For the March 2018 installment of our Featured Artwork series, winter/spring 2018 Social Media intern Bailey Reiners takes on a queasy, abstract work.

Feeling a bit queasy?

Through her work, Chicago-based artist Jeanne Dunning explores human experiences that both repulse and intrigue. And The Pink’s (1996) gory field of red blisters coated in glossy liquid does just that.

Dunning began toying with photography and its ability to trick the human eye during the 1990s. By capturing her subjects in close proximity, Dunning eliminates their greater context, allowing ambiguity to reign. While the subjects in her photographs can be as innocent as a grapefruit—yes, that’s a grapefruit pictured above—the emotional and physical reactions that result from viewing her works demonstrate her mastery of manipulation and experience.

Dunning is interested in how viewers relate to sculpture as a physical experience and how that experience is inherently different with photographs. Through works like The Pink, she effectively challenges the barrier between photograph and sculpture, as the camera nearly touches the subject causing the foreground to blur and the viewer becomes enveloped in the work. “The thing about works of art is that you do have to experience them in person and there’s no substitute—you have to be in the same space with it and have a physical, spatial, visceral relationship with it—whether it’s an object or an action.”