"The Gift" 36" x 48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2021
Reference Material – “The Gift”
1. “How a transplanted face transformed Katie Stubblefield’s life. At 18, Katie lost her face. At 21, she became the youngest person in the U.S. to receive a full face transplant.
It would take a team of 11 Cleveland Clinic surgeons and multiple specialists to perform the hospital’s third face transplant – and its first total face transplant – on Katie. At 21, Katie was the youngest person in the United States to receive a face transplant.
And, indeed, it was extensive: The surgery included transplantation of the scalp, the forehead, upper and lower eyelids, eye sockets, nose, upper cheeks, upper jaw and half of lower jaw, upper teeth, lower teeth, partial facial nerves, facial muscles, and skin – with 100 percent of her facial tissue effectively replaced.
2. Kurt Schwitters - Merzbau
One of the most important art works and myths in modern art, the inspiration for many installation artists, and still one of the most well known and published works by Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), the Merzbau, in fact, no longer exists. It was destroyed in a British air raid in October 1943 in Hannover. By 1937, when Schwitters left his hometown to follow his son into exile in Oslo, the Merzbau comprised a total of eight rooms in his house at 5 Waldhausenstraße in Hannover. Most of the surviving photographs seem to have been taken in the space of the ‘Merzbau proper’ (‘eigentlicher Merzbau’), in which Schwitters is known to have begun working at the beginning of 1927. Three photographs taken by Wilhelm Redemann in 1933 show the most detailed and complete overview of this main room.
Based on these photographs, the Switch stage designer Peter Bissegger executed a reconstruction of the ‘Merzbau proper’ between 1981 and 1983, assisted and supported by the artist’s son Ernst Schwitters. Harald Szeemann commissioned Bissegger to make a one-to-one reconstruction and it formed part of his famous exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, which included other reconstructions of this kind. Szeemann called it an ‘attempt at reconstruction’. He was himself aware of the inherent problems of making a reconstruction of a work that is in its very core an unfinished permanent work in progress, intended to grow and spread from ‘Hannover to Berlin’. Indeed, Schwitters’ aim can be surmised by the fact that he started his Merzbau again and again at the different locations where he lived (Hannover, Kijkduin, Lysaker, Hjertøya, Douglas, Elterwater), carrying it around him like a snail-shell.
3. This driver was fast — and is probably now furious.
Modal Trigger
South Yorkshire Police
An ill-fated motorist crashed his brand new Ferrari in spectacular fashion – just one hour after purchasing the more than $260,000 sports car in England.
Police said the Ferrari 430 Scuderia “went airborne” when it careened off a wet M1 highway in South Yorkshire on Thursday, the BBC reported.
It rolled more than 160 feet down a bank and burst into flames in a field.
Luckily, the driver walked away with cuts and bruises — to both his body and ego.
“Officers asked the driver what sort of car he ‘had’ to which he replied, ‘It was a Ferrari,’” South Yorkshire police said. “Detecting a sense of damaged pride he then said, ‘I’ve only just got it, picked it up an hour ago.'”
4. Smoker’s vs. Normal Healthy Lung
When you inhale cigarette smoke, there are thousands of tiny carbon-based particles that are inhaled.
Our bodies have a special way of dealing with these particles to get them out of the way if you will.
As soon as you inhale a puff of cigarette smoke, your body is alerted to the fact that toxic particles have invaded. Inflammatory cells rush to the scene. One type of white blood cell called macrophages may be thought of as the "garbage trucks" of our immune systems. Macrophages essentially "eat" the nasty brown-black particles in cigarette smoke in a process called phagocytosis.
Since these particles could be damaging even to garbage truck cells, they are walled off in tiny vesicles and stored as toxic waste. And there they sit. As more and more macrophages containing debris build up in the lungs and lymph nodes within the chest, the darker the lungs appear.
5. Female Ring
1. “How a transplanted face transformed Katie Stubblefield’s life. At 18, Katie lost her face. At 21, she became the youngest person in the U.S. to receive a full face transplant.
It would take a team of 11 Cleveland Clinic surgeons and multiple specialists to perform the hospital’s third face transplant – and its first total face transplant – on Katie. At 21, Katie was the youngest person in the United States to receive a face transplant.
And, indeed, it was extensive: The surgery included transplantation of the scalp, the forehead, upper and lower eyelids, eye sockets, nose, upper cheeks, upper jaw and half of lower jaw, upper teeth, lower teeth, partial facial nerves, facial muscles, and skin – with 100 percent of her facial tissue effectively replaced.
2. Kurt Schwitters - Merzbau
One of the most important art works and myths in modern art, the inspiration for many installation artists, and still one of the most well known and published works by Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), the Merzbau, in fact, no longer exists. It was destroyed in a British air raid in October 1943 in Hannover. By 1937, when Schwitters left his hometown to follow his son into exile in Oslo, the Merzbau comprised a total of eight rooms in his house at 5 Waldhausenstraße in Hannover. Most of the surviving photographs seem to have been taken in the space of the ‘Merzbau proper’ (‘eigentlicher Merzbau’), in which Schwitters is known to have begun working at the beginning of 1927. Three photographs taken by Wilhelm Redemann in 1933 show the most detailed and complete overview of this main room.
Based on these photographs, the Switch stage designer Peter Bissegger executed a reconstruction of the ‘Merzbau proper’ between 1981 and 1983, assisted and supported by the artist’s son Ernst Schwitters. Harald Szeemann commissioned Bissegger to make a one-to-one reconstruction and it formed part of his famous exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, which included other reconstructions of this kind. Szeemann called it an ‘attempt at reconstruction’. He was himself aware of the inherent problems of making a reconstruction of a work that is in its very core an unfinished permanent work in progress, intended to grow and spread from ‘Hannover to Berlin’. Indeed, Schwitters’ aim can be surmised by the fact that he started his Merzbau again and again at the different locations where he lived (Hannover, Kijkduin, Lysaker, Hjertøya, Douglas, Elterwater), carrying it around him like a snail-shell.
3. This driver was fast — and is probably now furious.
Modal Trigger
South Yorkshire Police
An ill-fated motorist crashed his brand new Ferrari in spectacular fashion – just one hour after purchasing the more than $260,000 sports car in England.
Police said the Ferrari 430 Scuderia “went airborne” when it careened off a wet M1 highway in South Yorkshire on Thursday, the BBC reported.
It rolled more than 160 feet down a bank and burst into flames in a field.
Luckily, the driver walked away with cuts and bruises — to both his body and ego.
“Officers asked the driver what sort of car he ‘had’ to which he replied, ‘It was a Ferrari,’” South Yorkshire police said. “Detecting a sense of damaged pride he then said, ‘I’ve only just got it, picked it up an hour ago.'”
4. Smoker’s vs. Normal Healthy Lung
When you inhale cigarette smoke, there are thousands of tiny carbon-based particles that are inhaled.
Our bodies have a special way of dealing with these particles to get them out of the way if you will.
As soon as you inhale a puff of cigarette smoke, your body is alerted to the fact that toxic particles have invaded. Inflammatory cells rush to the scene. One type of white blood cell called macrophages may be thought of as the "garbage trucks" of our immune systems. Macrophages essentially "eat" the nasty brown-black particles in cigarette smoke in a process called phagocytosis.
Since these particles could be damaging even to garbage truck cells, they are walled off in tiny vesicles and stored as toxic waste. And there they sit. As more and more macrophages containing debris build up in the lungs and lymph nodes within the chest, the darker the lungs appear.
5. Female Ring
