FALL ‘19 — SPRING ‘20
A SOLO EXHIBITION BY
The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya
in·tra- | \ ‘in-trə, -(,)trä\ : between layers of
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Intro / 4
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Subatomic / 14
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Molecular / 18
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Cellular / 26
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Interview / 36
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Multicellular / 47
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Organism / 54
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Society / 70 3
INTRO
// LETTER FROM THE ARTIST Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, Brooklyn, 2019
Just like the works of Shakespeare, the Old Testament, and the Harry Potter series all emerge from combinations of just 26 letters, so life exists through combinations of elements. The most primary of those being the 14th element, carbon. The late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking once observed that “what we normally think of as ‘life’ is based on chains of carbon atoms.” Carbon has the unique ability to easily form and dissolve stable bonds with itself and other elements like oxygen and hydrogen to create numerous compounds (tens of millions and counting) which make up everything from DNA to proteins to membranes and microprocessors. From fungi to falcons, cyanobacteria to seahorses, all life owes its existence to carbon and its ability to form connections. We are naturally drawn to the tangible and the solid. That which stands on its own. But nothing truly exists without infrastructure and support. Muscles are useless without bones to pull against and ligaments to attach to. Code sits dormant without servers
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to run on and data to pull from. Nations need ambassadors and multiple channels of communication to bridge divides and manage conflict. Without connective tissue, we are just a collection of parts laying useless on the side of the road. CONNECTIVE TISSUE uses scientific phenomena to explore the human experience. You don’t need to have a STEM background to appreciate the work, but a sense of curiosity will definitely help. And don’t be afraid to touch and engage with the work. That’s what it's meant for. This exhibition is an exploration of the different ways we form relationships and leverage interactions to create motion, meaning, and impact. We live in an era where a new story, a new feature, a new meme can reach hundreds of millions of people in mere days. We have access to technology that goes beyond what sci-fi writers could have dreamed of. But we are not untethered from history. The legacies of the past, the oppression and insults of history, echo in our present and imprint on our future, unless we can examine it for what it truly is and write ourselves a new path forward.
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THE TANGIBLE + INTANGIBLE WORLD OF AMANDA PHINGBODHIPAKKIYA // Kat Mustatea, New York City, 2019
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, in the midst of talking with me about the works in her solo exhibition, CONNECTIVE TISSUE at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, pauses a moment. “I feel I should address the use of inflatables in this show,” she says, suddenly. She sits in her studio, surrounded by stacks of boxed supplies, as she goes on to describe how inflatable objects have key properties that bridge the physical and the ephemeral. For example, they make it possible to model and shape a substance like air, as is the case in her piece, Campfire. Inflatable cushions are also instrumental to the method she devised for measuring touch in Impulse, a piece that illustrates the function of a connective substance in the body known as myelin. Phingbodhipakkiya notes she wants viewers to become involved in the pieces; as it turns out, touch is one of the key conduits for the involvement she hopes to instigate. In Binary Outcomes, the invitation to touch is explicit: touching the wooden boxes along the wall produces sound, and the more people touch, the more the sound builds from a single harmonic to a quintet. The show moves from material to material, from pleasingly colorful murals, to 3D printed busts, to projections, to an AR app, to lampshades and other home furnishings made from a decomposable substance found in mushrooms for the piece [De]compose. “I’m making the invisible, visible,” she tells me, and indeed, much of the show is a mode of illustration, either of physical or social phenomena not usually available to sense perception. For the piece There are no particles only fields, a representation of the behavior of subatomic particles rendered in steel frames and shock cords,
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the illustration is made by changing scale and material. For the piece In the Company of Great Scientists, a series of striking busts of female explorers and scientists, the mode of illustration is literal, using a likeness of each figure as a starting point for describing their role in history. I linger longest over Strange Sequences, perhaps because the consequences of touch are most loaded. For this piece, visitors are given a printout with one of several ethical dilemmas written, and a set of multiple choice options for how they could respond. As an example: If scientists develop a miracle vaccine that gives children an enormous cognitive boost but is suspected of causing Alzheimer’s disease later in life, would you vote to vaccinate everyone right away, or wait the 50-75 years it might take to verify the adverse effects? Visitors are asked to drop the printouts in one of four wastepaper baskets corresponding to the course of action they would choose, accumulating a kind of public vote on each issue. What would it say about you if you decide to value your child’s achievements when young above their quality life as they age? Or vice versa? I would want to stand nearby during the show, watching visitors weigh each dilemma and toss their votes; I would want to look each visitor over and try to guess something about their inner life and experience based on the way they make such a choice. Yet in Phingbodhipakkiya’s version of this vote, it is not the people that are most prominent, but the four baskets full of more paper or less. Over time, the physical accretion of voting is left, a visual tally that is abstracted from both people and the social consequences of their choices. The piece January is a Girl, which features a set of projections about the phenomenon of synesthesia, along with a companion performance piece, is perhaps the one work most likely to stand in for the whole. In its restless materiality, in its movement from idea to action, from memory to projection, from sight to touch to sound and back again, CONNECTIVE TISSUE reads like the journal of a synesthete. It focuses emotional, scientific, and social concepts toward a localized sensory experience: paper being crumpled, sensuous color, shapes, pulses, blinking lights, a face.
KAT MUSTATEA is a playwright and technologist. Her TED Talk examines the meaning of machines making art, looking at what new art forms arise as society shifts radically toward autonomous, algorithmic behavior. Her writing about the cutting edge of art and technology appears in Forbes, The Week, and Hyperallergic.
SUBATOMIC
SUBATOMIC
When things get small, they get weird. At this level, the laws of chemistry and physics operate on an entirely different set of rules.
THERE ARE NO PARTICLES ONLY FIELDS The discovery of the Higgs boson particle in 2012 validated the ideas of quantum field theory. The theory states that subatomic particles behave less like discrete objects and more like excitations of a three-dimensional field that is all around us. There are no particles only fields is a large-scale installation based loosely on diagrams first drawn by American scientist Richard Feynman to describe the behavior of subatomic particles. We learn in high school physics that two electrons will repel each other due to electromagnetic force. Now we understand that this repulsion comes from one electron transmitting a photon which gets absorbed by the other electron, sending it away.
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Made with 10-foot steel frames and over 750 feet of shock cord, this piece portrays one of the fundamental interactions that governs our universe. Its imposing scale and elegant geometry reveals the hidden beauty in even the smallest of encounters.
A scale prototype of the piece in the artist’s Brooklyn studio
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FEYNMAN DIAGRAM
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MOLECULAR
MOLECULAR
The universe might be made up of atoms, but molecules are where those atoms hang out — nestled in familiar combinations like salt (NaCl) and water (H2O). 19
An early prototype of the piece in the artist’s Brooklyn studio
STRANGE SEQUENCES Strange Sequences puts audiences face-to-face with fictional scenarios torn from tomorrow’s headlines and asks them to make a difficult choice. Visitors summon, with the touch of a magic button, a sequence of future ethical conundrums created by scientific breakthroughs in genetics or biotech. Visitors are offered a set of four choices, forcing them to see past simple solutions and question their assumptions about what is ethical and where society is headed.
A glimpse of the testing and iteration of the printers for design and functionality
By depositing their printouts in one of four bins corresponding to their answer, visitors will create a visual display of where the community stands on these future scenarios, from early adopters to laggards.
BASE PAIRS
MORAL, JUSTIFIABLE, APPROPRIATE, UNACCEPTABLE?
Sample scenarios will touch on how climate change might create a two-tier GMO food hierarchy, or the ethical implications of altering the immune systems of wildlife populations to prevent the spread of disease, or inducing changes in children to increase creativity and memory with the potential of elevated risks of Alzheimer's in old age. Whether attendees ponder them alone or debate them with a group, these provocative but near-future scenarios will surprise, concern, and challenge visitors to think critically about what they believe is moral, what is justifiable, what is appropriate, and what is unacceptable.
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NOW IS THE TIME TO UNDERSTAND MORE, SO THAT WE MAY FEAR LESS.
MARIE CURIE
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CELLULAR
CELLULAR
Many competing theories attempt to explain how life on Earth began — the RNA, protein, the cell membrane hypotheses to name a few. All purport to reveal how single-celled, ocean-dwelling organisms first emerged.
IMPULSE Our personalities define us far more than our physical bodies. When a veteran returns from war after losing their arm, we see them as the same person, just with new challenges. But when a football player retires and becomes prone to anger, depression, or memory loss from traumatic brain injuries they might seem like a completely different person. Brain neurons are coated with a special fatty substance known as myelin which smooths and accelerates signals across the nervous system. When the myelin is damaged or lost, brain functions can slow, weaken, or outright fail.
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Impulse features a series of 10 translucent pressure-activated pillows connected in one long chain, with varying degrees of cushioning. When visitors push on a pillow, it sends light propagating down the chain. Those with more cushioning send a longer, stronger light response, while thinner cushions have a weaker effect when activated - mimicking the effect of myelin. Over 5 million Americans live with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis; their caregivers and extended communities are all impacted by their loss of memory, motor function, and cognitive abilities. This interactive exhibition gives visitors a first-hand grasp of myelin’s essential role in our lives.
The artist protoytping the air pressure sensors in her Brooklyn studio
Researchers estimate that 1 in 20 people in the United States experiences some form of synesthesia.
JANUARY IS A GIRL Synesthesia is a neurological condition where activating one sensory/cognitive pathway leads to an immediate, involuntary experience in a different pathway. For instance, words or numbers can lead to colors, emotions, or even tastes. Some believe that physicist Isaac Newton may have been a synesthete, given his long quest to connect musical tones with color tones.
Stills from the artist's 2018 performance of the piece at Dixon Place in New York City
January is a Girl is a performance and media piece that brings audiences into this world. Video, words, sounds, images, ideas, and choreography are juxtaposed and merged in a loose, frenetic fashion—deliberately creating tension and sensory overload.
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The piece is based on the actual experience of a 24 year old woman with Ordinal Linguistic Personification, a type of synesthesia where numbers take on distinct personalities.
“THE WORD ‘COUCH’ HAS ALWAYS TASTED LIKE POTATO CHIPS TO ME” . 34
JOHANNA B, SYNESTHETE
Stills from a shoot for the piece in a New York City warehouse with artist Wendy Chu
Visitors experience the piece as two screens displaying the dancers and visuals not as static projections, but fluid and dynamic representations, switching back and forth between the screens. The choreography draws from the world of classical and contemporary ballet, with a hint of Latin and hip-hop. Ultimately, the piece reminds us that so much of our reality is determined by the three pounds of grey matter inside our skulls.
INTERVIEW
Made yo
u look.
st arti e h t n, with t atio a r h i c p ce. ins ndid cien ion, t s c A ca e d n s an tcon m u r o o b a gn rtin e v b su
ALL SORTS OF THINGS CAN HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE OPEN TO NEW IDEAS AND PLAYING AROUND WITH THINGS. STEPHANIE KWOLEK STEPHANIE KWOLEK is the chemist who invented Kevlar and winner of the Lavoisier Medal for technical achievements
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Tell us about yourself I’m a multidisciplinary artist and a child of immigrants. I have a background in neuroscience and spent several years studying Alzheimer's and the aging brain. I had an encounter with a patient that made me want to share all of the ideas and discoveries and motivations behind science and research with a broader audience that might not know our jargon or background. As I hope people see from this show, I have a lot of interests and work in a variety of mediums. I focus on the idea or question I want to express first, and I find the appropriate discipline/medium follows after.
For those who aren’t familiar with your work, what should people know? My work invites the audience to play. To press buttons and touch panels and answer questions. If everyone is just politely standing and nodding at something from 10 feet away, I’ve failed. My work explores the scale, structure, and presentation of things that are sometimes difficult for us to see normally, and it’s always fun to make the invisible, visible. Wherever possible my work tends to subvert norms and juxtapose settings. The busts from In the Company of Great Scientists feature notable women, instead of notable men, and are made out of 3D printed plastic instead of marble. Strange Sequences is like the circus fortune teller made into decision trees from the future. Impulse turns a microscopic organic process into a large electronic one.
Rest In Prowess collected stories from a virtual phone booth made possible by Google Voice. There are no particles, only fields transforms the intangibility of particle physics into a hulking steel installation that is extremely tangible.
My hope is that visitors not only feel connected to those with them and near them, but more broadly to the ecosystems of life all around us.
Finally, this exhibition in particular examines principles that are fundamental to our existence. Subatomic particles are fundamental to our existence. Our DNA is fundamental to our existence. Collective action is fundamental to our existence. We are not separate from these things. They are us and we are them. My hope is that viewers not only feel connected to those with them and near them, but more broadly to the ecosystems of life all around us.
How did the exhibition come to be? In 2017, I was contacted by two bright UNLV students who had seen my portrait series Beyond Curie. They had founded UNLV’s chapter of Scientista, a national organization that supports women in STEM, and invited me to come out and speak to them. They wanted their members to hear about my experiences as a woman in STEM and how I’ve used my background to help people see science and the human experience differently. They even offered to do a small showcase of the portraits. I couldn’t refuse. It just so happened that the space they obtained for the showcase was the Barrick and that’s how I met Alisha Kerlin, the executive director. We covered a lot in our first conversation and she actually encouraged me to use augmented reality to expand on the Beyond Curie portraits. I ended up bringing AR into that project and others, like a fashion line of atomic elements that make up our world. And we kept in touch. After the Beyond Curie AR exhibition went up in the East Wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Alisha wondered if there was work I had wanted to do that fit more of a fine arts setting. Of course there was, and so we began discussing what would become Connective Tissue.
Where did you get the inspiration for your pieces? Much of my inspiration comes out of spaces where the natural world and human world overlap. For instance, I saw parallels between social phenomena like #metoo or Black Lives Matter and biological processes like action potentials or activation energy which are gated by certain thresholds. The reach of our actions are limited when we operate independently, but can be exponential when we work together. Similarly in biology, there are times when a change in a cell or in an environment can have a cascading effect. The bobtail squid glows blue due to its symbiotic relationship with the Vibrio fischeri bacteria, only activating under particular circumstances related to time and light.
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How else has your scientific background influenced your work? My background in neuroscience and medical research makes me keenly aware of new developments in many fields, but even I can be surprised. I had been considering taking a genetic test like 23andMe to see what I could learn from my DNA. But a friend of mine who works in biotechnology at Stanford warned that my genetic data might be used in ways I couldn’t foresee. I looked more into it and realized these tests are not innocuous. There are serious implications from companies having access to so much information about people’s genetic makeup. And meanwhile, they serve to reinforce racial inequalities: the genealogy data for people of color is often less available because they often weren’t in a position to document their family history and aren’t well represented in the company’s reference data. One major provider has 296 ethnic regions identified for people of European descent but only 33 for people of African descent. That got me thinking about other ways that people in power can uphold their advantages. Maybe they can pay for certain benefits or unload problems onto others. What does that mean for our society? That’s what my piece Strange Sequences digs into.
There's a lot of mural art on the walls, which isn't something you often see in an art exhibition. There’s an explicit cultural connection between white backgrounds and high art. Most major museums and galleries have their art shown on blank stark white walls. Obviously there are practical reasons for that: it’s a neutral background that goes with everything as opposed to other colors or patterns. But it’s more than that. The marble statues we think of from classical Greek and Roman art were actually painted in bright, bold colors that some might consider gaudy. But when they were first unearthed around the 1500s, marble statues were cleaned, further degrading or destroying the
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remnants of color. Eventually, the idea of pristine white statues became the model for high society, while colorful art from other cultures like Asia, Latin America, or Africa is considered less elite. Not as serious. It’s what gets rolled out during “multicultural” events and programming. The murals on the walls pay homage to the connection I have to my Southeast Asian culture which is vibrant and full of life. Their contents feature women supporting and communing with one another. In many communities, it is the women who are the connective tissue that keeps the group humming and running smoothly, and so it’s only natural that their image is made visible on our walls.
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MULTICELLULAR
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MULTICELLULAR
Cellular organisms eventually found that they could be stronger and safer when they banded together. Kinda like a bunch of students clustering together at the middle school dance.
[DE]COMPOSE How often do we really consider the life cycle of the products we purchase and use? Today Americans generate 4.5 pounds of trash per day, which is 66% higher than the 2.7 lbs we made in 1960. More encouragingly, more than a third of the trash we generate is now recycled. As the global economy grows, the issue of waste generation becomes increasingly important. [de]compose challenges viewers to reconsider the final manifestation of the products they purchase and use. It features a set of everyday furniture and home goods made from biomaterials including mycelium and Pinatex. Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae, that can be used to make commercial products. Pinatex is a natural, non-woven textile made from pineapple leaf fiber that’s soft, lightweight, and durable.
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Visitors are free to (gently) interact with the work: sit in the chairs or touch the fuzziness of the mycelium. This interactivity blurs the lines between ecology, art, and decor. Where so much art eventually turns into trash in a landfill, [de]compose will simply fade away, underscoring the ephemeral nature and beauty of bio-materials.
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Work in progress on [de]compose in the artist's studio in Brooklyn
Mycelium, as with all living things, is difficult to control and predict. The design process begins with rehydrating the mycelium, letting it grow for a few days, then feeding it and shaping it into a form. These structures typically take between 10-20 days to grow.
ORGANISM
MULTICELLULAR
Those simple organisms kept getting bigger, with whole sections specializing in something: energy production, food consumption, sensory perception. Who knew that billions of years later, they would be used to binge Netflix while eating takeout in bed?
REST IN PROWESS In the hit Pixar film Coco, viewers are introduced to Mexican culture’s conception of death: that there are two versions of it. The first death comes when our physical body expires, releasing our soul to live on in the Land of the Dead. The second, permanent death of our soul comes when there is no one still alive who remembers us. In that vein, Rest in Prowess seeks to keep the memory of powerful women alive. It transposes oral storytelling onto a small grassy field filled with dozens upon dozens of white neuron-shaped wires. The field represents the cross-section of the hippocampus, the area of the brain neuroscientists believe plays a crucial role in storing memories. Each wire represents a hippocampal neuron and is linked to a personal memory of an exceptional woman who has since passed. Memories were sourced from participants locally and around the country. Like a reimagined graveyard, Rest in Prowess is a celebration of brilliance and defiance, encouraging visitors to explore each story and reflect on the legacy of the bold and pioneering women in their own lives.
An illustration from the series based on a memory from Harbin, China, collected through Google Voice
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
A neural field inspired by the above image of the hippocampus
"My grandmother had a stern personality, like a mother wolf watching over her cubs. Her two favorite things to say were 'don’t throw food away' and 'come eat'."
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who run the world?
BEYOND CURIE Visible icons can shape culture in major ways. South Korea saw a huge surge in girls and young women entering and succeeding in golf after Michele Wie established herself in the LPGA. In 2019, many top womens golfers are Korean or Korean-American. Beyond Curie is a celebration of 45 highly accomplished women in STEM, including 17 female winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine/Physiology. Despite all the progress that has been made in science and engineering, many women still find themselves unwelcome and constantly needing to prove themselves. This portrait series recognizes and uplifts female exemplars so that everyone can understand that women have every reason to belong, whether it's in a research lab, at the head of a department, or as the founder of a startup. The portraits have been turned into prints and many have an augmented reality animation that can be accessed via the Beyond Curie app. Propped on shelves like album covers, they are meant to be observed closely, giving viewers an intimate connection with each of the women.
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DON'T BE LIMITED BY OTHER PEOPLE'S LIMITED IMAGINATIONS. MAE JEMISON MAE JEMISON is an American engineer, physician and former NASA astronaut. She became the first black woman to travel in space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
IN THE COMPANY OF GREAT SCIENTISTS We have a tradition of commemorating the great figures of history with busts and statues. Usually, these busts are of military and political leaders, and rarely explorers, discoverers, and scientists. And when we think of the great figures of science, most people envision men. Of the over 5,000 public statues displaying notable or historic figures in the United States, only 7.5% depict women. This is a disappointing message and does not reflect the many contributions women have made to our society and our understanding of the Universe. In the Company of Great Scientists challenges these antiquated notions by filling an immersive space with busts of female pioneers in STEM — Nobel Prize winners, astronauts, doctors, and inventors. In a callback to the starkness of Greek and Roman marble statues, these busts are pure white. But few know that those historic statues were once brightly painted, and only look white because the paint has been lost.
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In progress post-production in the artist's Brooklyn studio
CHAWLA / CORDOVA / DRESSELHAUS / EARLE / FRANKLIN / HOPPER / JOHNSON / LEDERBERG / LOVELACE / MERCED / MCCLINTOCK / MIRZAKHANI / MONTALCINI / MOUSSA / ROSS / RUBIN / THOMAS / TRIAS / TU / WU
YOU YOU TU is a Chinese pharmacologist and educator who won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for her discovery of antimalarial agent artemisinin.
In order to recognize that legacy, the Great Scientists busts sit in a room filled with colorful lines giving the feeling of connectedness, progress, and motion. Each bust is paired with a QR label to help visitors get to know these women. Waving their smartphone over the label will automatically send them to an online profile of the woman.
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SOCIETY
SOCIETY
Life is fundamentally about discovering and forming constructive relationships with the outside environment. Species that are isolated (like on an island) tend to become brittle and struggle to adapt to new threats.
BINARY OUTCOMES Everything that becomes massive, starts small and gains momentum. A wildfire is triggered by a downed electrical line and accelerated by low humidity, dry grass, and hot winds. An epidemic is triggered by a patient zero and is accelerated by recycled air, poor hygiene, and unfinished antibiotic regimens. A social movement starts with a new idea and is accelerated by organizers, followers, resources, and attention.
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Binary Outcomes mirrors the function of many scientific and social phenomena through a simple, music-based model. The piece uses pressure-activated sensors to respond to human touch, producing one track of a musical score to play through headphones. When a single person touches the mural, a few notes from the oboe come through. When a second person adds their touch, we hear the harmonic notes of the flute, building up to a familiar melody when all five stations are touched.
The artist and her team assembling and testing the touch-sensitive button boxes in her Brooklyn studio
THERE IS POWER IN UNITY, AND THERE IS POWER IN NUMBERS. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
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A process shot of the screen printed touch-sensitive cushion
A prototype of the touchactivated button boxes in the artist's wood shop
CAMPFIRE Campfire is animated by the idea of the tipping point, a critical juncture which allows changes to unfold. Three seats face each other inside an enclosed room with multicolored fluorescent lights lining the walls. Every time a visitor sits down, two nearby cool-colored lights are activated via the air pressure sensor. When all three seats are occupied, a critical mass is reached and an additional warmer tone fills the room.
The artist's team testing the piece in her Brooklyn studio
Campfire examines and reveals the power of group action to transform circumstances. The challenges we face as a society: climate change, political reform, economic transformation, none can be overcome by isolated, individual effort. Only through collective action can the fire truly burn.
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I FELL IN LOVE THE WAY YOU FALL ASLEEP: SLOWLY, AND THEN ALL AT ONCE. THE FAULT IN OUR STARS by JOHN GREEN
// 0 to 1 // // 0 to 1 //
CONNECTIVE TISSUE was supported, in part, by the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the state of Nevada. The project is also supported by the UNLV College of Fine Arts, Google, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, UNLV Department of Art, UNLV Department of Dance, Women's Research Institute of Nevada, and the UNLV Women's Council. CONNECTIVE TISSUE is in collaboration with the Clark County School District Career & Technical Education Program, the UNLV School of Music, Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada, the UNLV Scientista Foundation, and local partners, Sherwin-Williams, PPG Paint, Dunn Edwards, and Home Depot. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay written by New York-based technologist and playwright, Kat Mustatea. Sincerest thanks to my team—Elaine Khuu and Anthony McNicoll for their tireless effort and unmatched creativity. To my partner, Jason Shen, for always holding space for my ideas and extraness. To Alisha Kerlin, for her constant support and keen eye and the Barrick staff for helping us breathe life into this show.
Catalog visuals and content are copyright of the artist.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS