Corey Corcoran

Have you ever gotten really sick to the point where you just feel like one giant lump of malfunctioning flesh and fluids? I’ll bet Corey Corcoran has. His aesthetic awareness of guts and all of those mysterious little things that make your body work leads you to wonder if he was raised by the descendents of Henry Gray or perhaps a pair of radiologists who always brought their work home. He knows how to turn vital organs into a new kind of face. We can read desires in them, we can wonder how their day went.

It feels appropriate that the majority of Corcoran’s cross-sectioned corporeal forms are in distress in some way. Leaking into a pool, sprawled across the ground, holding their heads in their hands: we see these bodies’ innards spilling into the open as a sign that all is not right in the world. It makes sense though. Organs, like a lot of technologies, almost seem to work towards their own effacement. If they’re operating smoothly you never even have to think about them, you just do what you need to do. It’s only when something in the system fucks up that you’re suddenly reminded: oh yeah, life isn’t just a thing that happens of its own accord, it’s the effect of an extremely long and complicated process of reproduction, generation, renewal, waste, and decay.