January Issue 2002
Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, Presents an Exhibition Based on Science, Technology & Belief
The Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC- Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, will present an exhibition of collaborative endeavors between three visiting visual artists and UNC-G faculty and students in three science departments at the university. Lab Results: Three Artists' Residencies in the Sciences is a highlight in a year-long series of programs at UNC-G entitled, That's Incredible: Science, Technology, and Belief. This broader university series will examine the complex interaction of science and culture in the modern world, while providing an overview of the excellent science programs offered at UNC-G.
Lab Results builds
upon the Weatherspoon's reputation for exhibition projects that
provide a fresh presentation of artists' work often within a new
context. The exhibition directly addresses the Weatherspoon's
interest and commitment to extending art's possibilities and for
helping audiences understand the diverse forms and manifestations
that contemporary art can take.
Lab Results focuses upon examining and challenging socially
constructed distinctions between artists and scientists. Art and
science share a number of methodologies and practices: collecting,
ordering, observation, and experimentation. Further, aesthetic
production and scientific inquiry share a creative kinship, a
mutual engagement in a process without predictable conclusions.
However, for many, science and art represent dialectical approaches.
Traditional notions portray the sciences engaged in purely objective,
goal-oriented projects, while artists pursue personal and intangible
goals.
Curator of exhibitions Ron Platt has encouraged
substantive partnerships in artist/faculty-student teams with
the goal of creating new, collaborative works. The fruits of these
collaborations will be presented in the exhibition, which will
also include related work by each of the artists in order to give
audiences a sense of the scope and nature of their recent aesthetic
practice. These artists share an interest in challenging categorized
forms of knowledge, representation, and information. For them,
scientific ideas and techniques enable them to best articulate
their aesthetic ideas.
Bill Burns's work focuses on the tenuous interrelationships between
humans and the natural world. For Lab Results, Burns shifts
emphasis from his recent explorations into human and animal interactions
to a visualization of the results of pollutants on the earth's
atmosphere. His project, created with Dr. Roy Stine (Director
of Geographic Information Science Certificate Program and Associate
Professor of Geography) and students in Geographic Information
Systems, will comprise a series of live projected images of ozone
distribution superimposed upon a geo-political map of the world.
An amateur astronomer, Russell Crotty has constructed
an observatory in the hills above Malibu, CA, where he resides.
Based upon his observations, Crotty transcribes the heavens in
ballpoint pen renderings in hand-made books, drawings, and on
globes. For Lab Results, Crotty has worked with Dr. Steven
Danford (Head of Department and Associate Professor of Physics
and Astronomy) and astronomy students at the Three-College Observatory
near Burlington, NC, and is creating new drawings and globes based
on their shared observations and on Danford's recently published
astronomical research.
Shannon Kennedy works with the microscope and endoscopic camera
to explore invisible forces and our organic relationship to the
unseen environment. For instance, Kennedy has recently worked
with endoscopic cameras to inspect the airducts, pipes, and interior
walls of buildings. The images she "brings back" on
camera are edited and projected on the wall at an enormous scale,
immersing the viewer in an environment typically invisible to
them. At UNC-G, Kennedy is working with Dr. Mary K. Sandford (Associate
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Anthropology)
and her students in Forensic Anthropology to explore the sub-visual
landscape of the human skeleton, as well as a microcosm of the
teeming life of the forest floor.
All three artists will be at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at 2pm on Jan. 20, for the exhibition opening and to participate in an Artists' Talk on each of their respective collaborations with the science departments. The Weatherspoon will publish a gallery guide highlighting the cross-disciplinary perspective of the artists' residencies and the exhibition. Lab Results: Three Artists Residencies in the Sciences has been supported in part by the F.W. Kirby Foundation.
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or contact the Museum at 336/334-5770 or on the web at (http://www.uncg.edu/wag/).
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