KARIN SANDER

15 November - 9 December 2000

With support from the Goethe Institut

Karin Sander's latest works are small human figures. These Lilliputians are not made by hand, and they reveal nothing of her touch or subjectivity. Instead she draws on advanced 3-D scanning technology, outputing the digitised image layer-by-layer in acrylic at 1:10 scale in a process called "fused deposition modeling". Finally the figures are airbrushed.

So the results are really a hybrid of sculpture, photography, painting and computer art. Sander has so far invited friends, associates, and virtual strangers to be scanned, and the results are intensely and eerily human, right down to the nuances of expressions, creases in clothes, postures, eye color and hairdos. It's not like looking at miniature sculptures, but at miniaturised people. All the big and tiny details of the body are there, but so too are pronounced traces of the high tech process, the ridges of the acrylic layers from which the figures are comprised suggesting video scan lines.