assemble

As a pediatrician, I watch closely as newly breathing bodies fill a mold slowly revealed across the last millennia of medical knowledge, and I am on the precipice of catching any deviations: measurements, tools, references. The recording inside assemble is one of those — a newborn heartbeat carried for two minutes through a directional speaker placed at the center of the work. It is not accompaniment; it is the premise.

Above the speaker, silk panels printed with Cor Fabrica's shadow — a Vesalius muscle-figure after De Humani Corporis Fabrica — hang vertically, parallel to one another, layered in depth above a birch base that carries the same figure as a skipped-line drawing. The body repeats and recedes — a diagram of itself in space — until it dissolves into the light moving through the silk.

Anatomists cut the body open to show what was beneath the skin. Assemble asks what remains when even the dissected figure is made provisional, when the muscle becomes line, the line becomes silk, and the silk becomes air. The body is now held in the room, in the air, between us. What stays is the heartbeat — from beat to beat.