Faculty portfolios
- Set 1 of 4
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My work lies at the art/science/technology nexus and often examines the ways in which culture and institutional structures shape (mis)understandings of the history of science and medicine.
Projects such as Oculus play with the principle of the synecdoche, or how the fragments of entities can stand in for their wholes. Oculus, a large-scale light sculpture that depicts a colossal abstracted drosophila eye, replete with compound faceted surfaces, both recalls the circular opening at the apex of a cupola and alludes to a surveillance device or drone hovering in mid-air. This collaborative project, fabricated with Metron Designworks and Axi:Ome, is inspired in part by a series of scanning electron micrographs I produced in a transgenic core facility while researching human and non-human sensoria. The work evokes affective encounters with scale, such as viewing miniature particles through the lens of a microscope or wandering through monumental physical environments. Each viewer’s reflection plays across the sculpture’s undulating surface, emphasizing the precariousness of our coexistence with other lifeforms in the world, one that is always contingent upon viewers’ bodies and the variability of the environment around them.
The Mutable Archive is a multi-layered video and artist book project that speaks to renewed nationalistic obsessions with Othering and difference. The project begins with nineteen photographs of human subjects in a physiognomy collection and their accompanying archive cards, which I produced at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. Nineteen commissioned writers—artists, scholars, historians, a medical ethicist, a philosopher, an opera singer, and a spiritual medium—each create a speculative biography for a subject of their choosing from the series of photographs. Each script and recorded monologue, a 4K cinematic video, exposes the roles of assumption and subjectivity in science.
Dark Skies, a multimedia collaboration with Axi:Ome and Christopher Ottinger is a two-channel projection on a large-scale dimensional wall. The installation includes an evocative soundscape, drawn primarily from field recordings of vespertine creatures emerging as night falls. The title for this work is an astronomical metaphor that refers to remote places free of hazy city light. The installation was inspired in part by night sky preservation, biomimicry, and the complex relationship between natural forms at the micro and macro levels. Dark Skies triggers affective alliances between viewers and a projected habitat that is quivering with life. Their shadows play across a complex, undulating surface, epitomizing our physical entanglement with ecosystems that defy boundaries between species.