The 836M Gallery welcome you on October 3rd, 2019 to the opening reception of "Find Yourself," a solo exhibition by Elisabeth Daynès. The artist will be in attendance and the opening reception will include a talk with guest speaker Dr. Leslea Hlusko, a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California Berkeley. We will discuss what it means to be human and how knowing our evolutionary origins can lead to a better understanding of ourselves.

As a French paleo-artist, Elisabeth Daynès’ work transgresses the commonly held belief that we humans dominate the world and are at the top of the evolutionary scale. Elisabeth Daynès explores a world of hyper-technology and virtual reality, marked by humankind’s obsessive quest for physical perfection and eternal youth. She puts forth a vision of what it might mean to be “human” twenty centuries from now.

Throughout her career, Elisabeth has continued to reflect on questions related to identity and the search for it. In this exhibit that explores human origins, Elisabeth Daynès encourages the public to reflect on appearance and the human face, today and in the future. She wishes to show that in a time of social networks and ubiquitous images, everyone is free to invent endless narcissistic mirrors: the boundaries blur between real and virtual, artificial and natural. Her work demonstrates that in the future as well as in the past, we are not at the apex of evolution nor are we the only possible manifestation of humanity. We were once diverse and we will again become diverse. And we ask ourselves: "As we remake and enhance our faces, bodies, and minds, as we evolve in the vast expanse of space and time, will technological innovation significantly impact human evolution?”