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Human Nature II
Suzanne Anker
Micronatural
Suzanne Anker
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Universal Concepts Unlimited, New York
Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theoretician working with genetic imagery. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Philips Collection, P.S.1 Museum, the Stadkunst in Koln, and the Museum of Modern Art in Japan.
Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Teme Celeste, M/E/A/N/I/N/G and Leonardo . She has hosted and participated in numerous panel discussions such as Monkey Business: Art and Science at the Millennium, and Sugar Daddy: The Genetics of Oedipus. She has been visiting artist and scholar at Yale University, the Royal Society of London, the Hamburg Bahnhof in Berlin, the Max Plank Institute in Dresden and Washington University in St. Louis. In 1994, she curated Gene Culture: Molecular Metaphor in Contemporary Art at Fordham University, the first exhibition devoted entirely to the intersection of art and genetics. She currently teaches art history and theory at the School of Visual Arts where she is chair. Suzanne Anker is represented by Universal Concepts Unlimited.
Jaq Chartier
Ink Chart 2002
Jac Chartier
Acrylic, paint and stains on wood
19"x30"
Courtesy of the artist
Jaq Chartier's paintings explore scientific methods through experimentation with paint and process. All of her works are "tests" to discover something about materials and what they do. Inspired in part by images of gel electrophoresis, Chartier investigates the migration of various stains through layers of paint and acrylic gels.
Paintings such as, Kilz vs. BIN (2001), 4 Reactions (2002), and Sun Test: 40 Whites (2004) - titles that attest to such experimentation - feature intimate views of materials as they react to each other, to light, and to the passage of time, including notes written directly on the paintings. Through experimentation, observation, and notation, Chartier creates sensuous paintings that provide commentary on both the visual culture and everyday practice of scientific investigation by highlighting similarities between artistic and scientific practice.
Chartier has recently received a 4Culture Special Projects Grant, an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship, and a PONCHO Special Recognition Award from the Seattle Art Museum's Betty Bowan Committee. She was also a 2004 Creative Capital Grant finalist, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award nominee in 2001. Her work was featured on the first Foo Fighters CD in 1995, and in the acclaimed traveling exhibition Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics.
Christa Erickson
dis-ease, 2003
Christa Erickson
Animated database, mixed materials
Courtesy of the artist
Christa Erickson is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who investigates the politics, pleasures, and pains of spaces mediated by electronic technologies. She weaves together combinations of video, tactile materials, programming, physical cinematic devices, performance, and the Internet in installations. She is currently developing an interactive installation of absurd personalized devices, which reference cultural obsessions with youth, wealth, health, sexuality, and beauty. She is also still working on the genetic body-memory installation titled Dis-ease.
Christa's individual and collaborative works have been exhibited widely, including PPOW (NYC), Walker Art Center (MN), Hong Kong Art Centre (China), Institute for Studies in the Arts/Arizona State University (AZ), School for Visual Arts, Visual Arts Museum (NYC), California Museum of Photography, Banff Center for the Arts (Canada), Jamaica Center for the Arts (NY), Maryland Art Place (MD), various university galleries/museums and at international media arts festivals like CYNETart (Germany), Maid in Cyberspace (Canada), FILE (Brazil), Medi@terra (Greece and Eastern Europe), Ciber@rt (Spain). Recently she was Artist in Residence at the Hong Kong Arts Centre for Digital Now 2003. Her work has been cited in many publications including Leonardo, New York Times, Village Voice, Wired, Parachute, South China Post, San Diego Union Tribune, Arizona Republic, Baltimore Sun and City Paper, and "Coolsite of the Day."
She also writes, curates, and regularly speaks about new media at international art and technology conferences, universities, and galleries. Her essay "Networked Interventions: Debugging the Electronic Frontier" appears in the Routledge 2002 anthology Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Urban Metropolis. She has curated the exhibition FEEDBACK: Female Artists Respond to Technoculture and a video screening for Queer Visualities.
At Stony Brook she is the Director of the Digital Arts Studios, Co-Director of the collaborative Laboratory for Technology Arts (Art, Music, and Theatre Arts), and Associate Professor of Art. She teaches electronic media courses and a collaborative multi-media sequence with a composer from Music. Her background includes commercial design, media production, and programming experience as well as an MFA from UC, San Diego and degrees in sculpture and computer science from UT, Austin. She also taught at UC, San Diego and at Indiana University, where she founded their Digital Media program.
Eduardo Kac
Genesis. 1999
Eduardo Kac
Transgenic Artwork
Dimensions variable
Add Courtesy of Karpio + Facchini Gallery, Miami
Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his interactive net installations and his bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web '80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced "Katz") emerged in the early '90s with his radical telepresence and biotelematic works. His visionary combination of robotics and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience (Uirapuru) to the cultural impact of biotechnology (Genesis); from the changing condition of memory in the digital age (Time Capsule) to distributed collective agency (Teleporting an Unknown State); from the problematic notion of the "exotic" (Rara Avis) to the creation of life and evolution (GFP Bunny).
At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kac shocked the world with his "transgenic art"--first with a groundbreaking net installation entitled Genesis (1999), which included an "artist's gene" he invented, and then with his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000).
From his first experiments online in 1985 to his current convergence of the digital and the biological, Kac has always investigated the philosophical and political dimensions of communication processes. Equally concerned with the aesthetic and the social aspects of verbal and non-verbal interaction, in his work Kac examines linguistic systems, dialogic exchanges, and interspecies communication. Kac's pieces, which often link virtual and physical spaces, propose alternative ways of understanding the role of communication phenomena in creating shared realities.
Kac merges multiple media and biological processes to create hybrids from the conventional operations of existing communications systems. Kac first employed telerobotics in 1986 motivated by a desire to convert electronic space from a medium of representation to a medium for remote agency. He creates pieces in which actions carried out by Internet participants have direct physical manifestation in a remote gallery space. Often relying on the indefinite suspension of closure and the intervention of the participant, his work encourages dialogical interaction and confronts complex issues concerning identity, agency, responsibility, and the very possibility of communication.
Kac's work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Exit Art and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, and Lieu Unique, Nantes, France; OK Contemporary Art Center, Linz, Austria; InterCommunication Center (ICC), Tokyo; Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago; Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; and Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro. Kac's work has been showcased in biennials such as Yokohama Triennial, Japan, Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Gwangju Biennale, Korea. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, among others. He is currently working on a public art commission for the University of Minnesota, which will be on the permanent collection of the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis.
Kac's work has been featured both in contemporary art publications (Flash Art, Artforum, ARTnews, Kunstforum, Tema Celeste, Artpress, NY Arts Magazine) and in the mass media (ABC, BBC, PBS, Le Monde, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, New York Times). The recipient of many awards, Kac lectures and publishes worlwide. His work is documented on the Web in eight languages: http://www.ekac.org.
Kac is a member of the editorial board of the journal Leonardo, published by MIT Press. Kac's writings on art, which have appeared in several books and periodicals in many countries, have been collected in two volumes: Telepresence and Bio Art : Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005) and Luz & Letra (Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa, 2004). Books about Kac's work include: Eduardo Kac : Move 36, Elena Giulia Rossi, editor (Paris : Filigranes Éditions -- New York : DAP, 2005) and The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins, eds. (Tempe: ISA/ASU -- New York: DAP, 2003).
Eduardo Kac is represented by Galerie J. Rabouan Moussion, Paris; Black Box Gallery, Copenhagen; and Laura Marsiaj Arte Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro.
Richard Krueger
Beyond Desire, 2006
Ink jet print
11"x14"
Courtesy of the artist
Richard J. Krueger's current research and studio productions explore the histories of the conspiring sciences of artifice and the naturalizing of the supernatural. Recent exhibitions of his artwork have been held at Purdue University's Stewart Gallery in West Lafayette, IN., Elliot Smith Gallery in St. Louis. MO., and The Center for Visual Arts in Toledo, OH. His works are featured in the permanent collections of the Snite Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. He has received numerous awards and grants including an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship and an Indiana Arts Commission Grant. Richard J. Krueger is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis.
Susan Robb
Micro Fauxology
Susan Robb
32 type c prints
10"x10" each
Courtesy of the artist
Susan Robb grew up on the East Coast and currently living in Seattle, Washington. She received a BFA and a BA from Syracuse University and a MFA from the University of Washington. Her work crosses disciplines employing video, photography, performance, sound, sculpture, site-specific installation and new media, often questioning modes of authority: investigating how science may be undemocratic, how institutional interpretations of culture might limit the affect that culture has, and how corporate marketing is a challenge to an authentic life for example, while exploring the intersection between nature and society. Robb's work has exhibited internationally including the exhibitions: Today in Paradise, Röden Sten, Goteburg Sweden, Ulterior Modish, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne Austrailia, Blackhole, SideTwo Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, and the U.S. touring exhibition Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics. Her work is also included in the on-line exhibitions HYLE International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry- Chemistry in Art: A Virtual Art Exhibition, Art et Biotechnologies, and Leonardo On-Line the website for the Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. In 2005 Robb received a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, a CityArtist Project Grant from the City of Seattle, and a 4Culture Special Projects Grant. Robb was also a recent recipient of a Stranger "Genius Award", an Artist Trust Fellowship, and an Artist Trust GAP grant. Her work is held in public and private collections internationally and most recently included in the Microsoft Art collection. Susan is currently a visiting professor at the University of Washington teaching installation art.
Eva Sutton
Mutations
Eva Sutton
Interactive Video Projection
Courtesy of the artist
Eva Sutton is an artist and programmer living in New York. Her current work explores the boundary between static images and interactive databases in which users change the visual state of the system. Before becoming an artist, Eva was a software engineer working primarily in the fields of biotechnology and large-scale database management, and later as a senior network administrator at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been featured at Aperture, Exit Art (New York), The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Tang Museum, (Skidmore, NY), The National Center of Photography in Paris, SIGGRAPH, and the on-line sites Digital Imaging Forum (www.art.uh.edu/dif), www.genomicart.org and www.pbs.org. She has lectured on issues in art and technology at Princeton, New York University, The Cooper Union, the Hong Kong Center for the Arts and the Ludwig Foundation in Havana, Cuba. Currently, Eva is serving as chair of the Photography Department at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Elona Van Gent
Trespass
Elona Van Gent
Stereolithography plastic
Courtesy of the artist
Elona Van Gent is a new media artist whose creative investigations integrate the history and philosophy of science, genetics, evolution, teratology, and three dimensional computer technologies. Exhibitions of her work include Artifacts and Anomalies: Cabinets of Wonder and the Play of Technology at Peter the Great Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Today in Paradise at Röda Sten, Gothenburg, Sweden, the International Rapid Prototyping Sculpture Exhibition, traveling internationally, and Beings: A Preview to Human Nature at the School of Fine Arts Gallery, Indiana University. She is the recipient of grants and commissions from the Michigan Arts Council, Grand Valley State University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including Frederick Meijer Sculpture Park and Herman Miller, Inc. in Michigan, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and Alpha Genesis of Boston. Elona has lectured at museums and universities in America and Europe, is an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan and has also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Kendall College of Art and Design, and Grand Valley State University.
Paul Vanouse
Latent Figure Protocol
Paul Vanouse
Mixed materials
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and Creative Capital Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts
Working at the crossroads of genetics and art, Paul Vanouse has been creating interdisciplinary installations since 1990. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally at such spaces as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Louvre in Paris; and the TePapa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. He is featured in the book Information Arts by Stephen Wilson and has been funded by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Heinz Foundation, among others. He is an associate professor of art at the University at Buffalo in New York and has also taught at the University of California, San Diego.
Human Nature I
Katrin Asbury and Shawn Greene
The Victory Garden (detail), 2006
Katrin Asbury and Shawn Greene
Mixed materials
8'x9'x5'
Collection of the artists
Katrin Asbury and Shawn Greene are married and live in Chicago. After graduating from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1997 and 1998 they moved to New York City where they lived and worked in a firehouse in Long Island City, Queens. While in New York they participated in exhibitions in galleries, museums and sculpture parks, both as individual artists and as collaborators. After moving to Chicago in 2003 they were able to build a studio and continue to work together on projects that explore the increasingly complicated relationships human beings have with other animals and the environment.
Both artists have a strong commitment to helping preserve the natural world and all of its inhabitants. In the summer of 2002 Katrin spent time working with the Orangutan Foundation in Borneo. And, in June and July of 2006 both Katrin and Shawn were able to travel to India to visit and work in animal sanctuaries, wildlife rescues and a bird hospital, thanks to a grant from the Efroymson Foundation. Both of these experiences inspired many drawings and sculptures and enhanced their understanding of the complexities inherent in conservation.
Much of the funding for "The Victory Garden" came from a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago.
Shawn Decker
Night Sounds, 1998
Shawn Decker
Sound installation
Dimensions variable
Collection of the artist
Shawn Decker is a composer and artist who writes music for live performance, electronic tape, and for film and video soundtracks, and works primarily with interactive computer-based performance and with sound and electronic media installations. His work has appeared in a variety of settings ranging from small galleries to large concert halls, and has been heard on NPR, the European Broadcast System, PBS, and the Learning Channel. Recent commissions include the first permanent public sound installation ever installed in Finland, a piece for the Chicago Saxophone Quartet which has been widely performed in the US and Europe, and an interactive live-electronic score for a major work by the Mordine and Company dance ensemble. Mr. Decker also has performed with and composed for the acclaimed new music ensemble KAPTURE. In addition to writing and producing music, Mr. Decker is an Associate Professor in the Art and Technology and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to his creative work, Mr. Decker also writes and lectures, and was recently the chair of the 1997 International Symposium on the Electronic Arts. Mr. Decker received a Bachelor's degree in music composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Master's and Doctor's degrees from the Northwestern University School of Music.
Wim Delvoye
Trophy, 1999
Wim Delvoye
Bronze
270 x92 x133 cm
Collection of the artist
Born in Belgium in 1965, Delvoye currently lives and works in Ghent, Belgium and Berlin. The artist has gained international recognition through his participation in major exhibitions including the Venice Biennale in 1990 and 1999 and Documenta IX in 1992. Recent projects include an exhibition for the Public Art Fund entitled Wim Delvoye: Gothic on view in Central Park and at Madison Square Park, survey exhibitions at the Musee D'Art Contemporain in Lyon, and the Centro per L'Arte Contmporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, Italy.
Linda Adele Goodine
A Lamb Named Mary, 2005
Linda Adele Goodine
Color Print
40"x60"
Courtesy of Galeria Gora, Montreal
Linda Adele Goodine received her MFA from Florida State University and has exhibited her photographs since 1987. She has had a number of solo and group exhibits throughout the United States and has exhibited internationally in New Zealand, Montreal, Canada, and Heidelberg, Germany among other venues. She has been the recipient of a number of grants and awards, most recently an Efroymson Foundation Fellowship in 2004, which enabled her to travel to New Zealand to live for a year. During that time, she photographed the landscape and continued her investigation into the complex relationship that man has with nature.
Richard Gray
Codes & Conduct #9, 2006
Richard Gray
Ultrachrome Print
22"x14"
Collection of the artist
Richard Gray's artwork investigates photographic constructs of identity with an emphasis on the role science plays in redefining the contemporary self. His project, Human Factors digitally combines his microphotographs of human cells with portraits, fostering dialectic relationships between the visible and sub-visible. Gray explores the cultural evolution of the photographic image and the influence technologies have on our understanding of what it means to be photographed. Gray's artwork was recently exhibited at the 2005 Internationale Fototage in Germany where he gave the keynote address "Contemporary American Photography." His work is selected for exhibition in 2006 at the Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta. Other exhibitions include Beings, IU Bloomington; Out of the Darkroom, Miami University Art Museum, Digital Hybrids, McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown, Ohio. He has received regional fellowships from Arts Midwest/NEA and Indiana Arts Commission and currently serves on the National Board of Directors for the Society for Photographic Education.
Roger Hangarter
Brood X, 2005
Roger Hangarter
Video
Collection of the artist
Roger Hangarter received his Ph.D. in Plant Physiology in 1991. He is an Associate Professor of Biology at Indiana University and his research focuses on the physiological and molecular mechanisms of how light and gravity control plant form and function. As a scientist he works to discover, describe, and understand fundamental aspects of the natural world, often taking something that initially appears abstract and, through experimentation, revealing order. Nevertheless, nonscientists often see science as adding further abstraction. Hangarter attempts to communicate an awareness of our fragile environment and of plants in particular, on which our lives and the health of our environment depend.
To view Roger Hangarter's work, go to his website: www.bio.indiana.edu/~hangarterlab/
Jawshing Arthur Liou
Elements, 2006
Jawshing Arthur Liou
High Definition video and sound installation
Sound composed by John Gibson
Arthur Liou worked as a video journalist in Taiwan before coming to US in the early 90s. In the past decade his work gravitates toward the increasingly personal issues of media experience, ethnicity, food, and illness. The work format roamed from multimedia, archival digital prints, to high-definition video installation. Liou received Rising Star Award in Fotofusion 2004 conference for the series "Picture(s)" and "Blood work." His work travels internationally, including Asian American Arts Center, New York; Poissant Gallery, Houston; Schopf Gallery, Chicago, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, and numerous electronic and digital arts festivals in Sweden, Italy, Argentina and Brazil. His video installation series "Things that are edible" was reported by Indianapolis Star as one of the top 5 visual art events in Indianapolis in 2002. Liou received MFA in Electronic Intermedia and Photography from the University of Florida. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Art at Indiana University.
Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault
Essay of 1000 Layers II, 2006
Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault
3-channel animation video
Collection of the artists
Collaborating since 1991, Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault are artists whose work employs 3-D whole body laser-scanning technology to map and re-visualize the figure. Working with a custom software program, the artists have developed special techniques for generating complex unfoldings from three-dimensional scans of their own bodies. Currently they are also using another custom application to explore and animate topographies from their digitized three-dimensional scans. Recent exhibitions include the widely traveled solo exhibition 'selfportrait.map', which originated at the List Visual Art Center at MIT. They also have had solo exhibitions in New York at the Frederieke Taylor Gallery, Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona, Spain and Carpenter Center at Harvard University. Their work has been included in such group exhibitions as New Art. New York: Reflections on the Human Condition in Traun, Austria, Digital: Printmaking Now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Contemporaneou.s. in Cornwall and Sunderland, UK. They have held residencies at Maryland Institute College of Art, Colorado State University, Harvard University and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. Currently, LoCurto and Outcault are having a ten year survey exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz.
Alexis Rockman
Manifest Destiny, 2003-04
Alexis Rockman
Oil and acrylic on four wood panels
8'x24'
Courtesy of the Artist and Leo Koenig Gallery, New York
Alexis Rockman is a painter living and working in New York City. Over his twenty-year career he has collaborated with people from a variety of disciplines, such as science and architecture, and has exhibited in solo and group shows around the world.
A native New Yorker who frequented the American Museum of Natural History as a boy, Rockman is inspired by natural history iconography, as well as murals and dioramas. His work explores the intersection of humanity and nature, science and art, documentary and fantasy.
He is represented by Leo Koenig Gallery, and his work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and London's Saatchi collection.
Gary Schneider
John, 2004
Gary Schneider
Digital print
86.5"x44"
Courtesy of Julie Saul Gallery, New York
South African born Gary Schneider moved to New York City in 1977 after receiving a BFA from the University of Capetown. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute, NY. His first solo performance and installation, Naming, was presented at Artist's Space in 1977. From 1981 his primary medium was film, returning exclusively to photography by1987.
He has exhibited internationally in both group and solo exhibitions. In 1997 Schneider produced Genetic Self-Portait which is an installation of 55 photographs that comprise a portrait of the artist. The images are derived from both forensic, purely scientific and pseudo scientific sources. These include images of Schneider's DNA, genes, chromosomes, as well as his hands, ears, teeth, sperm and blood . Among the venues that exhibited this work were: The International Center of Photography, NY; MassMoCA, MA; The Musee de l' Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland; and The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. A catalogue/book of this work was published in 1999 by Light Work.
He is also currently producing large color portraits of people exposed while the shutter remains open for an extended period of time. The artist works his way around the face with a flash light, highlighting certain areas and leaving others in shadow. By making images in this way Schneider is refering back to his own beginnings in film and performance as well as his interest in the work of Julie Margaret Cameron and Vito Acconci. This work will be exhibited at the Julie Saul Gallery in 2003. The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University will present a survey of all Schneider's portrait work in 2004.
Lorna Simpson
Same, 1991
Lorna Simpson
Mixed materials
119"x 82 1/4"
Collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky
Lorna Simpson lives and works in her hometown, Brooklyn, New York. She received her academic training from the School of Visual Arts in New York and the University of California, San Diego and began her career as a documentary photographer. In 1985, the same year she received her MFA, Simpson was granted an Arts Management Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts and exhibited her work in her first major solo exhibition, Gestures/ Reenactments, at the Alternative Gallery in San Diego. As time passed, Simpson challenged perceptions of what constitutes photography, painting, sculpture and film by experimenting with printing techniques, size and scale and the relationship between the image and the viewer. However, Simpson never lost a sense of her beginnings in documentary photography and continued to record cultural, political, and social phenomena. Simpson has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions all over the world, including Europe, the United State, Canada, and New Zealand.
Bonnie Sklarski
Spring, 2006
Bonnie Sklarski
Oil on board
40"x31 1/2"
Collection of the artist
Bonnie Sklarski studied painting and drawing at the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute and received her MFA from Brooklyn College. Her work has been exhibited at the More Gallery in Philadelphia and Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in New York, and in other galleries in the Midwest and East. Her engagement with the landscape, the figure and nature has been an underlying theme in her work for over thirty years.
Diana Lynn Thompson
Untitled, 2006
Diana Lynn Thompson
Mixed materials
Variable Dimensions
Diana Lynn Thompson is an installation artist who works with ephemeral moments, accumulated objects, collected stories and insertion/intervention strategies, which she documents in video and photographs. She took her BFA at the University of Victoria. Her works have been exhibited, performed and installed nationally and internationally.
In the 1980's Diana worked as a park naturalist and botanical illustrator. This background in - and deep love for - biology influences her work, which integrates scientific methodology with a poetic sense of wonder.
Albert William
Nucleus, 2005
Albert William
Video animation
Collection of the artist
Albert William received the 2003 Silicon Graphics Inc. Award for excellence in computational sciences and visualization at Indiana University. Prior to accepting an academic position, Albert worked for the past 12 years at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Albert has been involved in numerous projects in the School of Informatics. He created "The Cell- A Virtual Tour", an interactive multimedia CD/ROM designed to be used as a learning aid in cellular biology. This presentation utilized state of the art 3D animation and interactive content to deliver complex subject matter in a user friendly environment.
Albert was involved in creating music and images for the Chichen Itza and Uxmal virtual tours as part of the School of Informatics CLIOH projects. He also created "Genomics," an informative 3D animation for use in the I.U. School of Medicine and INGEN initiative. His animation "The Neuron" can be viewed as part of the Indiana State Museum's "Tomorrow's Indiana" exhibit.
Joel-Peter Witkin
Raphael and La Fornarina, 2003
Joel Peter Witkin
38"x30"
Toned Gelatin Silver Print
Courtesy Van Der Aa Family Collection
Joel-Peter Witkin is a photographer whose images of the human condition are undeniably powerful. For more than twenty years he has pursued his interest in spirituality and how it impacts the physical world in which we exist. Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin pursues this complex issue through people most often cast aside by society -- human spectacles including hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynes, carcasses, people with odd physical capabilities, fetishists and "any living myth . . . anyone bearing the wounds of Christ." His fascination with other people's physicality has inspired works that confront our sense of normalcy and decency, while constantly examining the teachings handed down through Christianity. His constant reference to paintings from art history, including the works of Bosch, Goya, Velasquez, Miro, Botticelli and Picasso are testaments to his need to create a new history for himself. By using imagery and symbols from the past, Witkin celebrates our history while constantly redefining its present day context. Visiting medical schools, morgues and insane asylums around the world, Witkin seeks out his collaborators, who, in the end, represent the numerous personas of the artist himself. The resulting photographs are haunting and beautiful, grotesque yet bold in their defiance a hideous beauty that is as compelling as it is taboo. Witkin begins each image by sketching his ideas on paper, perfecting every detail by arranging the scene before he gets into the studio to stage his elaborate tableaus. Once photographed, Witkin spends hours in the darkroom, scratching and piercing his negatives, transforming them into images that look made rather than taken. Through printing, Witkin reinterprets his original idea in a final act of adoration. Joel-Peter Witkin lets us look into his created world, which is both frightening and fascinating, as he seeks to dismantle our preconceived notions about sexuality and physical beauty. Through his imagery, we gain a greater understanding about human difference and tolerance.