Geraldine Ondrizek: The Sound of Cells Dividing

For the last twenty years, Portland artist Geraldine Ondrizek has created architectural scaled works which house medical and biological information. Since 2001 she has worked with medical professionals to gather images of human cellular tissue and genetic tests relating to ethnic identity and disease, and then used this information in her installations, films, and drawings. The exhibition includes Ondrizek’s recent film “Cellular” and its corresponding set of drawings of a blastocyst, as well as her “Sound Wall” installation. “Sound Wall” was originally created for CAMAC, the Center for Art and Technology, and housed in a 17th century monastery in France; it has been recreated for the Western Gallery and is comprised of three spaces created by handmade paper walls embedded with recordings of both healthy and cancerous cells dividing that were captured by Andrew Pelling, a biophysicist at the University of California at Los Angeles.