BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.- The Berkeley Art Museum presents today “Exhibiting Signs of Age,” on view through January 18, 2004. The U.S. population is increasingly made up of people over the age of 65. Yet the media is saturated with images of youth and advertisements for products that promise to counteract signs of age. What are the implications of this cultural denigration of aging?

Exhibiting Signs of Age explores representations of aging in twentieth-century and contemporary artistic practice. The photographs and works on paper on view in the museum’s Theater Gallery provide visitors with an opportunity to contemplate subjective experiences of aging and gain perspective on a range of aging issues. By its very nature, the exhibition investigates the politics and ethics of representation, inviting us to reconsider the normative conventions and strategies of depicting identity.

A number of artists included in Exhibiting Signs of Age approach the theme of aging through self-portraiture, using their own bodies as a site of self-scrutiny and exploration. In a series of large-scale photographs, for example, John Coplans examines the defamiliarizing effects of his aging physique. Coplans presents a body reduced to abstract parts: a callused heel, a contorted hand, a cropped torso. Pointing to the liminal state of aging, Imogen Cunningham’s self-portraits address the feelings of invisibility that older people can experience in our youth-obsessed culture. In her conceptually based Seniors Project, the 29-year-old Nikki S. Lee appropriates stereotypical appearances of elder citizens. Lee’s ability to masquerade as a senior questions the legibility of age and suggests the malleability of identity. Challenging our preconceptions of old age, Chester Higgins Jr.’s ten-year photographic project Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging offers portraits of uncommon beauty, strength, and majesty. Ed Kashi and Julie Winokur’s series Aging in America: The Years Ahead represents diverse experiences of aging in our increasingly older society. Exhibiting Signs of Age also includes work by Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Jim Goldberg, Nina Katchadourian, Robert Mapplethorpe, and George Segal.

Running concurrently with Gene(sis), Exhibiting Signs of Age offers a unique opportunity for a comparative view into questions of imaging and imagining the body. Where is identity, or subjective experience, located? Is it genetically programmed, residing within the body’s own cells, or is it etched onto the surface of our bodies? The artists in both exhibits highlight ambiguity and indecipherability, as well as exploring anxieties surrounding our bodily condition. Together, these exhibitions allow us to interrogate various modes of expression—abstraction, realism, scientific imaging—as means of representing our bodies, our identities, and our future.

Funding for Exhibiting Signs of Age is generously provided by the UC Berkeley Center on Aging/The Academic Geriatric Resource Center and the UC Berkeley Center for Medicine, the Humanities and Law, with additional funding from the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities.