Published in conjunction with the exhibition Encircling the World: Contemporary Art, Science, and the Sublime, curated by Darci Hanna, Curatorial Associate, Bakalar & Paine Galleries, Massachusetts College of Art and Design. This catalog is made possible through a grant by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and additional individual support. © 2017 Massachusetts College of Art and Design All rights reserved. No part of the catalog may be reproduced whole or in part in any way without permission from the publisher. LCCN: 2017957361 ISBN: 978-0-9771419-8-2 EDITORS Chloé Zaug, Mallory Ruymannn ESSAY Why Science Needs Art © Christina Agapakis DESIGN Opus Design PRINTING Westwood Graphics IMAGE CREDITS All individual images and details are courtesy of the artist and gallery. All installation documentation is courtesy Eduardo Rivera (pp. 18-19, 23, 26, 39, 65) and Farimah Eshraghi (pp. 41, 45, 52, 56, 61). Cover: Pablo Carlos Budassi. A Logarithmic Map of the Entire Known Universe in One Image, 2012. Digital compilation. Courtesy of the artist. Bakalar & Paine Galleries Massachusetts College of Art and Design 621 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115 www.massart.edu
ENCIRCLING THE WORLD Contemporary Art, Science, and the Sublime SEPTEMBER 19 – DECEMBER 3, 2016 Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery Massachusetts College of Art and Design
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I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. – ALBERT EINSTEIN
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ART, SCIENCE, AND CONSILIENCE DARCI HANNA
Encircling the World: Contemporary Art, Science, and the Sublime is a multidisciplinary exhibition that features an international roster of artists whose work is rooted in scientific inquiry. Their compelling visualizations of complex datasets and natural phenomena make the unseen visible, whether sound or brain waves, magnetic fields, microscopic cells, or the entirety of the known universe. Curating this exhibition allowed me to combine two of my lifelong fascinations: contemporary art and the scientific realm. Despite the current cultural emphasis on STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), often to the exclusion of the arts and humanities, the two disciplines have a long history of consilience and cross-pollination. In various cultures and times, the arts and sciences have been viewed as more alike than different, and more overlapping and intertwined. Many people have merged the two fields in their own work over the course of history. One thinks immediately of the Italian Renaissance titan, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519), whose artistic skills were matched by his scientific curiosity and proficiency in engineering. Other examples from the western world include Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 – 1717), a German naturalist and scientific illustrator, who was such a talented observer and draftswoman that she was awarded a grant to travel to South America in 1699 on a scientific expedition with her daughter Dorothea. Her careful studies of the
Left: Maria Sibylla Merian. Plate 11 from the book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Transformation of the Surinamese Insects), 1705. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Below: Beatrix Potter. Clitocybe ample, c. 1890s. Watercolor on paper. Courtesy of the Armitt Museum and Library and the Armitt Trust.
metamorphosis of butterflies contributed tremendously to her field of study and she was a leading entomologist of her time. John James Audubon (1785 – 1851), the American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter, and his successor, Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874 – 1927), were well known for their prolific and precise illustrations of birds. While Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943) — the renowned author, illustrator, and conservationist — is best known for her animal tales featuring characters such as Peter Rabbit, she was also an accomplished mycologist who rendered her chosen subjects in meticulous detail. Interestingly, the term “scientist,” which was coined only in 1834, was created by analogy to the word “artist.” The scientific historian William Whewell created the word to refer to the work of the Scottish polymath Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780 – 1872), who was hailed as “The Queen of Nineteenth-Century Science” after her death. The common title of the day, “man of science,” was ill-suited to Somerville because of her sex and, more importantly, because of her formidable skills in multiple fields of inquiry, from mathematics, astronomy, and physics to geology, chemistry, and scientific writing. Her interdisciplinary work defied previous categorizations. She was a visionary thinker whose concise writing connected multiple academic branches and became the foundation for Cambridge University’s first science curriculum. Whewell thought “scientist” was fitting for her, with its allusion to “artist,” in part because of her creativity in connecting ideas across diverse areas of study.
Below: Mary Dawson Turner (née Palgrave). Mary Somerville, c. 1830s. Lithograph, printed by Graf & Soret. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
The artists in Encircling the World also make connections across disciplines, although their work can vary considerably at first glance. The fourteen artists represent a broad range of approaches, employing various artistic media and scientific content. Their relationships to their subject matter span from the scientifically curious to the well-versed. However, certain themes throughout the exhibition link much of the work together, sometimes in unexpected ways. One such through line is the idea that specific patterns can be found repeated throughout our universe at every imaginable scale, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. A clear example is bifurcation, the branching pattern that can be seen in the paint of Perry Hall’s Decalcomania Cycle paintings and the visualization of the cosmic web in Pablo Carlos Budassi’s image of the universe. The same pattern occurs in our neurons and veins, in the plants and trees that surround us, and can be seen in aerial photographs of river systems. This type of truly universal pattern hints at underlying physical laws that govern all manner of existence as we know it. Although the exhibition is not an exhaustive review of contemporary artists working with scientific themes today, it is my hope that viewers will enjoy seeing glimpses of this sublime interconnectedness through the selected works. Many of the pieces on view also involve some form of synesthesia, the neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second pathway. Synesthetes may see a color when they hear a specific sound (chromesthesia); have strong, lifelong associations with letters or numbers and colors (grapheme-color synesthesia); or attribute a strong sense of personality or gender to days of the week, months, numbers, or letters
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(ordinal-linguistic personification). For example, Nathalie Miebach’s and Andy Thomas’ visualizations of sound assign shapes and color to noises, whether from bird songs or the cityscape. For Miebach, these works are a departure from her typically three-dimensional practice, which frequently involves creating sculptural versions of weather data that are sometimes transformed into musical scores. The sound maps in the exhibition compress the auditory information she captured outdoors into a colorful two-dimensional image that turns the urban cacophony into a frenetic visual interpretation. Similarly, Thomas makes synesthetic visualizations of birdsong using animation software to encode the sound into complex and even psychedelic evocations of the initial source material. Like Miebach and Thomas, Perry Hall also incorporates visualized noise in his work. His video from the Sound Drawings series allows us to see (normally invisible) sound waves as they move through liquid, in this case: paint. He creates hypnotic patterns by experimenting with different sounds, scales of the work, and mixtures and types of paint. The final videos are silent, leaving viewers to contemplate the rhythmic surface disruptions without hearing the auditory source of the physical movement. The other video in the exhibition, Faithful Animal, makes another unseen force visible, that of magnetic fields. Using a magnet to move ferrofluid (which has nanoparticles of iron suspended in oil) over the surface of a paint-covered tray, viewers can see the forces at play and watch the surprisingly beautiful physical and chemical interactions that occur as the magnetic blob dissipates and reconvenes. His Decalcomania Cycle paintings do not involve sound, but reveal the dividing patterns that are so prominent in nature. Rather than recreating natural growth patterns, however, the branching imagery is created by compressing paint between two smooth surfaces and letting the suction create fractal-like ridged forms.
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Those that delve into the microscopic world include Rogan Brown, RoseLynn Fisher, and Vik Muniz. Brown’s intricate cut paper works show a normally invisible world, whether the microbiome of the human digestive system or a cross-section of a plant’s stem. Fisher uses a microscope to disclose the surprisingly complex terrain of human tears on a glass slide. Initially curious if tears produced in various emotional states looked different when magnified, she discovered that her images often resembled tiny topographic maps. Meanwhile, Vik Muniz worked with Tal Danino, a postdoctoral researcher and bioengineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to create artistic imagery with human cells. Pushing the boundaries of what the lab’s technology could do, they invented new ways to coax cells into patterns and capture the results in striking detail, so that even individual cell nuclei are visible in the final work. Working at the largest scale conceptually, Pablo Carlos Budassi, a musician and artist with a deep fascination with the cosmos, used publicly available imagery from NASA and logarithmic maps from Princeton University astronomers to create a single image of the entire observable universe. This remarkable compilation allows viewers to see all that has been captured with our current technology, as well as artistic renderings of the furthest reaches of human knowledge, the radiation and plasma rings left over from the Big Bang that encircle our universe. Laurie Frick, on the other hand, relies heavily on data that is closer to home to create her compositions, allowing the typically unrecognized patterns of our daily interactions with the world to populate her pieces. Mary Bates Neubauer works closely with large datasets as well. She transforms statistics from diverse environmental and personal sources (from weather patterns to her classroom attendance numbers) into three-dimensional mathematical models before casting them in metal and creating tangible objects from the abstract numerical information.
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Artists with a neuroscience bent include Jennifer Hall and Lisa Park. Hall uses her own brainwave data, captured during a seizure, and transforms it into two complementary works: a 3D-printed sculpture in resin and a sterling silver crown. The different interpretations of the same data allow a deeper look into how information can be encoded for better understanding or to achieve a certain artistic effect. Similarly, Lisa Park’s interactive piece allowed visitors to put on an electroencephalogram headset and see their own brainwaves in real-time in the gallery. Her custom-made iOS app focused primarily on a user’s “meditation” versus their “attention” values within the brainwave data. Participants watched a scrolling graph of their values as they rose and fell on an iPad screen before completing the reading. Viewers were then able to see their brain activity transformed into a colorful flower-like visualization and add it to a collective Instagram gallery, which revealed the diversity of brainwave patterns captured for the project. The remaining artists are deeply inspired by the scientific world but tread more closely to traditional artistic modes. Stanton Hunter was captivated by a report about a scientific paper analyzing the invisible-to-humans ultraviolet light grids that butterflies use to navigate the earth, yet he interprets the grids in delicate hand-rolled clay formations suspended from the gallery walls. His work makes tangible an aspect of our world that surrounds us daily (and is crucial to the insects’ very existence) but that scientists have only recently begun to recognize or understand. Julie Martini uses an ancient Turkish marbling technique, combined with artful airbrushing and masking, to create imagery that echoes natural forms, from the smallest cells to the largest celestial bodies. In one series, the pigment patterns on the surface of her marbling bath follow the same laws of physics that affect cell growth, creating tessellations that imitate the
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appearance of a cross-section of tissue under a microscope. In her second series, the marbled paper has fractal-like patterns that suggest the terrain of distant planets. On a smaller scale, photographer Ariana Page Russell uses images of her own rare skin condition combined with creative postprocessing for her prismatic works. Her series mimics the artificial coloration utilized in so many scientific applications to aid visibility and understanding, from cell-staining to color-enhanced satellite imagery of the universe. The brightly hued images emphasize the surprisingly diverse surface variations of something as seemingly familiar as our own skin. Although diverse in their approaches, methods, and techniques, the artists in Encircling the World — like scientists — use curiosity, observation, experimentation, and creativity as core tools of their practice. The exhibition demonstrates some of the ways in which we communicate and translate information in various, seemingly disparate, disciplines. The participating artists often use novel and unexpected methods to materialize scientific knowledge into aesthetically captivating artworks. This type of work at the intersection of visual art and science can enable viewers to contemplate the world through a new lens. Institutions increasingly recognize the incredible potential of such collaborations between the world’s discoverers and creators and are fostering them through new initiatives, from MIT’s Media Lab to the Art|Sci Center + Lab at UCLA and the National Science Foundation’s Network for Sciences, Engineering, Arts and Design (SEAD). Only time will tell if we are truly on the brink of a new renaissance of art-science innovation. In the mean time, by playing in the realm of experience beyond the measurable — the sublime — the artists who push the boundaries of current scientific knowledge remind us that we can imagine far more than we can ever know.
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WHY SCIENCE NEEDS ART CHRISTINA AGAPAKIS
Art is a lie that tells the truth. – Pablo Picasso
Two disconcertingly pixelated faces stare blankly from the wall, as if the algorithmically flattened “average” faces of a psychology paper jumped off the page via a 3D printer. They look like siblings, fraternal twins with only subtle differences in their computer-generated physiognomy. Both faces are portraits of recently freed whistleblower Chelsea Manning by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg. The portraits are generated by an algorithm that takes DNA sequences as input, translating data about a person’s genetically encoded characteristics into an image of what their face might look like, a process known as “forensic DNA phenotyping.” With samples of Manning’s DNA shipped from Fort Leavenworth, Dewey-Hagborg was able to give a face to someone that, until recently, very few people were able to see.
Top: Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Radical Love: Chelsea Manning, 2015. 3D prints. Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery, New York. Bottom: Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea E. Manning. Probably Chelsea, 2017. 3D prints. Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery, New York.
It is difficult to pinpoint the differences in the two portraits. Perhaps it is in the curve of the eyebrows, the shape of the upper lip, the expression in the eyes, or the softness of the jawline. In one face, Dewey-Hagborg instructed the algorithm to give the face a “neutral” gender, in another, female. Exhibiting both possible faces next to each other serves two purposes — it highlights Manning’s erasure from the public eye during her gender transition, while also problematizing the use of chromosomes to assign gender and the notion of what gendered faces are “supposed” to look like. In the summer of 2017, Manning and Dewey-Hagborg teamed up again, further exposing the limitations of genetic profiling. In the project, titled Probably Chelsea, Dewey-Hagborg created thirty possible Chelseas from the same DNA sample, hanging eerily from thread at a variety of human heights in the Fridman Gallery in New York. Each looks quite different from the next, highlighting the subjectivity inherent in interpreting DNA sequences. This ambiguity was missing in her first foray into forensic DNA phenotyping, Stranger Visions. For that piece, Dewey-Hagborg made similar 3D-printed genetic “portraits” of strangers whose DNA she found in litter on the streets of New York City. A cigarette butt identifies a person with brown eyes, European ancestry, and no Y chromosome. From this meager data, her algorithm creates a single visage out of the infinite possible variations.
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The faces associated with each DNA sample in Stranger Visions are lies. It is not possible to give an accurate representation of what someone’s face will look like when all you know is their sex, race, and eye color. Even worse, the proxies we use to identify socially complex factors such as sex and race — chromosomes and geographic clustering of similar mitochondrial DNA sequences — are themselves uncertain markers (even the genes for eye color leave some ambiguity, giving a percentage likelihood that someone will have blue eyes rather than a definitive answer). But these assumptions expose a deeper truth about the ways that genetics is being deployed in society in problematic ways. Genetics companies and law enforcement are teaming up to produce “DNA police sketches” based on little more genetic information than what Dewey-Hagborg uses in her artworks, relying on stereotyped images of “average” racialized faces. When dangerous stereotypes like these are literally killing black people, it becomes necessary to ask — is science truth that tells a lie?
THE TWO CULTURES1 In his 1959 lecture identifying the rift between the “two cultures” of art and science, C.P. Snow ironically warns against dividing complex issues into simple dichotomies. Faced with complaints from social scientists who find themselves falling into neither the scientific nor the artistic cultures Snow describes, he writes that indeed, “The number 2 is a very dangerous number: that is why the dialectic is a dangerous process. Attempts to divide anything into two ought to be regarded with much suspicion.” 1
Parts of this section appeared as a blog post for Scientific American, published January 21, 2014.
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Snow, a British bureaucrat involved in science and technology policy in the 1940s and 50s, does not take his own advice, using the rest of his essay to bemoan the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between science and literature, identifying it as a major threat to technological progress and the Western way of life. Literary intellectuals, he argued, are “natural luddites,” slowing technological progress with their ignorance of the laws of thermodynamics. To “come out on top in the scientific revolution” would require a different way of educating British scientists, engineers, and literature majors, lest the U.S.S.R. do it better. Snow’s arguments that national competitiveness and science literacy go hand in hand are frequently echoed in today’s arguments for expanded STEM education and public outreach. Others have also argued about the danger of splitting the intellectual community into two. Scientists who promote the concept of consilience propose that there is fundamentally no division at all between the arts and sciences — no two cultures necessary — because deep down everything should actually just be science. A review of E. O. Wilson’s Consilience by Charles Gillispie for American Scientist summarizes the argument thus: Cultural norms, for their part, are passed on through generations, some proving more adaptive than others...Only when explanation of cultural and economic behaviors is carried back, largely by way of cognitive psychology, to their causal basis in biology will an analysis be scientific. The false boundary separating the social from the natural sciences will then be exorcised. All roads to the truth will be scientific. To paraphrase: All human knowledge can be collected under the banner of science, with evolutionary psychology shepherding the humanities back into the fold.
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Whether scientists see art and science as fundamentally one or two pursuits, these arguments echo a social hierarchy that has long placed science above the arts in education policy and beyond. But worse than this hierarchy is the tendency to place science outside culture and human experience. In a scathing review of Michael Chwe’s Jane Austen, Game Theorist (2013), a book that attempts to show how science can explain the arts, critic William Deresiewicz bristles at the attempt at consilience, writing instead that “science addresses external reality, which lies outside our minds and makes itself available for objective observation. The arts address our experience of the world; they tell us what reality feels like.” To say that science is objectively focused on external reality and not a human practice situated in a time, place, and culture is to ignore how science and culture shape one another through the life and work of scientists. The problem with the “two cultures” concept then is neither that non-scientists do not know enough about thermodynamics, nor that science cannot fully capture the ineffable power of art, but that separating science from culture leads to bad science, truth inflected by the lies of a prejudiced culture. The belief that science and scientists are somehow above the influence of cultural forces has made it easier to pass off harmful stereotypes and cultural biases as scientific facts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the science of human difference and the generations of scientists who studied the “natural” inferiority of women and minorities. These scientific beliefs about human nature change over time not because of the progressive power of science to correct previous errors with new evidence, but because of the changes that happen in culture when disenfranchised people fight hard to be heard — in politics, in science, and in art.
Top: MIT Technology Review, cover. “We Can Now Engineer the Human Race,” May/June 2015. Copyright © 2015, All rights reserved MIT Technology Review. Middle: TIME, cover. “The Gene Machine,” July 4, 2016. Photo: Hannah Whitaker. Copyright © 2016 TIME. Bottom: The Economist, cover. “Editing Humanity,” August 22, 2015. Copyright © 2015 The Economist.
The artist who engages directly with science opens a window into the ways that culture and science blur, exposing some truth of socio-technoscientific complexity through creative, subjective, visceral, critical, and often playful engagement.
SPECULATIVE BIOETHICS Artists and designers have used fictional objects and imaginative speculation to both challenge and lend confidence to technoscientific narratives. Daisy Ginsberg, an artist and designer who has critically engaged with the field of synthetic biology for nearly a decade, has called this work a type of “applied, speculative bioethics.” Speculative bioethics can take many forms at the intersection of art, design, science, and technology. For example, consider the particularly thorny bioethical question of what new genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR will enable when it comes to altering the human genome. In the context of these ethical debates, images used to popularize news stories about the potential and ethics of this technology might be considered a form of everyday speculative bioart. These images offer a startling but remarkably homogeneous picture of what an “enhanced” baby might look like: adorable, blue-eyed, and inevitably white. These magazine covers reflect bioethical anxiety that gene enhancement will benefit those who are already privileged enough to afford the more oldfashioned methods of giving their children a leg up in a deeply unequal society, the wealthy white parents who spend their money on private schooling, SAT tutors, and extracurricular activities.
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But the already “enhanced” children of the privileged few also benefit from the lie that these stories perpetuate — that intelligence, ability, and our potential to succeed is something inborn, written in our DNA and therefore re-writeable. That some groups of people are genetically superior to others implies that societal inequality is not unfair, but natural. This is the heart of the faulty science that comes from splitting the discipline from culture, creating a science that reflects society’s biases rather than transcending them. When speculating bioethical futures, it is much easier perhaps to imagine extremely advanced technological change than it is to imagine altering structures of social inequality. Can the imagery and stories we tell about our future help us to ask not just what a “better” human might be able to do, but also to ask: “Better” for whom? Can art challenge us to question the premise that a better future can be written in our genes in the first place? Some, like Heather Dewey-Hagborg, have taken the biopolitics of gene talk head on in their art. Others have used artistic speculation to offer a more ambivalent and peculiar vision, where human biology and technology intertwine in different ways. As technology has transformed the Earth and the climate, some artists, designers, and philosophers are asking whether we should use technology to change ourselves. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s Anarcho-Evolutionists imagines a world where people do not use technology to transform the world to fit our needs, but alter our bodies to adapt to the limits of the planet instead. Thighs are enhanced for those who get around by cycling. Balloonists are tall and very thin. Animals are hybridized to assist in pulling loads without the need of fossil fuel-powered machines.
Right: Dunne & Raby. The Anarcho-Evolutionists: Pitsky, Balloonists, Cyclist and Hox, 2012-2013. The United Micro Kingdoms, commissioned by the Design Museum, London. Courtesy of the artists.
These designer body types are not predictions. They are objects for thinking with and reflecting on today’s technology. Ursula Le Guin writes in the introduction to the novel, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) that fiction and art that draw on and engage with science offer valuable metaphors through their imagination of alternative societies, alternative biologies, and alternative futures. Their business is not to predict the future (“a novelist’s business is lying”) but to open debate, to expose potential alternatives, and question the dominant narratives that feed science and are strengthened in return.
EMBRACING ART Scientists turn to art for many reasons: primarily to illustrate and visualize their work but also, in some cases, to inspire and engage new audiences. Increasingly, art can be employed alongside the sciences to explore new boundaries of creativity. Most importantly, however, art can also challenge, it can critique, and it can expose the invisible links that inextricably connect science and culture. When the boundary between art and science blur, we can begin to see that there was never a clear division at all.
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ROGAN BROWN A self-taught artist, Rogan Brown began creating his nature-based works after moving to a rural area of France from his native UK. Inspired by his new surroundings and the long history of artist-scientists who have used close observation in their scientific models and drawings, Brown began making multilayer cut-paper sculptures of the natural world. The detailed and labor-intensive works, which can take several months for hand-cut versions, reveal hidden patterns that repeat throughout nature from the microscopic to the cosmic scale — whether in microorganisms, plant and animal cells, topographical charts, or weather systems. In Magic Circle, which was created for this exhibition, Brown includes a number of bacterial motifs: “clouds of comma-shaped Vibrios, chains of Streptococci and Streptobacilli, as well as a swirling Paenibacillus vortex,” which he calls a “stylized and beautified glimpse of our gut flora.” Although he begins with detailed studies, he soon lets his imagination transform and embellish his organic subjects, abstracting them slightly to encourage multiple readings and allow viewers to see the interconnectedness of the world. Time is also an important aspect of the work and Brown intentionally uses a slow and meditative technique of drawing, cutting, and building the layers that reflects natural processes such as seasonal changes, growth, and decay. Describing his working methods, he says “every cut is a moment, every sheet a month, every sculpture a season.” Brown notes that a recurring theme in his work is the limitations of scientific studies when dealing with the vast complexity of the natural world and the overwhelming volume of information that has to be collected, analyzed, and verified to comprehend it. Bypassing the data-collection and reveling in the breathtaking intricacy that exists at every level and scale in nature, Brown explores the “microbiological sublime” and sees himself as an archaeologist at the interface between nature and imagination.
Magic Circle, 2016 Laser-cut paper
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Left: Control X (detail), 2016 Laser-cut paper Right: Installation view of Magic Circle, Cut Stem, and Control X, all 2016
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PABLO CARLOS BUDASSI Argentinian musician and artist Pablo Carlos Budassi was inspired to make this image while creating origami hexaflexagons for his son’s birthday party guests. These paper structures, which contain a number of hidden faces, condense a large amount of information into a compact space. While doodling a central view of the solar system and cosmos on one of the folded pieces, he realized he could use a logarithmic view and NASA’s images to create a singular image of the observable universe. Using Photoshop, logarithmic maps of the universe from Princeton University researchers, and photographs of space, he was able to combine the documented celestial bodies into a single disk. Our solar system’s sun and planets are in the center. Next is the outer ring of the Milky Way, as well as the Andromeda and other nearby galaxies (photographed by the Hubble Telescope). Outside of that is the “cosmic web” of gravitationally concentrated matter that forms the underlying foam-like structure of our universe and includes billions of other galaxies. Two final rings, of cosmic microwave background radiation and the (invisible) plasma generated by the Big Bang, encircle all the rest. The logarithmic scale, using powers of ten, allows unfathomable distances to be condensed and represented together in the image, since each section of the circle represents a field of view several orders of magnitude larger than the one before it. After creating the image, Budassi released it into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons so that it could be free and accessible to anyone and he continues to make corrections and revisions as more is discovered. Stunning in its beauty, the map encourages viewers to contemplate the awe-inspiring breadth of the universe and our place within it, on this pale blue dot.
A Logarithmic Map of the Entire Known Universe in One Image, 2012 Digital compilation
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ROSE-LYNN FISHER Rose-Lynn Fisher uses photography to explore the continuum between microscopic and macroscopic views of our world. From images of her own bone fragment or honey bee physiology done with a scanning electron microscope to aerial views of the land, Fisher is a keen observer of the patterns and visual affinities that occur at every scale of examination. During a painful period of change and loss in her life, she began to wonder what her own teardrops looked like up close. She caught a tear, dried it on a slide, and examined it under a microscope. Noting that it looked like a landscape viewed from a plane, she became curious if different tears would have distinct appearances. The multiyear project became a book, The Topography of Tears, which explores over one hundred tears from the artist and others. With a digital camera attached to a microscope, she captures images of tears (between 10x and 100x magnification) from a variety of emotional and physical states. Scientifically, there are three categories of tears: psychic (from extreme emotions, joyous or not), basal (for corneal lubrication), and reflex (caused by irritants such as dust or onion vapors). Aside from salts, tears also contain a variety of other substances such as oils, antibodies, enzymes, and hormones. The final images are not an exhaustive study in the differences between types of tears since many factors determine the final image — including individual body chemistries, the microscope’s settings, and the way she dries each sample — but rather a poetic vision of an otherwise unseen emotional terrain. As Fisher notes, “Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.”
Installation view of Topography of Tears series
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Topography of Tears series, 2008-2016 Left: Watering eyes: a microclimate (detail) Right: Possibility Archival pigment prints
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LAURIE FRICK A former technology executive, artist Laurie Frick has made data her muse. She is captivated by the normally unseen rhythms of daily life and finds novel ways to visualize personal statistics through mixed-media artworks. From large-scale installations reflecting her walking habits according to FitBit to color-coded mood logs made with the online diary Moodjam, Frick utilizes self-tracking data to create works that make abstract numbers and information more approachable and aesthetically pleasing. In Quantify-Me Too, Frick taps into the natural human strength for pattern-recognition in order to visualize abstract concepts. She asserts that, “Very soon walls and spaces we occupy will be filled with easy to decode patterns” and will serve as a visual record of how we feel, our stress levels, and moods. These wall-sized systems, according to the artist, will help predict the future condition of our daily selves, what she deems a “data-selfie as technology-boosted mindfulness.” In her related Stress Inventories series, Frick uses brightly colored dots to visualize and predict how today’s annoyances can build to create future problems. She envisions a time when personal data will be able to operate on your behalf and help prevent unanticipated crises by seeing into your future health. Noting recent studies that show how daily stress impacts the long-term development of chronic health problems, Frick hopes that collecting and recording such information can help us recognize and alleviate some of the irritations that needle us on a daily basis and affect our health, from transportation woes to online snark. Each dot is a day, with a handful of the daily stressors represented, which are “color-coded and quantified to predict the price in future chronic pain.” By collecting — and aestheticizing — measurements from everyday experiences, she believes that we can achieve greater awareness of both ourselves and complex matters in our world through a merger of art and science.
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Quantify-Me Too, 2015 Laser-cut drawing
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Left: Daily Stress Inventory 1, 2015 Etched wood, hand-cut leather, and linen Right: Daily Stress Inventory 4 (detail), 2015 Etched wood, hand-cut leather, and linen
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JENNIFER HALL A multidisciplinary artist with a doctorate in Neurophilosophy and Embodied Aesthetics, Jennifer Hall is a Professor of Art Education at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She often explores the links between neurology, consciousness, and creativity through sculpture, video, sound and performance art, as well as interactive installations. For her Epileptiform works, Hall recorded her brain waves during deep REM sleep using an EEG (electroencephalogram). Instead of the typical dream baseline that one would expect to record during these 90-minute phases of the sleep cycle, her brain waves revealed an atypical spiking due to her temporal lobe epilepsy. Turning an aspect of her medical condition into a thing of beauty, Hall rendered 5 seconds of the captured spikes and valleys as three-dimensional rings. To make the sculptural forms, Hall translated the data into a 2D vector graph, modified it slightly with 3D NURBS software, and then used 3D printing and rapid prototyping to create the final products in sterling silver and polymer resin. Since each object begins at the electrical baseline of the first wave spike and ends at the baseline of the last wave spike, it is considered one cycle. Thus, both sculptures represent a single epileptic event, rendered in different ways. Hall notes that “to work with the spiking data of my own brain is to celebrate other states of consciousness that make up the numerous natures of mentality and the paradoxical state of my physical self.� The work visualizes personal data that is normally unseen, turning the electrical activity of a seizure into abstract numbers, computer code, and ultimately a physical object for the contemplation of larger metaphysical questions.
Top: Epileptiform Polymer Resin: 5 REM, from Consciousness as a Property of Matter series, 2006 Polymer resin Bottom: Epileptiform Sterling Silver: 5 REM (Artist print), from Consciousness as a Property of Matter series, 2005 Sterling silver
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PERRY HALL Growing up near water sparked a lifelong fascination with fluid dynamics for artist and musician Perry Hall. Many of his paintings and drawings break traditional boundaries and become entrancing temporal experiments using liquids and natural forces, from turbulence, gravity, and magnetism to thermodynamics and chemical reactions. For his Sound Drawings, he sends sound waves from his electric bass through basins of paint. By altering the volume and frequency of the sound waves, Hall achieves different visual effects. The patterns created by the noise are all that remain in the final piece, as the films are silent, leading viewers to contemplate sound (and drawing) in an entirely new way. In another silent work, Faithful Animal, Hall uses a hidden magnet to manipulate a mixture of paint, oil, and ferrofluid on the surface of a painting. The spiky magnetic blob with iron nanoparticles moves over the surface, shapeshifting and becoming emaciated or plump as it traverses the chemical terrain and interacts with other fluids. Although the subject appears to have a mind of its own, magnetic fields guide the action on screen and the liquids help reveal the normally invisible force. In his 2D works, Hall still uses paint in surprising ways that make viewers contemplate its fluid properties. Reviving the Surrealist technique of pressing paint between smooth surfaces for his Decalcomania Cycle paintings, Hall creates textured works that reflect larger physical forces in nature. Created by pressure, each work is a visual index of all of the forces applied to it. The paint becomes fractal-like or bifurcates, echoing patterns seen at every scale in nature, from neurons to tree branches and river systems. In each new body of work, Hall’s scientific curiosity drives him to follow the phenomena that interest him. However, with numerous uncontrolled variables, he intentionally creates conditions where the unexpected can happen, and new and exciting artistic discoveries can be made.
Faithful Animal (still), 2012 Oil, acrylic, and various paints filmed live, from 5k master 12:00 minutes
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Left: Sound Drawing (still), 2014 Sound waves moving through paint filmed live, from 5k master 12:00 minutes Right: Installation view of Decalcomania Cycle series, 2009
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STANTON HUNTER A story in the L.A. Times about butterfly visual systems inspired Stanton Hunter to begin his Migration Grids series in 2005. The article highlighted a study coauthored by UC Irvine and UMass Medical School professors that examined how Monarch butterflies navigate during their annual migrations from the eastern United States south to the Sierra Madre mountain range in Mexico. Although invisible to humans, butterflies can see an immense three-dimensional grid made of ultraviolet (UV) light rays that emanates from the sun and serves as a map to guide their migratory flight. The grid moves along with the sun as it travels east to west across the sky. The butterflies compensate by using an internal clock that recalibrates the grid throughout the day so they can still travel in a straight line. As the researchers verified, if UV light is blocked, the insects are unable to fly normally. Fascinated by this view into the complex and uncharted neurobiological mechanisms that scientists are just beginning to understand, Hunter began incorporating grids into his sculptural work. He says he was floored by the hard science but “drop-dead poetics� of the study and started creating scaffolding and truss-like forms in response. The pale grids blend into the gallery walls, but the illumination creates intricate patterns in the shadows below that emphasize the relationships between light and space around the piece. Using clay, a terrestrial and simultaneously strong yet fragile material, he explores the contrasts between earth and sky, mass and weightlessness, permanence and ethereality in his aerial ceramic installations. Through the work, he attempts to materialize and represent those flashes of magic, glimpses of awe-inspiring beauty, and moments of discovery that allow a deeper understanding of our natural world, which delight both scientists and artists alike.
Installation view of Migration Grid #26, 2011-2014
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JULIE MARTINI Boston-based artist Julie Martini explores the relationships between the natural world, science, and the sacred in her work. From three-dimensional cast paper drawings to large-scale marbled paper pieces, she pushes her chosen medium in new directions to examine the nature of life itself. In recent projects, Martini responds to patterns that appear in the basic building units of nature and our cosmos, whether biological cells or celestial formations. Using a technique that originally dates to the 13th century called Ebru, or Turkish marbling, Martini drops acrylic paint onto the surface of a prepared solution called size. She contains the pigments using custom guides and templates, which are removed just before the paper is placed on the liquid. Through the process, the color and patterns are transferred to the paper. In some cases, she uses her own breath to alter the surfaces, employing a mouth atomizer to add layers of pigment and give shape to the paintings. The marbling in each work is unique but the forms created by the dispersion of the acrylics echo other natural growth patterns, such as the irregular polygon tessellations found in cells, pine cones, snake scales, or even dried mud. The final pieces invite close inspection and reward viewers with fractal-like depths within the compositions. These meditative works focus on the interplay between science and nature and pose questions about the interrelated forms found at every level of observation. Though aesthetically pleasing, Martini hopes that the contemplation of these universal structures can help lead viewers to a deeper spiritual understanding of the physical world around them as well.
Untitled I (detail), 2016 Acrylic on paper
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Untitled II (Blooms), 2011 Acrylic and gouache on paper
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Installation view of Untitled I-III (Blooms), 2011
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NATHALIE MIEBACH Nathalie Miebach’s work is situated at the intersection of artistic visualization and scientific observation. She is best known for her woven sculptures that translate scientific data related to astronomy, ecology, and meteorology into three-dimensional grids that can be read, used as instruments in the environments where the information was collected, or performed as a musical score. The idea for the two-dimensional Weather Sounds series originated during an artist residency at the Mountain Lake Biological Field Station in rural Virginia in the summer of 2015. Living in a cabin and with limited amenities, Miebach began to rethink her previous frameworks for representing weather statistics. During a torrential downpour on her first night there, she annotated the sound of the rain, such as its direction, quality, and tone. Using an improvised visual shorthand in her sketchbook, she created a minute-by-minute score of the storm. For the remainder of the residency, she made similar “sound storyboards” as she explored her new surroundings. Back home in Boston, she continued the process of transcribing sounds, such as those she encountered while sitting in front of the Boston Public Library and facing Copley Square. From her initial sketches, Miebach translated all of the sounds she recorded into these colorful two-dimensional collages. Each type of sound — whether loud or quiet; rhythmic or singular; and animal-, human-, or machine-made — is represented by a different shape, color, or line. The composition develops through the layering of sounds over time and serves as a visual snapshot of the normally unseen noises of a bustling urban setting. From her initial 6-page sound storyboard, she translated portions of the score into the two smaller maps on view, while the entire session is represented in the largest piece. Through such innovative combinations of data collection and representation, Miebach’s work blurs the lines between traditional visual vocabularies that define art versus science and challenges viewers to reimagine their auditory environment.
July 28th – 4:27pm – 4:45pm, Copley Square (detail), 2015 Watercolor and Bristol paper
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July 28th – 4:26pm – 4:34pm, Copley Square, 2015 Watercolor paper and acrylic
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July 28th – 4:34pm – 4:45pm, Copley Square, 2015 Watercolor paper and acrylic
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VIK MUNIZ Brazilian artist Vik Muniz is fascinated by perception. His work often explores how the human brain develops and interprets encoded messages through visual imagery. In Colonies, a collaborative project done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with bioengineer Tal Danino, Muniz creates beautiful images using live human cells, specifically, an immortal line of cervical cancer cells known as HeLa. These cells, which revolutionized scientific research, were taken without knowledge or consent from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks, who succumbed to her cancer shortly after in 1951. Since being mass-produced, Lacks’ cells have been an essential part of many scientific studies, from cancer and AIDS research, to gene mapping, and the development of the polio vaccine, among many others. Just as the cell lines’ history is fraught, researchers’ relationships with cancer can be complex as well. Cancerous cells are our own bodies run amok and, in a person, oncologists and patients want to destroy the rogue cells. However, for scientists who use these immortal lines in the lab to make their breakthroughs, the goal is for the disembodied cancer cells to be healthy and flourish. Muniz is entranced by such moments of cognitive dissonance, when you begin to realize that what you see or think you understand is actually something completely different. In the work, Muniz corrals the dyed cancer cells in a petri dish with a collagen mold to make them grow in an orderly way, creating biogenerated beauty out of something that is normally chaotic and frightening. Difficult, poetic, and technically challenging, the works in the series could not have been achieved without the collaborative effort of an artist who loves science and a scientist enamored with art. Muniz notes that he enjoys working with scientists because he sees parallel goals in their work (trying to describe phenomena) and his (exploring how we perceive phenomena).
HeLa Pattern 15 (Colonies), 2014 Digital C-print
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Collaborating with scientist Tal Danino, Vik Muniz transformed bacterial plates in an MIT lab into imagery for porcelain dinnerware. The project began as petri dishes filled with nutrient-infused agar. Danino added a drop of bacteria to the center of each plate and allowed it to grow. The bacteria include various strains of Paenibacillus as well as Salmonella, a frequent culprit of food poisoning. In his research, Danino attempts to program bacteria to detect and treat cancer. Capturing the aesthetic qualities of the cells was Muniz’s idea and they worked together to photograph the cellular growth through a microscope. Each bacterium uses a motorized tail to swim through the agar in search of food. Spreading out from the initial population center, they form patterns that can be surprisingly complex and even fractal-like. Muniz notes that the science-based series is about more than simple decoration though, “Sometimes we look at abstraction and all we see are beautiful patterns and colors, but these are abstractions that tell a story.�
Petri Collection, 2015 Porcelain
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MARY BATES NEUBAUER Sculptor and innovator Mary Bates Neubauer turns number streams into tactile representations that shed new light on the hidden patterns of our universe. She is a pioneer in the use of rapid prototyping (RP) and computer-numeric-controlled (CNC) milling to create sculptures. Her work also goes beyond the bounds of traditional foundry work as she collaborates with the Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling (PRISM) laboratories as well as the Software Factory at Arizona State University, where she is a professor. To create the sculptures, she uses a custom computer program developed for the project to visualize the abstract data. The information represents a variety of datasets including rainfall levels, tidal flows, earth core samples, pollution measurements, energy consumption, solar storms, and even university class attendance. The data-driven works combine her technological and metalworking skills. First, she converts the long sequences of numbers with mathematical modeling software into prototypes that are 3D-printed. Next, she casts the printed models in bronze, copper, and iron, using ceramic shell or sand molds. Finally, after casting, she adds distinct patinas to further enhance the aesthetic qualities of the finished pieces. Though representing information detected by many kinds of sensors, the final products echo familiar patterns and shapes that can be found repeatedly in nature. She has always been drawn to the inherent beauty in mathematical models, but Neubauer hopes that her novel data-responsive sculptures can help people appreciate our complex world in new ways. She notes that her three-dimensional works can have a visual and emotional impact that a spreadsheet cannot. Neubauer’s works are meant to reveal grander rhythms in global phenomena, enhance viewers’ sensitivity and awareness of the invisibly functioning aspects of our environments, and provide an aestheticized view of the behavior of data through time.
Data Visualizations, 2011-present Patinated bronze, copper, and iron
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LISA PARK In recent works, Lisa Park creates auditory and visual representations of physiological measurements, whether her own or those of participants. Using biofeedback technologies, such as heart rate and brainwave sensors, she translates personal data into images and sound that can be shared with others. Her experiments with biosensors to create art emerged from an interest in taking normally invisible energy and emotions and making them visible. In an earlier series, called Eunoia (“beautiful thought”), Park used an EEG headset while she meditated. Utilizing custom software to translate her brainwaves into sound waves, she created ripples in basins of water placed atop speakers that encircled her. With each basin representing a different emotion, she trained for a month to achieve a choreographed musical composition powered by her thoughts. Eudaimonia, the custom-built iOS app, is a continuation of these investigations. The Greek word means “happiness” or “welfare” and was the Aristotelian term for the highest human good, which could be achieved through a life of virtue. In this iteration of the piece, the EEG headset provides real-time feedback of users’ brainwaves. Once the device is in place, the brain’s electrical activity is measured with electrodes. The neural readings are turned into both sound and a starburst-like visualization that is added to a collective image gallery on Instagram. With the blue color representing “meditation” values and the red color standing for “attention” values, each participant’s final result is a unique combination of the two readings. Users are welcome to interact with friends, strangers, or the gallery attendant during their session or do it alone. Park says that the aim of her work is to use technology to “engage and evoke human emotion rather than alienation” and to create art that empowers the public through greater awareness of their psychological and physical states.
Eudaimonia, 2016 Custom-built iOS app
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ARIANA PAGE RUSSELL For Ariana Page Russell, her own skin serves as both inspiration and medium for her work. Noting that our bodies help reveal the story of our lives, reflecting the way we have lived and some of the choices we have made, she says we become “embodied storybooks.” Lines from laughter or stress, scars, stretch marks, and sunspots serve as evidence of our experiences. Russell first became interested in using her skin as a canvas as a graduate student. She was diagnosed with a rare skin condition, affecting 5% of the population, called Dermatographia or “skin writing.” People with the condition develop temporary raised wheals similar to hives when anything scratches their skin, even lightly. The painless but sometimes itchy reactions develop when the body produces histamines and capillaries dilate in response to the stimulus, almost as if the body has an allergy to touch. Employing this unique immune response for artistic effect, Russell began drawing and writing on her skin and documenting the dramatic results. In Interior Optics, she photographs her skin and further manipulates the images digitally to create what she calls an “otherworldly terrain.” Her photographic process intentionally simulates scientific optical instruments, such as high-resolution laser microscopy, to explore the skin’s prismatic qualities and how it reflects and refracts light. Looking closely, viewers can see the surface topography of hairs and follicles, as well as the raised marks left on her hypersensitive flesh. She says, “I’ve always been interested in how skin can reveal internal happenings, so I think of these as an extension of that... like they’re showing an internal energy field that isn’t visible on the surface.” The brightly hued works make visible even the most fleeting encounters between the surface of her skin and the outside world, highlighting the capacity of skin to reveal otherwise hidden health conditions and reminding viewers of our skin’s relative permeability.
Salmon (detail) from the series Interior Optics, 2015 Archival pigment print
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Aqua, 2015 Archival pigment print
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Installation view of Opal, Salmon, Teal, and Violet from the series Interior Optics, 2015 Amethyst, 2015 Archival pigment print
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ANDY THOMAS Australian artist Andy Thomas creates one-of-a-kind digital sound sculptures that react to recorded birdsongs. Using a wide array of software, his animated audio lifeforms become a synaesthetic fusion of sound waves and mind-bending imagery. In the works, Thomas combines his love of biology, technology, and travel to explore the planet’s flora and fauna. Each piece begins with sounds recorded in the wild, often in some of the world’s oldest rainforests. Thomas listens to the birdsongs while walking before returning to the studio to sketch, paint, and search for imagery that matches his vision for each audio clip, from plants and insects to machines and invented forms. After experimenting with his chosen shapes in 3D-modelling software, he uses the waveform of the sound and a variety of different digital animation techniques to build the visually stunning works. Full of shape-shifting forms and small flourishes that highlight every tweet and trill of the birds’ calls, his unique visual language encourages viewers to appreciate the complexity of the birdsongs we hear all around us — and largely tune out — on a daily basis. Interested in the interplay between technology, nature, and evolution, Thomas uses his latest works to draw awareness to species and regions imperiled by human development and climate change. Through the work, he hopes to draw attention to the effects that technological advancements can have on ecosystems and help viewers see some of what is at risk of being lost. These digital animations combine natural elements and highlight the beauty and interconnectedness of all life forms on Earth, from regions as diverse as Borneo, Laos, Finland, Australia, and Brazil.
Bird Sounds Visualized (still), 2013-2016 Digital animation
EXHIBITION LIST 20
ROGAN BROWN Control X, 2016 Laser-cut paper 42” x 26” x 4” Courtesy of the artist Cut Stem, 2016 Hand and laser-cut paper 28” x 27” x 4” Courtesy of the artist Magic Circle, 2016 Laser-cut paper 31” x 31” x 4” Courtesy of the artist
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PABLO CARLOS BUDASSI A Logarithmic Map of the Entire Known Universe in One Image, 2012 Digital compilation Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist
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After the sun came the tears 15.25” x 13.25” Compassion 15.25” x 13.25” In the end it didn’t matter #65 13.25” x 15.25” Momentum, redirected 15.25” x 13.25”
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Now pivotal 15.25” x 13.25”
Epileptiform Polymer Resin: 5 REM from Consciousness as a Property of Matter series, 2006 Polymer resin 6” x 6” x 14” Courtesy of the artist
Overwhelm #26 15.25” x 13.25” Possibility 13.25” x 15.25” Quiet ripening 15.25” x 13.25” Timeless reunion 13.25” x 17.75” Watering eyes: a microclimate 15.25” x 13.25” What couldn’t be fixed 13.25” x 15.25” What it meant after a long time forgotten 15.25” x 13.25”
ROSE-LYNN FISHER All works from the series Topography of Tears, 2008-2016 Archival pigment prints Courtesy of the artist and Craig Krull Gallery After goodbye 15.25” x 13.25”
Quantify-Me Too, 2015 Laser-cut drawing 18” x 25” Courtesy of the artist and Edward Cella Art + Architecture
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LAURIE FRICK Daily Stress Inventory 1 & 4, 2015 Etched wood, hand-cut leather, and linen 28” x 36” each Courtesy of the artist and Edward Cella Art + Architecture
JENNIFER HALL
Epileptiform Sterling Silver: 5 REM (Artist print) from Consciousness as a Property of Matter series, 2005 Sterling silver 1.5” x 12” Courtesy of the artist
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PERRY HALL Works from the Decalcomania Cycle series, 2009 Impasto on panel 24” x 24” each Courtesy of the artist Faithful Animal, 2012 Oil, acrylic, and various paints filmed live, from 5k master 12:00 minutes Permanent collection Centre FRAC, Orleans, France
Sound Drawing, 2014 Sound waves moving through paint filmed live, from 5k master 12:00 minutes Courtesy of the artist
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STANTON HUNTER Migration Grid #26, 2011-2014 Ceramic Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist
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JULIE MARTINI ‘03 Untitled I, 2016 Acrylic on paper 42” x 30” Courtesy of the artist Untitled II, 2016 Acrylic on paper 44” x 30” Courtesy of the artist Untitled III, 2016 Acrylic on paper 46” x 32” Courtesy of the artist Untitled I-II (Blooms), 2011 Acrylic and gouache on paper 21” x 14” each Courtesy of the artist Untitled III (Blooms), 2011 Acrylic and gouache on paper 21” x 30” Courtesy of the artist
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NATHALIE MIEBACH ’06
LISA PARK
July 28th – 4:26pm – 4:34pm, Copley Square, 2015 Watercolor paper and acrylic 17” x 14” Courtesy of the artist
Eudaimonia, 2016 Custom-built iOS app Courtesy of the artist
July 28th – 4:34pm – 4:45pm, Copley Square, 2015 Watercolor paper and acrylic 17” x 14” Courtesy of the artist
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July 28th – 4:27pm – 4:45pm, Copley Square, 2015 Watercolor and Bristol paper 38” x 24” Courtesy of the artist
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VIK MUNIZ HeLa Pattern 15 (Colonies), 2014 Digital C-print 71” x 71” Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
ARIANA PAGE RUSSELL All works from the series Interior Optics, 2015 Archival pigment prints Courtesy of the artist Amethyst 30” x 45” Aqua 30” x 22” Opal 28” x 45” Salmon 35” x 26” Teal 22” x 28” Violet 40” x 30”
Petri Collection, 2015 Porcelain 10.6” each Private collection
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Bird Sounds Visualized, 2013-2016 Digital animation Running time variable Courtesy of the artist
MARY BATES NEUBAUER Data Visualizations, 2011-present Patinated bronze, copper, and iron Courtesy of the artist
ANDY THOMAS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Congratulations to Curatorial Associate Darci Hanna on her inaugural exhibition. Encircling the World: Contemporary Art, Science, and the Sublime is a thoughtful and timely examination of the connections and intersections between art and science.
Krull Gallery; Laurie Frick and Edward Cella Art + Architecture;
facilitating of free educational programs to both our internal and external communities. Our trained student Gallery Attendants also deserve recognition for their thoughtful and engaging conversations with our visitors about the works
Jennifer Hall; Perry Hall; Stanton Hunter; Julie Martini; Nathalie
on view.
Miebach; Vik Muniz and Sikkema Jenkins & Co; Mary Bates
Christina Agapakis for her insightful catalog essay Why Science Needs Art.
This exhibition was realized because the following artists and their galleries believed in our vision. Thank you to Rogan Brown; Pablo Carlos Budassi; Rose-Lynn Fisher and Craig
Neubauer; Lisa Park; Ariana Page Russell; and Andy Thomas. Additionally we would like to acknowledge the following individuals for their invaluable assistance and myriad contributions: Chief Preparator Rob Gainfort and his merry crew of alumni
Julia Frenkle, Ellery Curran, Emily Knapp, and Casey McGee of Opus Design for their original graphic design; and Westwood Graphics for the production of this catalog.
and student art handlers/installers for a seamless installa-
Lastly, without the generous support of the following indi-
tion. Associate Director ChloĂŠ Zaug and Curatorial Fellows
viduals and foundations this catalog would not exist:
Helen Lewandowski, Mallory Ruymann, Carolina Rossetti de
Anonymous
Toledo, and Madison Treece for their tireless curatorial and registrarial support.
Boston Cultural Council Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation
Public programs are realized once exhibitions are mounted.
Joseph Persky Foundation
We are grateful to the Gallery Education team of Mesma Bel-
Nancy Lukitsh
sarĂŠ, Michael Reback, and Lynn Brown and Gallery Education
Massachusetts Cultural Council
Intern Esmeralda Cuevas for their inspired teaching and
Lori and David Sprows
THANK YOU! Lisa Tung, Director, Bakalar & Paine Galleries