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Curatorial
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Laura Splan: Entangled Entities
The New Gallery, Feb. 22 - Mar. 26, 2021 |
exhibition catalogue
exhibition essay by: Hannah Star Rogers Gallery Guide
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Entangled Entities is an exhibition that combines biomedical research with aesthetics. With her work, Splan choreographs poetic confrontations with science inside the gallery to foster deeper engagement with science outside the gallery. She frames complex biomedical issues with provocations of curiosity and wonder – revealing beauty amongst chaos and resilience amidst crisis. As we are currently in the throes of a global pandemic, this timely exhibition invites the viewer to experience the tools, sounds and images of the biological research lab and to, in Splan’s words, ‘inspire audiences to think critically about the role of biotechnology in our daily lives.’ “I create embodied interactions, tactile experiences and sensory encounters that connect materialities of science to familiar domains of the everyday,” Splan states. “My conceptually based projects destabilize notions of the presence and absence of bodies, evoking the mutability of categories that delineate their status. “Using a range of traditional and new media techniques, I reconsider perceptions and representations of the corporeal, combining the quotidian with the unfamiliar to interrogate cultural constructions of self and other,” she added. Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied interactions and sensory engagement. Her conceptually based art practice combines a wide range of media including experimental materials, digital media and craft processes.
Her biomedical-themed artworks have been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation and Davidson College. Her projects combining digital fabrication and textiles have been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design and Beall Center for Art + Technology and are represented in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the NYU Langone Art Collection. Her widely acclaimed lace viruses including SARS and HIV (2004) have been exhibited and published around the world. Reviews and articles including her work have appeared in The New York Times, Discover Magazine, Hyperallergic, American Craft and Frieze. Splan has received research funding from The Jerome Foundation and her residencies have been supported by The Knight Foundation, The Institute for Electronic Arts, Harvestworks and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford University teaching interdisciplinary courses including “Embodied Interfaces," “Data as Material” and “Art & Biology.” She is currently a Creative Science member at NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator and is collaborating with biotech laboratories to interrogate interspecies entanglements in the contemporary biomedical landscape. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, in a building that has been both a pharmaceutical factory and a knitting factory. | ||
