Floria Sigismondi is on the phone from her apartment in lower Manhattan. It's a little after one pm, and she's just gotten up. Her voice sounds husky, sleep-heavy.

"A late night?" I ask, hoping for a tale of wild parties in Chelsea, hob-nobbing with the city's artistic elite. Not quite. "I was working," she says.

This isn't your usual take-some-files-home-from-the-office kind of work, though. Sigismondi was up till 5 am sanding breasts in preparation for a solo gallery show that opens in New York in a couple of weeks.

Sanding breasts?

Although she's been busy in the past few years working with David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, and others in the chic, hit-the-ground-running world of music videos, Sigismondi is still something of a newcomer on the New York art circuit. And Come Part Mental, which opened at the John Gibson Gallery in SoHo in late April and will be unveiled at Toronto's Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in the fall, is her first major foray into installation work.

Anyone who saw Sigismondi speak at the Art Gallery of Ontario in February as part of Trinity Square Video's "Cultural Engineers" series will have caught a glimpse of what to expect. Sigismondi began by showing a picture of New York City. "Boxes on top of boxes, inhabited by people. When one dies, another moves in to take its place." The picture changes. "I began to think of the city as a body," she explains. Like the city, with all its discrete compartments, people and their bodies can be broken down into different categories and slotted into one box or another.

The show, which features several mannequins that Sigismondi has altered in various ways, as well as other installation pieces and several colour photographs, raises questions about how technology is changing the way people think about the body, and even the nature of humanity.

It's something that Sigismondi, 35, says she's been fascinated with ever since she can remember, but only began to think about in terms of this show in the past couple of years. Over the phone, she talks about a magazine article she read a while back describing the perfect human being from a medical perspective. "It's short, its legs bend backwards, the eyes bulge out, and it has huge pointy ears," she explains. By contemporary Western standards the perfect human is ugly.