Joseph Mills (1951- ), Surgery of the Hand, c. 1980/2002 |

Toned and varnished gelatin silver print mounted to folding vanity mirror, 18 1/8 x 23 in. (46.04 x 58.42 cm) |
Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Gift of the artist) | 2018.15.119 

 

The photograph at the heart of Surgery of the Hand is a composite of two images (one of a bird embryo and another of a burlesque dancer) that Joseph Mills cut out of a 1940 issue of Life magazine. The composite looks seamless, but the references to surgery and to hands in the text above and the graphic below the photograph point to Mills’s role in creating this “Surrealist” image. Surgery of the Hand participates in a resurgence of interest in the early twentieth-century movement, which blurred the lines between reality and fiction. Spurred by debates around images and the media in the 1980s, artists deployed Surrealist strategies to critique photography’s illusion of truth. In Surgery of the Hand, for example, Mills invokes the language of science and medicine to this end, and the folding mirror situates this gesture within a broader play on perception.