BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON.- Collaborative artist team Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault has created strange and distorted representations of the body in eighteen large Cibachrome photographs mounted on aluminum, which were created from scans and a mapping program. Their work explores the topography of the body in this series of works that range from figurative to nearly abstract. The exhibition, in the Museum’s second floor gallery, will open on April 6 and run through July 14.



LoCurto and Outcault started with a relatively simple inquiry: how to present the body as a shell, laid flat as "a map of the human character." This exhibition, which originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology List Art Center, represents the outcome of their investigation -- a metaphorical and literal look at the topography of the body that draws on both universal and personal experience. Using advanced technologies, the artists have manipulated their disembodied forms to create self-portraits that merge their physical bodies with the cartographic vocabulary of a world map. The New York-based artists first scanned each limb of their bodies with their home flatbed scanner but then discovered a military scanner that was capable of making a 3-D scan of their entire bodies. The information recorded from this scanner was then translated into a mapping program that transformed the 3-D scan into a flat image. This digital data was imported and manipulated in Geocart, a professional mapping program (created in Renton by Mapthematics, LTD). Varying points of perspective, the mapping configuration, the color, density and pixel counts are controlled to create these portraits.



LoCurto and Outcault, who are husband and wife, pursued independent artistic careers after graduating with Master’s of Fine Arts degrees in sculpture from Southern Illinois University in 1978. They began working collaboratively on a project titled Self Portrait in 1992, finding that together they were able to be more experimental and take greater risks in their work. They reside and work in New York.



The exhibition has been show at the Selby Gallery, Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, FL; the Hatton Gallery, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO; Lyman Allyn Museum of Art at Connecticut College, New London, CT and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL prior to Bellevue Art Museum.