Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to announce "The Lifesaving Machines," Reiner Riedler’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring work from his most recent series of the same name.  An opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 30, 6–8pm.

In his photographic series of historical and modern medical machinery, Reiner Riedler asks "Why do they look so human?"  The project, initially inspired one late night as the artist waited alongside his newborn son in a neonatal intensive care unit, seeks to coax the beauty and mystery from objects normally viewed with clinical detachment.  Here, Riedler addresses the unconscious dialogue between our lifesaving machines and their human counterparts twofold, seen in both the documentation of medicine’s evolving technologies and apparatuses, and through the intentional isolation of the machines from their place of use, highlighting each alone afront a pitch-black background.

Rather than signifying pain and discomfort, the machines are at times dazzling, as seen in the image of a laser cut glass model of a heart; powerful, as seen in the omniscient glow of a solitary monitor screen; and, perhaps most notably, humanoid, like Historical Breathing Machine, with its flop of cream-colored tubes above a “face” of radial dials and knobs.