Art Talk: This is Your Brain and This is Your Brain on Drugs

Caffeine

Crystal Meth

Cocaine

Heroine

Adrenaline

Speed

Artist Sarah Schoenfield was privy to the extremes of drug culture when she worked in a Berlin nightclub. Soon after she changed her photo studio into a laboratory and exposed a variety of legal and illegal drugs to film negatives and then magnified the results to comprise her section of work titled All You Can Feel. 

Depending on if you are a user of illicit substances or not you definitely have some expectations and presuppositions of what those drugs do to you because of your exposure to the media's portrayal in films, music, and TV. Sarah Schoenfield's work is interesting because it examines drugs on a different level entirely: it's not what it makes you do, but what it is does to you - specifically your brain cells and blood stream. 

To me these images are a reflection into what the chemical nature of these drugs do to your insides. Plus, even more hauntingly, they all seem to reflect how I would draw or paint the way they make people feel. Kind of like doing your moods on a color scale. Not a scientific portrayal, but a visceral one... It is as if they are all exactly what I would expect to see: as they truly are on a molecular-emotional-basis. Cool, huh?

{See all of her work here. Images via here.}