Krista Hoefle

Hoefle, serial to brain transmissions were attempted in six experiments, 2008.

Four recent works by Krista Hoefle make up a tiny but noteworthy show at one of Chicago’s newest apartment galleries. As the title hints, Hoefle’s subject is the cyborg. Yet rather than invoke the morality tales typical of Frankenstein’s genre, the Indiana artist imagines a bright techno-utopian future.

Hoefle’s most striking work is a large-format print on plastic of organic, fractal-like patterns in muted neons and pastels. Building on the Flash wizardry of artistic forebears such as Joshua Davis and James Paterson, Hoefle infuses these software-generated designs with new meaning, presenting them as so-called cyborg brain waves. The pleasing forms hardly suggest the cold, malicious thoughts of Darth Vader and other pop-culture man-machine hybrids. Instead, they appear to be visual traces of a brilliant, creative intelligence. Hoefle’s mixed-media collages likewise welcome the cyborg’s impending heyday. The artist pairs dated-looking, blue-hued cyanotype photographs of women in white coats working in sterile laboratories with her signature blossoming, multihued designs, making pre-cyborg reality seem droll in comparison.

Unfortunately, Hoefle’s sculpture of an enlarged papier-mâché heart—hung from a string with red cotton balls stuffed into aortas—comes off as merely grotesque. The monstrous and grotesque are crucial aspects of “transhuman” art, but this territory has been more fully explored by major artists like Patricia Piccinini. Hoefle’s work is strongest when it marries her splashy palette with cybernetic optimism, the ethics of rampant scientific progress be damned.

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