“Biological Metaphors” was a series of installations of paintings and drawings formulated as an inquiry into the artistic and scientific representation of the body. How do our thoughts and feelings about our own individual bodies arise? To what extent do we create our own body-consciousness based on science (or other-wise)? How do we experience our bodies, especially when dissected into segments or otherwise subtracted by medical science? How do patriarchal scientific discourse and its visualizations penetrate and influence our bodily experience and knowledge? What symbolic meanings are attached to each organ by the patriarchal-corporeal hierarchies? How does subdivisional logic of medical terminology and practice manipulate the notion of the body as an individual entity, or whole? And how does this relate to regimes and etiquettes of power? How does the concept of the individual body relate to social concepts and laws? How do the laws of society and social institutions overpower the individual experience of the body? How, precisely, is the patriarchal medical representation of the body embedded in power structures and relations? How is our experience of the individual body influenced by scientific knowledge? How did scientific vocabulary and imagery become the dominant language of our bodily experience?
Exhibited: Biological Metaphors I, Óbuda Gallery (Zichy Palace), Budapest, Hungary (July 23 –September 16, 1984), Biological Metaphors II, Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada (September 25 – October 20, 1984), Three Installations. Tony Monahan, Steven Donegan, Orsolya Drozdik (Biological Metaphors III), Art in General, New York, USA, November 10 – December 8, 1984 and Biological Metaphors IV, Galerie Suspect, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 17 – April 6, 1985
