Rendering the human figure has long been central to Linda Carreiro's work. Her installation Dissection is the latest in a series of pieces that move from her earlier depiction of figures as subjects of narrative and metaphor, to the human body as a site of a cultural and personal discourse. Specifically it is the body flayed for display here, not the compact, enclosed body of living experience. Rather than providing us with this coherent whole, Carreiro gives a tableau in which the body appears as an analogue made of disparate objects. This body is stripped of the characteristics of an individual -- face, distinguishing marks, unbroken outline, sexual and racial characteristics. This seemingly non-specific body is also personal and affective. There is resonance to the objects, materials and handcraft, as well as a fine point of horror in its presentation. An old wooden trunk sits on the floor and there are strings of red, hand-stitched words like viscera coming out of it, pulled at by a murder of crows. The crows are fashioned of paper with an effect recalling cast-off skin and are inscribed in what appears to be a brown ink (invisible ink - sugar water and lemon juice, exposed to heat -- recalling secrecy, faded photos or dried blood.) If you look into the trunk you see a mass shaped after the human heart to which the strings are attached, similarly inscribed. The words are quotations from historical works pertaining to dissection, medicine, and transplantation. The crows are layered with transcriptions of explanatory passages by Andreas Vesalius, the sixteenth century father of modern Anatomy. The texts of the entrails are a sampling from Hippocrates to the present. Throughout there is an oscillation from the poetic to the dispassionately descriptive: Like the parts of a dissected corpse, these are thoughts that are clipped out of context, yet together they reveal our uneasiness with the processes of dissection, so closely associated with our notions of identity and mortality. As historian and cultural theorist Phillippe Ariès asks in one of the texts, “Is there a permanent relationship between one’s ideas of death and one’s idea of oneself?” Anatomy is a practice that has been controversial since its invention. No discussion of the body whether living or dead can be considered neutrally, whether that discussion occurs in language or in visual culture. The reason is clear. Anatomy deals with the bodies with which we are familiar in a manner that is patently unfamiliar. The personal body of growth, reproduction and decay, the body of hunger, desire and plenitude, the body of emotion, thought and perception are swept away by the strange, impersonal intimacy of the anatomist’s knife, opened for view, inscribed and mapped by the anatomical texts. It is a disturbing transformation of the body from subjecthood to objecthood -- a charting of a new country that is within us, yet is unknown and untouchable. If Anatomy itself reifies the body as a text and a visual spectacle, Carreiro's Dissection is a parallel discussion, touching on medical ethics and motives, and questioning our continuing fascination with the body as a subject and an object. Steven Nunoda is a Calgary-based artist and educator. Gallery 101 is pleased to lend its support to the Alberta Scene, a celebration of Albertan artists and the arts organized by the National Arts Centre, that unfolds in Ottawa between April 28 and May 10, 2005. Special thanks to Deborah Margo, Visual Arts Coordinator.