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Eva Strohmeier
Gastral Projections
May 31 - July 7, 2002
 opening reception Friday,
May 31, 6:30 - 9:30 pm
Through various media (wall drawings, video, sculpture), Eva Strohmeier's installation for Pond explores the human body as a landscape of tension. The installation's videos feature close-up shots of the artist's mouth biting her fingernails, chewing apart gummy worms, and smacking green bubblegum. Digitally exaggerated, the viewer's attention focuses on the mouth and its habits (biting, licking, sucking, digesting) as a place where the external and internal meet-both physically and metaphorically.
Strohmeier's strategy of deconstructing the body into literal-physical and symbolic parts is similarly employed in
her sculptural work, Stomach Sensations, which considers the way we associate emotion with the stomach and its digestive processes. Balloons filled with melted-down food products (chocolate, chewing gum, gummy worms) are contorted and morphed to visually suggest emotional states of grief, anger, sorrow. The sculptures serve as a visual cue for common phrases revealing the tendency to map affect onto the body: ''I was sick to my stomach with worry", "butterflies in my stomach", etc.
Between the videos and the sculptures sprawl text-based wall drawings that schematize the artist's free associations about the semiotics of orality and digestion. Referred to as 'mind maps', these drawings situate the work between the
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