GENE SPILL

16 November - 2 December 2000

Opening night:
6-8pm Thursday November 16th

IMPERIAL SLACKS GALLERY
Level 2
111 Campbell St
Surry Hills
Sydney NSW 2110

Gallery hours 12-6pm (Wed-Fri), 11-5pm (Sat)

Gene Spill is a group exhibition involving the artists:

Stephen Birch
Bronia Iwanczak
Isobel Johnston
Michelle Nikou
Suzanne Treister
Philipa Veitch

+ + +

Gene Spill is about our movement towards an age redefined by
biotechnology: it is an investigation into the reconfigured realities
created by genetically modified lifeforms and their interplay within the
complex nexus of our ecosystem and our cultural/social beliefs and
practices. Gene spill explores the transgression of previous boundaries
for a new taxonomy with different relational strategies in a language of
morphology, mutation and fusion.

'It is very important to understand that we are crossing species
boundaries at will. There is no time in history, that I'm aware of,
where flounders mated with tomatoes, where humans mated with mice, where
salmon mated with chickens. This is a completely new arena.'

-Andy Kimbrell, The International Centrer for Technology Assessment

'Genes are the green gold of the twenty-first century, every bit as
important to power in the next era as oil and rare metals and minerals
were to the industrial revolution .'

-Jeremy Rifkin, head of the foundation of economic trends.

What realities can we anticipate as nature's relational complexity
becomes substituted by the economic determinism of the bio-industry? How
will we revise our theories of Darwin's evolution, long held assumptions
about the sanctity of nature and theological- cultural systems around
the notion of GOD. We are on the re-playing field of the second genesis
and everything we have ever assumed about the definition of life,
ourselves andthe meaning of existence itself is about to be radically
altered.