Juxtapoz Magazine – Cathrin Hoffmann: Human Hand For Scale

The conclude of the globe is not the conclude of the planet. People have existed on Earth for just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its existence the world will proceed to rotate on its axis prolonged just after we Homo sapiens sapiens have incinerated ourselves via some horrific, however statistically insignificant rapture of our personal making. Following the earth moves beneath our toes and the sky tumbles down, who or what will take pleasure in our tunes, poems, and shots about it? It is a fever dream, a fool’s fantasy, to latch onto any just one earthling’s intrinsic worth when they were nothing just a temporary rewind or rapidly-ahead into the past or foreseeable future.

With Human Hand for Scale, Cathrin Hoffmann’s very first solo exhibition with Nicodim, the artist casts herself in the purpose of upcoming anthropologist, measuring the levity of our species on a timeline stretched to millenia and mega-annum. She techniques the human form from a major length in both of those time and place, the human hand is employed as a jerry-rigged scale for equally. These will work are approximations of human existence as we know it, educated guesses, in the way of Dürer’s Rhinoceros or a electronic 3-d rendering of a cro magnon skull. Don’t Know How to Improve It Back (2022) performs with Bacon-ian notions of interiority and exteriority in an period somewhere concerning cave dwellings and the apocalypse. In Much more Like Animals With no Movement (2022), a gargantuan Christlike figure perches herself (or is crucified on) a disembodied womb, bestowing equivalent gravity to science and spirituality. It’s Termed Teratoma, Glance It Up (2022) is a different ode to feasible human origins and people perverted along the evolutionary pathway. The central figure is Hoffmann’s consider on Michelangelo’s David, the threaded and furry globule to its aspect the biological anomaly Goliath’s slayer could have been experienced the wind been blowing a diverse way in excess of the program of his gestation. (Dear reader, *do not* appear up “teratoma.”)

Hoffmann’s observe is not so nihilistic as it is a useful, great-humored assessment of how The Way Factors Are Now will be comprehended when “Today” encompasses the entirety of our species’ existence. There is an inherent optimism below: extensive immediately after the every day drama of human biology and spirituality are extinguished, the sunlight will continue to increase and established. The stop of the entire world is not the finish of the globe.