technology, both propose a future human body capable of physiological transformations such as color-excreting skin.

 

Make Your Maker (short film)

Morphe (short film)

Lucy McRae: Body Architect: IanPotter Centre, NGV Australia, Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia. Admission is free. Further information is available from the NGV website: NGV.MELBOURNE.