After graduating from her studies in graphic design, AMVK worked at a company that developed methods for measuring and graphically representing toxins. Her first assignment at this job was to illustrate a woman wearing a bikini cradling a geiger counter. From this point forward she began using pornographic images of women to embody abstract theories, as a joke. The conflation of lust and engineering became the leitmotif of her practice.
Partially in reaction to the 1972 “Limits to Growth” manifesto, AMVK made the denigrated material of plastic her primary medium. Her tactile interest in industrial materials, as well as the visual mechanics of advertising surrounding them eventually led her to seek employment at a factory producing light boxes. She used discarded color plexiglass from this job to make works such as Girl Illustrated (1981) and Econom… + Chemis… Amusement (1981).
AMVK’s first journey to the empire state took place in 1979. During this trip she acquired a number of books that became important references in her work. Among them was a Soviet engineering textbook “Theory of Elasticity” by Filonenko-Borodich, which informed her 1993 work Theory of Stress. Comprising of forty-five dayglo fabric samples depicting scenes of sexual intimacy and romance combined with descriptions of structures and machines under pressure. The work’s modular format underscores AMVK’s interest in the expansion and contraction of inner worlds, feelings, and ideas.
Diagnosis by the Eyes (1987) is a triptych based on a medical approach that studies internal organ imbalance through conspicuous facial symptoms. On the other hand, the Philosophical Rooms series distorts renderings of existing interiors as a function of ideas by thinkers like Maurice Maeterlinck and Richard Rorty.
For the drawings God and Violence (1994), AMVK asked a friend to pose while magnetizing a skeleton. Before each session they read “The Sermon on the Mount” from the Gospel of Matthew. A woman is staged as a new Christ, returning the idea of death to the cycle of life.
