There are times, viewing Justine Cooper’s art, that you laugh to split your sides and then twist suddenly away, struck with absolute horror. You tend to get that when an artist presents surgically incisive and viscerally immersive work about bodies ‘living’ on the borders of life.

With conceptual elegance and often blistering wit, Cooper’s work — which has been shown and praised from Shanghai MOMA to Ars Electronica to the Centre Pompidou — has confronted power and femininity in pharmaceutical ‘correctives’ to ‘emotional imbalance’ (Havidol 2007) by staging her own fully viable, if teasingly parodic ad campaign.

A few years before, as the resident artist of New York’s Museum of Natural History, she had unprecedented access to their extensive storerooms and collections, examining technologies of preservation — like taxidermy and museums themselves — that alter given boundaries of life, death and artificial, performed naturalness and producing Saved by Science, a clinical and overwhelming but oddly touching series of portraits of suspended life.

Opening today in New York, Justine Cooper’s new series Terminal will be up alongside Lamina and RAPT — full-body MRI self-portraits. The new work speaks volumes on its own, but then again, what’s better than hearing it straight from the artist?

Read on for our interview with the eloquent and insightful Justine Cooper.

Gallery and opening intel here.

TRACE: What is unique about this series compared to your other work?
Justine Cooper: The new series of medical simulation mannequins and robots (Terminal 2008) [used for training doctors] relates to my other work in its probing of our relationship to science and medicine in a technologically advanced society.

Like anatomically correct, overgrown Ken and Barbie dolls, these mannequins are given a plot line to act out, in a story of someone else’s devising. The result is they grow into their own histories, in the same way we present ourselves — relating our personal lives through blogs.

Re-invention takes place through the medium of social networking. Their stories mimic our own; our choices of the parts that punctuate the daily ritual — the new baby, the island holiday, the head wound.

T: In your other work, the moments of humor seem more obvious. In Terminal, are they still there?
JC: Don’t let the name fool you. The definition of terminal is not just a disease condition. Any device for entering or receiving information is also a terminal, which is how I view these mannequins. I think it’s humorous to see a million dollar mannequin dressed in a festive Hawaiian shirt. Or the most sophisticated robot for remote surgery (aptly named the DaVinci) making an old fashioned cup of tea.

RAPT, on the other hand, is an experiential work, where you use your own physicality to find the meaning in it.

T: What about our bodies do medical technologies make us confront?
JC: In a purely prosaic way medical technologies help us see ourselves more intimately. They then confront us with the idea that we are mortal, vulnerable and sublime. RAPT, which was created from my full body MRI scans, makes a physical boundary crossing into the body’s interior. It lacks the physical brutality of the cut, but it opens up a different kind of vulnerability in both the body and the viewer, leaving them to determine if it feels like the Shroud of Turin or 1966’s sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage.

T: Why are we horrified and fascinated by seeing our bodies as scientific objects?
JC: I’m not wanting to turn the body into a scientific object. But the body is a great starting point for any art. I’ve called RAPT a universal self-portrait in the past. When you are looking at me, you are also looking at you. Medical imaging exposes us in ways that Playboy doesn’t.

T: What is the difference you would like your work to make?
JC: There isn’t a message in the work for the viewer, there’s just a nested set of questions of one’s own making. My questions began with how technology changes our perception of space and the body, with RAPT. They continue with how do we humanize medicine, while brokering our desire to be well with our desire to be better (there is a difference).

T: Who inspires you?
JC: The Terminal portraits are inspired by the formal 4×5 view camera portraitists of the late 19th century and the modernist photographer Bernice Abbott for her scientific work. She didn’t pictorialize, but through a relatively straight aesthetic she did represent a complex idea.

RAPT is inspired by natural history exhibits of mounted skeletons, and the entire history of medical imaging in art from Frida Kahlo’s paintings that incorporated her spine, to Rauschenberg’s xray work “Booster.” RAPT’s focus was to explode the body back into a 3D space. You can literally stand inside.