ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Artist Lois Goglia has been examining the relationship between Art, Science, and Medicine for over thirty years. She has created multiple series using animal and human X-rays, mammograms, ultrasound radiographs, X- rays of cells growing in Petri dishes, X-rays of DNA sequencing gels, and brain cell photographs combined with traditional and nontraditional art supplies.

In her latest Series, Covid Variations, 2020, Goglia repurposed a coat rack, floor tiling, CD’s brain cell images, and Plexiglas panels to create her poignant and eye-catching artwork, Double Vision. In her Lifecycle and Identity Series Goglia attaches X-rays to light, boxes. These series, with their illuminated X-rays, make the inner body’s malfunctions visible in order to facilitate a diagnosis and cure.

Goglia contends that X-rays are fraught with unpleasant connotations because of their associations with physical disabilities and disease. Very rarely have X-rays been investigated as an art form, despite q fact that they reveal an artist's formal vocabulary: line, value, color, texture, and shape.

Goglia asserts that she sees X-rays with an artist's eye, not as a medical diagnostician. She associates the X-ray imagery to photography. The X-ray's value contrasts, textural variations, linear qualities, and unusual shapes engage her. She thinks many are beautiful and intriguing. Furthermore, she opines that X-rays explore an old art theme in a new and unique way: figurative art has been a subject for artists since the time of the caveman's animal and human wall drawings.

Using X-rays donated by veterinarians, physicians, medical researchers, and friends, Goglia created multiple series of X-ray artwork. She states that her work speaks of the human condition: that its transparency implies their ability to see through many layers to truth. X-rays also reference the body's interiority and spiritual life. Goglia’s work with torn and pasted together X-rays suggests that cutting edge science may have removed us from our inner light and spiritual selves to put our bodies at dis-ease.

Additionally, Goglia’s mix of animal and human X-rays images draw comparisons between the two species. To Lois, the commonalities of human and animal anatomies question how close humans are to our "animal natures."

Goglia’s medical imagery art also suggests that the use of radiation imbedded in the X-ray might be a precognition of the threat of world destruction by nuclear weapons. She believes her collaged prints of animal and human interiors can serve as metaphorical diagnostic indicators of conditions in our world that need treatment: pandemics criminal behavior, drug addiction, war's human destruction, and political instabilities that plague us.