“I dye, paint and stitch silk and wool to create boldly colored biomorphic wallhangings inspired by microscopic/cellular imagery – a kind of visual invented biology with textiles.”
Fiber artist, Karen Kamenetzky, creates a kind of ‘invented biology’, inspired by microscopic and cellular imagery, with works zooming in on that fundamental nature of things and bringing it into vision. She works loosely from sketches but each piece travels a route of evolution and change.
David S. Goodsell is a Professor of Computational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute and Research Professor with the RCSB Protein Data Bank at Rutgers. He divides his time between research in computational biology and science outreach. His art explores the inner structure of cells and viruses, using computer graphics and traditional painting with watercolor and ink. This article describes “Molecular Landscapes,” a series of work created for a show at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in April 2020, which was ironically postponed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Jody Rasch is a New York City area-based artist whose work is based on themes from astronomy, biology, physics and spectra. The artist has been exhibiting his work nationally for over 25 years. Duality–abstraction and representation, the literal and the metaphorical, science and mysticism, the unseen and the seen–is a predominant theme in Rasch’s work. An expression of both the patterns of the natural world and the metaphors underlying modern science, his art allows us to see the beauty in the repulsive, to find knowledge in the unknown, to observe the unseen to more clearly see our world. By exploring the invisible, Rasch invites the observer to look beyond the “seen” to appreciate the beauty and mystery of the “unseen.” His art challenges us to explore the world around us.
“All the sculptures I make are either hand or laser cut from layers of paper and then hand mounted to create three dimensional structures……..It is also a material perfectly adapted to describe the complexity of the natural world as it embodies the paradoxical qualities that we find in nature: its fragility and durability, its strength and delicacy.”
Inspired by the narratives of scientific discovery and innovation that increasingly dominate contemporary culture, Rogan Brown’s work is an attempt by a non-scientist, an outsider, to visualize, comprehend and assimilate these new ideas and new ways of seeing the world, whether it’s to do with our changing perception of bacteria or the paradigm shifts in our comprehension of the physical world that emerge from quantum physics.
Artist Klari Reis is best known for her Petri Dish series, a multicolour set of circular blobs created using a blend of media and ground-breaking techniques. The core of her approach is the transformation and pigmentation of a UV-resistant plastic, the epoxy polymer, into unique and cutting edge artworks. She uses the tools and techniques of science in her creative process, constantly experimenting with new ways to apply materials and methods. She is driven by curiosity and her desire to explore and document the natural and unnatural with a sense of wonder and joy.
“My artistic narrative is influenced by my experience and involvement, over the years, in the scientific study and investigation of cell structure and function……….The physical and chemical properties of atoms and molecules, the composition of matter, the energy, matter’s wear and degradation — these are the raw materials I use to compose a personal artistic landscape.”
Thalia Gatzouli currently lives and works as an artist and a Nuclear physician in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Andrew McKeown has completed many large scale sculpture commissions throughout the U.K and internationally. Recurring themes within his work are those of growth, change and renewal and these natural or organic themes are often combined with site specific historical or industrial references which can be both literal and metaphorical. Andrew’s expertise is in sculpture, design and environmental regeneration. Casting and mould making processes inform and influence his work in both a practical and conceptual way and he often create installations of multiple sculptures which are cast or fabricated in durable materials such as iron, steel, bronze and stone.
Jill Gibbon is an artist and activist with research interests in drawing, and art as an interdisciplinary method. She currently uses performance and drawing to research the secretive world of the international arms trade. She has exhibited in the UK and US, and has drawings in the permanent collections of the Imperial War Museum, and the Peace Museum.
She has a B.A in Illustration from Leeds Polytechnic, an M.A in Visual Arts from Keele University, and a PhD from Wimbledon School of Art. She teaches Graphic Arts at Leeds Beckett University, specialising in drawing. She is an early career research fellow at the ISRF, and a founder member of Art Not Arms.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is Associate Professor of American Studies, Rutgers University. She is a cultural theorist and writer interested in visual culture, black cultural history, gender and feminist studies, performance, creative nonfiction, and poverty studies.
She is the author of two books: “Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness,” which was the recipient of the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, and “On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination” (Rutgers University Press, 2015). Her articles appear in African American Review, American Quarterly, Aperture, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, Public Culture, Signs, and Social Text.
She is completing her third book, “Marking Time: Prison Art and Public Culture,” a study of visual art in the era of mass incarceration.
Massinissa Selmani’s work aims to create drawn forms mingling a documentary approach with fictional constructions and animations, while taking as its point of departure contemporary political and social issues from press cuttings. Through confrontation, juxtaposition and even the superposition of actual elements, whose contexts have systematically been concealed, the artist creates enigmatic, ambiguous scenes unlikely to happen in reality.