In Stranger Visions, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material like hair, fingernails, chewing gum and cigarette butts, collected in public places. Working with traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance. Beginning with a single hair that captured her imagination, Dewey-Hagborg set out to learn just how much she could find out about someone from a discarded forensic artifact. Working at Genspace, a community laboratory in downtown Brooklyn, she became an amateur biohacker, learning the tools of forensic science in a thoroughly unconventional way.
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