PHIL HASTINGS

13.1.20.20 [7][13], 2014, HD 2-channel video, 5 minutes. Film Still: Courtesy of the Artist.

The diptych 13.1.20.20 [7][13] is part of Phil Hasting’s The Threshold Series—video works in which, to use Hastings’s words, “a wall of organic matter undulates, at times seductive or mesmerizing, at times moving between a state of health and sickness. This digitally created living, breathing matter becomes a proxy for the viewer’s own experience of standing at a threshold.” 13.1.20.20 [7][13] imagines two corporeal orifices—both abject yet also seductive—and thereby creates a way to fantastically enter and then exit the body. Opening and closing, becoming ill and recovering, this work beckons us to enter a constant state of reconstitution, seeing how the body can never be clearly marked as exclusively “ill” or “healthy”—at the microscopic level, it is always both.

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Phil Hastings (b. 1969) is an artist and filmmaker whose work is rooted in the often-opposing subjects of the sciences and the spiritual with explorations tied to liminality and the transformation process. Concepts of adversity, transcendence, and rebirth are themes that infuse his work. He works in animation, experimental and narrative cinematic modes and has screened in festivals, galleries and museums internationally. His video documentation of the sexual cannibalism and reproduction practices of praying mantis has been licensed for shows on National Geographic television and the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and New Scientist magazine. He is a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Film/Video Fellow and was an invited artist in the 18th Biennale of Sydney where his film Steadfast was screened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.