Unknown Heart

Unknown Heart was commisioned by Dr. Benoit Bruneau, Director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Research in 2017. At the time, Benoit's promotion to this position was nascent. Benoit requested a painting that used heart and DNA as imagery. This piece was assembled using callage material consisting of vintage anatomical illustrations of dissected hearts in a textbook illustrations of a Pre-Cambrian sea. CRISPR-CAS-9 gene splice visualizations were used and conformed to the curve of the DNA double helix in the heart of the collage.

This proved to be an intuitive ephiphany because it symbolically corresponded to the focus of Bernoit's work: curing cases of perforated heart setptum using stem cells. Of course, the diver is "Diving into Research!"