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Works by Los Angeles artists Ted Meyer, Kim McCarty and Toti O'Brien explore the frailty of the human body and the resilience of its spirit.
"Each body has its art," once wrote poet Gwendolyn Brooks. She could have been writing about "Biosystems," the latest art exhibit at USC's Institute for Genetic Medicine.
Each of the show's artists has struggled with serious illness -- Ted Meyer with Gaucher's disease, Toti O'Brien with chronic bone fractures and Kim McCarty with the congenital condition of her son. Each has turned pain into art.
Meyer's ScarArt series, for example, was fashioned from direct-contact body prints of trauma scars, ranging from a mastectomy to a self-inflicted gun shot wound.
The exhibit also includes pieces from Meyer's Structural Abnormalities series. Featuring contorted and highly designed skeletal images, the series chronicles his ordeal with Gaucher's disease.
McCarty's watercolor and oil paintings reflect the struggle of watching her son suffer. Born with nerve and muscle damage, he has been subjected to continual reconstructions of his spine and legs.
Though O'Brien has been plagued with chronic bone fractures for most of her life, she hasn't let that stop her from being a performance artist. Her contribution to the show are digital photographs of clay figures, which she fashioned while blindfolded and imagining autobiographical scenes.
Together, the pieces of "Biosystems" explore not only the frailty of the human body but also the resilience of its spirit.
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