One of the purposes of art is to gain new perspectives.
British visual artist Nick Veasey takes that seriously and does so by looking at things from the inside out.
Veasey’s exhibit “Forensic Beauty,” which opens with an artist presentation on Friday and Saturday at Park Place Fine Art at the Pendry Hotel, examines the world through X-ray images.
“We’re going to show about 30 works, and it’s an exhibition I’ve been putting together for a while,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for about 30-plus years, and these are my best hitters.”
The exhibit title comes from an exhibit Veasey did in collaboration with the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London a few years ago.
“We did this thing on fashion and X-rayed clothes from the ’80s, and the curator described my work as ‘forensic beauty,’” he said.
Veasey creates his works with real X-ray machines, real inorganic objects as well as human and animal remains.
“I got access to a skeleton from a teaching hospital that was used to teach student radiographers how to do X-rays,” he said. “She’s still in really good shape and is in a museum. And when I do have her, I X-ray her from every conceivable angle, and she becomes my template. Then with animals, I get dead dogs from the vets, and I have used butterflies and snakes.”
Working with a real skeleton from a hospital is much more convenient than robbing graves.
“If you go graverobbing on the weekends, which I’m sure you do, when you pull bodies out of the ground the skeletons fall apart because what’s holding them together is blood pressure, muscle tissue and skin,” he said with a laugh. “When you die and your body has been in the ground for three months, that’s all gone. That’s why you see reconstructed skeletons with pins in the joints and plastic connections.”
Furthermore, working with a dead skeleton does make it easy for Veasey to escape litigation.
“Every time a human or animal is exposed to radiation, it’s accumulative, meaning the radiation stays with you for life,” he said. “So, the more X-rays you have the more radiation you get. So, my way around that is instead of X-raying living things, I X-ray dead things. If they’re already dead, they aren’t going to sue me.”
Veasey makes many technical adjustments while composing a piece.
“Fundamentally, an X-ray is a ‘same-size’ process, and if I X-ray my phone, it comes out the actual size on the film,” he said. “The largest piece of (x-ray) film is 14 by 17 inches. So, if the object is bigger than that, you tile the film like you’re tiling a bathroom wall with a slight overlap. So, we process each part of the scene individually and we join them back together on the computer. It takes about three months for three people to make.”
Another challenge of creating X-ray art is getting access to the equipment, according to Veasey.
“It’s dangerous equipment, and you can make a dirty bomb with an X-ray machine,” he said. “So you have to go through a vetting procedure, and you also have to understand the health and safety implications of what you’re using.”
Typically, a person can get access to X-ray equipment by being sponsored by a hospital, Veasey said.
“But I didn’t go down the normal way,” he said. “I came at it as an individual from the artistic and photography side. And I go buy second-hand equipment.”
Veasy still had to obtain an X-ray license from the British government in order to purchase and run the equipment.
“They come and visit me once a year and check out the building I use is totally safe and there is no radiation leaking,” he said. “I also have to get a medical (procedure) once a year to make sure I’m OK.”
Still, Veasey doesn’t cover himself with a lead apron when he takes the X-rays. He sets up the scene and simply leaves the room.
“The laboratory I work in has two-feet thick concrete walls, and the doors are lead and steel that weighs 1,250 kilograms, which is more than two tons,” he said. “That traps the radiation in.”
Once the X-ray stops, the radiation stops, Veasey said.
“There are two types of radiation — alpha radiation and beta radiation — and when you get a disaster like in Japan when the tsunami came into the nuclear reactor, that radiation is beta radiation, and it never stops,” he said. “I use alpha radiation. When the machine is on, it’s dangerous, but when the machine is off, it stops, and there is no contamination.”
Veasey’s fascination with X-ray images started with his love of photography, which was one of the only subjects that held his interest..
“I love the analog part of photography, and I’ve always messed around with cameras and film and ways to make pictures,” he said. “Then something happened in my late 20s. Sometimes life just presents you with something.”
At that time, Veasey’s wife, Zoe, then his girlfriend, was working as a graphic designer for a TV show.
“It was a fast-moving breakfast show that was light hearted and wasn’t heavy on news,” he said. “Her script had one of the TV presenters sitting on a truckload of cola cans, and it was in the day when the cans had pull tabs.”
The cola company had just started a promotional campaign, according to Veasey.
“Like the ‘Willy Wonka’ story, one of the ring pulls had a magic letter on it, and if you got the letter, you won 100,000 pounds, which is $125,000,” he said. “The script was ‘how can we cheat?’ and then we’d cut to some X-ray of the cans.”
The couple had been renting an apartment, and their landlord had access to an X-ray machine.
“He then gave me access to it, and I had the machine for the whole day,” he said. “I knew at the end of the day that I found my calling.”
‘Forensic Beauty’ Exhibit Opening and Presentation by Nick Veasey
