Critical Writing Index

Iñigo Manglano Ovalle: The Garden of Delights

by Maureen P. Sherlock

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: The Garden of Delights, 1998, pp. 1-37

Winston-Salem: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1998

This text is about the project that Manglano-Ovalle developed at SECCA, institution that holds an Artist and the Community series in which artists are connected with the larger society on a local, national, or global level.

Manglano-Ovalle project was The Garden of Delights, that addressed the power of genetic technologies and their impact on notions of race and ethnicity. Manglano-Ovalle reversed the previous Artist and the Community model using local issues to illuminate global concerns.

The project relates to an expanded group of communities partners and focuses on a collaboration with geneticists and the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

The project comprises a series of forty-eight unique photographic images. Each 60 X 23 inches, created from DNA "fingerprints" taken from individuals both locally and worldwide. The portraits are grouped into tightly hung triptychs, which flow as a single work around three gallery walls. Sixteen individuals were selected by the artist to participate in the project; they in turn were asked to select two additional people with whom they would make a triptych. Participants were also instructed to select a primary color for their portrait. CytoSoft brushes were distributed to the forty-eight participants, enabling them to take their own DNA samples and mail them to the Wake Forest University School Medicine Genetics Laboratory in Winston-Salem. There, laboratory technicians processed the individual DNA. Computer files carried the sample "images" from the genetics laboratory to the final, digital photographic output.

The rest of the article described other related projects that Manglano-Ovalle has done.

ITEM 1998.089 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Assigned IdentitiesIñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Tele-VecindarioIñigo Manglano-Ovalle

The triptych RoseIñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Untitled Clandestine Portrait (The Patron, His Wife, His Barber, and the ArtistIñigo Manglano-Ovalle

casta paintingsAnonymous

The Garden of Earthly DelightsHieronymus Bosch

Flora and FaunaIñigo Manglano-Ovalle

SubwooferIñigo Manglano-Ovalle

The El Niño EffectIñigo Manglano-Ovalle

La Vida es SueñoCalderon de la Barca

TwinIñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Man Walking Among ShadowsGoya