41.1 F
Clarksville
Friday, March 29, 2024
HomeEducationAPSU's The New Gallery to exhibit ‘Entangled Entities’ by Laura Splan

APSU’s The New Gallery to exhibit ‘Entangled Entities’ by Laura Splan

Austin Peay State University - APSUClarksville, TN – The New Gallery, with support from the  Austin Peay State University Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts and the APSU Department of Art + Design, is pleased to present Entangled Entities, a new exhibition by bio-artist Laura Splan, to continue an exciting 2020-2021 exhibition season.

The New Gallery at Austin Peay State University presents ‘Entangled Entities’ by Laura Splan. (APSU)

Entangled Entities is an exhibition that combines biomedical research with aesthetics,” said Michael Dickins, curator, and director of The New Gallery. “With her work, Splan choreographs poetic confrontations with science inside the gallery to foster deeper engagement with science outside the gallery.

“She frames complex biomedical issues with provocations of curiosity and wonder – revealing beauty amongst chaos and resilience amidst crisis,” Dickins added. “As we are currently in the throes of a global pandemic, this timely exhibition invites the viewer to experience the tools, sounds, and images of the biological research lab and to, in Splan’s words, ‘inspire audiences to think critically about the role of biotechnology in our daily lives.’”

The exhibit opens Tuesday, February 22nd, at The New Gallery in the APSU Art + Design building on the campus of Austin Peay State University and runs through March 26th. Splan will give an artist lecture on February 25th at 6:00pm via Zoom. Register here for this free talk.

Laura Splan
Laura Splan

“I create embodied interactions, tactile experiences and sensory encounters that connect materialities of science to familiar domains of the everyday,” Splan said. “My conceptually based projects destabilize notions of the presence and absence of bodies, evoking the mutability of categories that delineate their status.

“Using a range of traditional and new media techniques, I reconsider perceptions and representations of the corporeal, combining the quotidian with the unfamiliar to interrogate cultural constructions of self and other,” she added.

This marks a return visit to APSU for Splan.

“She was part of the CECA Visiting Artist Speaker Series in 2015, and I have been following her career ever since,” Dickins said. “During a visit to her Brooklyn studio in 2018, we discussed her newest work – a result of her experience participating in the uCity Science Center BioArt residency. We decided then that The New Gallery would be a great place to show this work. I am super excited to share this work with our art students as well as with biology, Allied Health and computer science students.”

 

About the artist

Laura Splan in studio.
Laura Splan in the studio.

Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied interactions and sensory engagement. Her conceptually based art practice combines a wide range of media including experimental materials, digital media and craft processes.

Her biomedical-themed artworks have been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation and Davidson College. Her projects combining digital fabrication and textiles have been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design and Beall Center for Art + Technology and are represented in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the NYU Langone Art Collection.

Her widely acclaimed lace viruses including SARS and HIV (2004) have been exhibited and published around the world. Reviews and articles including her work have appeared in The New York Times, Discover Magazine, Hyperallergic, American Craft and Frieze. Splan has received research funding from The Jerome Foundation and her residencies have been supported by The Knight Foundation, The Institute for Electronic Arts, Harvestworks and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

She has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford University teaching interdisciplinary courses including “Embodied Interfaces,”Data as Material” and “Art & Biology.” She is currently a Creative Science member at NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator and is collaborating with biotech laboratories to interrogate interspecies entanglements in the contemporary biomedical landscape.

She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, in a building that has been both a pharmaceutical factory and a knitting factory.

To learn more about Splan, visit www.laurasplan.com.

Walk-through gallery tour, additional work in The Terminal Gallery

Laura Splan during a recent exhibition.
Laura Splan during a recent exhibition.

A 360-degree virtual walk-through will accompany this exhibition for those who wish to view the work from the safety of their homes. The walk-through can be found on The New Gallery’s webpage and can be accessed via www.apsu.edu/art-design.

In addition to the exhibition in The New Gallery, Splan’s body of work, Unraveling, will be featured in The Terminal Gallery, the Department of Art + Design’s gallery for 21st Century video/animation/time-based media art, throughout March.

 

 

Hours for The New Gallery are 10:00am-3:00pm Tuesday-Thursday, closed on weekends and holidays, and follows the university’s academic calendar. To maintain social distance measures, a 15-person limit rule will be in effect.

For more information on this exhibition, which is free and open to the public, contact Dickins at dickinsm@apsu.edu.

RELATED ARTICLES

Latest Articles