Oblique Images from Stelarc’s Extra Ear

Guildford Lane Gallery is pleased to present the first Australian exhibition Nina Sellars’ series of photographs, oblique.

With the assistance of an Australia Council grant, Nina Sellars travelled to Los Angeles in 2006 to photograph the surgical construction of the Extra Ear project. The experimental and internationally renowned artist Stelarc underwent surgery to have a left ear constructed on his left forearm. A miniature microphone was also embedded underneath the Extra Ear during the surgery, allowing it to be wirelessly connected to the Internet via a Bluetooth transmitter. Sellars’ artistic practice, which focuses on of the physiology and phenomenology of the human body, intersects with Stelarc’s own body-based practice.

Sellars lectures in Anatomical Drawing at Monash University, where she is currently completing her Masters of Fine Arts having received an Australian Postgraduate Award. Sellars’ MFA research investigates the idea that with the advent of new technologies to emanate, record and capture light, our perception of the anatomical body alters and a new body is imaged. The work explores how light determines what we see and experience in relation to the anatomical body. Sellars’ is also a trained Prosector: a dissector of cadavers for medical display, and her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2008 Sellars was an invited speaker at the Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin where she presented the lecture ‘Anatomy and Light’.