The Scarlet Genotype



I have been conducting a long-term experiment in the limitless possible combinations of text and image, and how these combinations of words and pictures can create new meaning. The content of my artwork is firmly situated at the conflux of art, science, and technology. I am keenly interested in the ways that science and technology encroach upon our everyday lives.

The Scarlet Genotype is a body of work by Pattie Belle Hastings built around the idea that our vices, defects, and predispositions, as determined by our genetic information, will be the new Scarlet Letter – a new form of social outcasting. In the future, our own genetic code will be used against us, just as Hester’s own genetic offspring, Pearl, was used as evidence against her. Humiliation in the public square will be replaced by lockout from health insurance, jobs, and stigmatized reproduction. How dare we reproduce with the knowledge of our own genetic defects? What forms of control will be exerted over our genetic data? Perhaps these processes have already begun...

In these works, text, pictures, video, and sound are combined to create narratives that can be read on a number of levels – served up cross-media in the form of artist’s books, prints, a video projection installation, web site, assorted printed matter, and an installation based performance.

The Scarlet Genotype was originally conceived for the group exhibition Exposing Scarlet: A Visual Response to the Scarlet Letter at Mills Gallery/Boston Center for the Arts, September 10 – October 31, 2004. Inspired by the Bicentennial celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life and work, fourteen artists have been invited to explore the conceptual and visual evocations of Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter. Working in a range of media spanning from installation to painting, these artists inquire into whether, and how, the issues raised in the novel are relevant in today’s society.