Amy’s paintings are inspired by diagnostic imaging procedures such as MRI scans, x-rays, and endoscopies. By turning this technologically mediated and highly contextualized material into paintings, she creates visceral expressions of human experience, identity, and the phenomena that occur when we are given the opportunity to gaze inside our own bodies. By bringing the diagnostic experience into focus, she questions what separates the experienced illness from the embedded disease, encourages the consideration of physical and intellectual ownerships of the body, and reflects on the resulting ethical ramifications.
The medical imagery Amy works with is not known merely through mediation; Amy has attended human dissections alongside first year medical students, and this first-hand experience is evident in her work. The colours, smells, textures, and sounds of the human body, are dynamically portrayed by using paint simultaneously as three-dimensional skin on a surface and a means to representation. In many of her paintings, Amy packs layers of information into the composition, each abstracting its origin even further. They shift away from the illustration of a system, and towards an expression of an experience that is individual and unique to each body. Her work addresses the complicated relationships we have with our bodies – the way we feel in them, control them, and how we are affected when they betray us. Amy grew up in a suburb of New York City. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame in 2008, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2009, and is expecting to earn her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art this spring. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Massachusetts, Indiana, and Glasgow.
Amy Carroll Reinthaler
Glasgow
United Kingdom
Europe
