The human figure has been central in Michael Reedy’s paintings and drawings for the last twenty years. His most recent works explore themes of life, death, and the human condition. This renewed curiosity in the physical limits of the body, and its ultimate failing (both outwardly and inwardly), has been paired with his prior interests long rooted in depictions of the body that fall outside the canon of art history (medical imaging and cartooning).  Here, the ongoing references to anatomical illustration, and its benign approach to depicting pain and death, and cartooning serve to both underscore the comedic tragedy of physical existence and the frailties that increasingly define our sense of self as we age. In each instance, the unsettling presence of the open body presents complex questions of gender, pleasure, pain, interpretation, and reception, and results in works infused with a sense of scientific aura, moral lesson, and morbid entertainment. Consequently, the viewer is seduced into disregarding the boundaries between interior and exterior, between looking and feeling, and between the real and the pictured body.