Barbara Singer Award: Vivian Pratt
Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Cambridge, MA
A review in Art New England, August-September 2005
By Luke Jaeger

Vivian Pratt's work brings to mind Muhammad Ali's motto "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." Pratt's large photographic images of decaying flowers are digitally tweaked into subdued, stately ruminations on aging and the body's decline.

From a distance, the colors are muted; up close, they reveal multicolored digital noise, like pointillist brush strokes. Printed on vellum and suspended a few inches in front of the wall by steel pins, the images seem to glow and float in midair. At the same time, the artist's choice of mounting hardware speaks as eloquently as her subject matter. Her work has often featured images of subjects from the world of medical technology, in which the cold and clinical machine encounters the living, flawed body; this interplay is also mirrored by Pratt's own history as a professional technologist turned artist. Pratt's flowers hang like butterflies pinned in a museum case: The same technological intervention that kills them also allows us to continue seeing them.