Nell Tenhaaf: You tell me that it's evolution

Nell Tenhaaf is an electronic media artist and writer living in Trent Hills, Ontario. Born in Oshawa, she has also lived in Montreal, Pittsburgh and Toronto. Tenhaaf’s artworks integrate elements from the biosciences and Artificial Life in the form of lightbox displays and interactive sculptures. A survey exhibition of fifteen years of her work entitled “Fit/Unfit” was shown in several Canadian venues between 2003 and 2008 (catalogue available), and she has also shown in Spain, Hungary, Germany, Sweden, and the USA.In the early 1980s Tenhaaf made pioneering artworks using the Telidon videotex protocol for interactive graphics and text, including public access to her databases via experimental telecommunication networks in Montreal. Her works from the late 1980s through the 1990s are known for their feminist commentary on biotechnology and genetics, presenting these as practices that only complicate how human nature is hybridized and imperfect. Later works represent some of the complex dynamics of life and involve the viewer as one element in a continuous flux, from “WinWin” (2012) back to the touch-activated video installation “UCBM (You could be me)” (1999), both shown at Paul Petro Contemporary Art. Tenhaaf collaborates with sound artist John Kamevaar, computer science researcher Melanie Baljko and electronics artist Nick Stedman. Permanent collections include the National Gallery of Canada, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON, The Glenbow Museum, Calgary, AB, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Pret d’oeuvres d’art), the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, and the Canada Council Art Bank. Tenhaaf has published numerous reviews and articles, and was jury chair for the VIDA art and artificial life competition in Madrid from 1999 to 2014. She is Professor Emerita at York University in Toronto.

“In 1993, not long before these works were made, I wrote an article for C Magazine called Mutational Cravings (full article available on the PPCA  website) where I said: ‘Determinism and reductionism are flourishing as the ideological partners of perfectability in industrial mega-science.’ This came out of a longstanding interest in historical science ideas that were marginalized over time, such as the late 17th century vitalism of Wilhelm von Leibniz or more recent research by women scientists that went against the grain of the mainstream, like the work of Lynn Margulis on symbiosis in evolution.I think that the perfectibility era is definitively on shaky ground with COVID. Because of the pandemic it finally may be dawning on us that we can’t continue to exploit the natural environment to amass wealth or pursue immortality without pushback from the natural world, into our bodies. Holistic is not just a New Age sound bite, it’s a way we need to think.  The photographs Machines for Evolving put the personal and reflective self-knowledge of drawing into the objective science picture. Three different figure drawings are superimposed on a backdrop that consists of various kinds of information about the body: a computer model of t-RNA, and an artificial wound. In relation to our desire for self-knowledge, the three elements as a whole pose the question of how accessible our bodies are to ourselves. In Expression of Humours and Four-Cell Stage, the idea of four rather messy humours that describe the inner self bumps up against a pristine rendition of cells dividing. These humours go back to very early Western physiological theory, associating temperament with bodily fluids and the elements:phlegmatic (unemotional) / phlegm / water;sanguine (optimistic) / blood / air;melancholic (easily sad) / black bile / earth;choleric (quick to anger) / yellow bile / fire.This thinking prevailed into the 18th century and is still familiar today, even if superseded clinically by psychology and psychiatry.These works helped me push past an adversarial stance toward mega-science and its quest to isolate and bioengineer ‘master molecules,’ in essence a hugely flawed attempt to direct evolution. Let’s remember that imperfect and vulnerable bodies are intrinsically part of the rest of the natural world.”— Nell Tenhaaf, October 2021