The stop of the globe is not the stop of the entire world. Human beings have existed on Earth for just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its existence the world will go on to rotate on its axis extensive just after we Homo sapiens sapiens have incinerated ourselves as a result of some horrific, however statistically insignificant rapture of our very own building. Just after the earth moves underneath our toes and the sky tumbles down, who or what will enjoy our tunes, poems, and pictures about it? It is a fever aspiration, a fool’s fantasy, to latch onto any just one earthling’s intrinsic value when they were nothing just a temporary rewind or rapidly-forward into the earlier or future.
With Human Hand for Scale, Cathrin Hoffmann’s 1st solo exhibition with Nicodim, the artist casts herself in the position of upcoming anthropologist, measuring the levity of our species on a timeline stretched to millenia and mega-annum. She approaches the human form from a substantial length in the two time and place, the human hand is used as a jerry-rigged scale for both of those. These works are approximations of human lifetime as we know it, educated guesses, in the way of Dürer’s Rhinoceros or a electronic 3-d rendering of a cro magnon cranium. Don’t Know How to Improve It Back (2022) plays with Bacon-ian notions of interiority and exteriority in an era somewhere involving cave dwellings and the apocalypse. In Extra Like Animals Without Movement (2022), a gargantuan Christlike figure perches herself (or is crucified on) a disembodied womb, bestowing equivalent gravity to science and spirituality. It’s Identified as Teratoma, Seem It Up (2022) is an additional ode to attainable human origins and those people perverted along the evolutionary pathway. The central figure is Hoffmann’s just take on Michelangelo’s David, the threaded and bushy globule to its side the organic anomaly Goliath’s slayer could have been had the wind been blowing a distinctive path in excess of the course of his gestation. (Dear reader, *do not* search up “teratoma.”)
Hoffmann’s exercise is not so nihilistic as it is a useful, great-humored assessment of how The Way Factors Are Right now will be understood when “Today” encompasses the entirety of our species’ existence. There is an inherent optimism listed here: extended right after the each day drama of human biology and spirituality are extinguished, the sunlight will even now rise and set. The finish of the environment is not the close of the environment.