Pamela Rosenkranz’s work examines the biochemical and cultural forces that shape human experience. Her installations blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, exploring how evolution and contemporary technology shape our emotions, identities and behaviour as well as our body’s interaction with our environment.

The series Pour Yourself consists of plastic water bottles filled with ‘Dragon Skin’, a silicone substance normally used for prosthetic make-up in the film world as well as for medical cosmetics. Pigmented in skin tones that evoke the ethnic demographics of consumers of brands such as Evian, Fiji and San Benedetto, the works create abstract portraits of the human body in a bottle, wrapped in advertising slogans such as Evian’s “Live Young”. They emphasise the domestication of nature in a society shaped by capitalism, in which the attributes of a lifestyle that idealises the purity of ‘inner’ human nature are juxtaposed with a balanced ecology of the world. The work examines the relationship between humans and nature and the multiple strategies we as a species use for marketing, production and other forms of commodification to justify our consumption of natural resources. 

(Borbála Szalai)