Sophie Kahn's works owes its fragmented aesthetic to the interaction of new and old media, or the digital and the analog. She combines cutting-edge technology, like 3d laser scanning and 3d printing, with ancient bronze casting techniques. She creates sculptures and videos that resemble de-constructed monuments or memorials. They engage questions of time, history, vision, identity and the body.
The precise 3d scanning technology Kahn uses was never designed to capture the body, which is always in motion. When confronted with a moving body, it receives conflicting spatial coordinates, generating fragmented results: a 3d ‘motion blur’. From these scans, Kahn creates videos or 3d printed molds for metal or clay sculptures. The resulting objects bear the artifacts of all the digital processes they have been though.
They also speak to the impossibility of ever capturing more than a trace of the past, or of a living, breathing body, despite our grandest efforts to fix it in place. This concern with the instability of memory and representation is the common thread that weaves together the ancient and futuristic aspects of her work.
