Reviewing

Material Expressions

Laura Splan

2018 Workspace Resident Laura Splan will present new work in progress at the Harvestworks TEAM Lab Artworks and Experiences Exhibition on Governors Island. Material Expressions incorporates moving sculpture and sound triggered by biosensors monitoring the artist’s heart rate as she knits. The project is part of a series of performances that explores the potential for objects to embody corporeal experience and to materialize the unseen machinations of the human body.

LOCATION: Governors Island, Nolan Park Building 8a

DATES AND TIMES: September 1 – 2, 2018

Sat. Sun  noon – 5 pm

Governors Island New York Ferry Schedule

Laura Splan’s work explores intersections of art, science, technology and craft. Her conceptually based projects examine the material manifestations of our mutable relationship with the human body. She reconsiders perceptions and representations of the corporeal with a range of traditional and new media techniques. She often combines the quotidian with the unfamiliar to interrogate culturally constructed notions of order and disorder, function and dysfunction. Her frequent combinations of textiles with technology challenge values of “the hand” in creative production and question notions of agency and chance in aesthetics. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

http://www.laurasplan.com/material-expressions-performances

 

PRESS QUOTES

 “…In Splan’s works, coded data captured from bodily actions… is transformed into hypnotic rhythmic patterns and re-coded as sensory input. Aesthetically pleasurable and quantifiable, Splan deftly weaves scientific findings into visually stimulating artworks…”

~ Audra Lambert, Arte Fuse

“…The exigent urgency of Laura Splan’s conceptual work always feels one step ahead of us, much the way technology, which she employs to execute and symbolically illuminate her concepts, exists long before it is grasped by the masses…”

~ Elizabeth Lopeman, Surface Design Journal

“…Laura Splan presents the human-scaled, handmade, and the physical body through poetic mediation, reminding us of the inescapable material body…”

~Cassandra Huerta, Daily Voice

 

www.laurasplan.com

www.facebook.com/laurasplan

www.twitter.com/LauraSplanArt

www.instagram.com/laurasplan

 

#FiftyQuestions with Laura Splan

Interview Questions by Quintan Ana Wikswo

2017

http://someseriousbusiness.org/2017/08/02/fiftyquestions-with-laura-splan/

Raw Material: In Conversation with Curator Angela McQuillan with Artists Laura Splan and Gail Wight

Speak Speak, Grizzly Grizzly Gallery Blog, 

2016

Raw Material: A Conversation Led by Curator Angela McQuillan with Artists Laura Splan and Gail Wight

Laura Splan

Laura Splan will discuss her interdisciplinary art practice that
combines experimentation, production, & collaboration. Working at the intersections
of Science, Technology, and Culture, she creates conceptually layered and carefully
crafted artworks that explore the sublime complexity of the biological world while
unraveling entanglements of natural and built systems. Her research-driven projects
connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied
interactions and sensory experiences. Recent exhibitions have included immersive
installations, networked devices, and tactile sculptures. Splan often engages
audiences with themes in her work through companion programming, including
participatory workshops covering laboratory techniques, specialized software, and
textiles methods that she uses in her own studio practice. Her artworks exploring
biomedical imaginaries have been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control
Foundation and the Bruges Triennial. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of
Arts & Design, Pioneer Works, and New York Hall of Science and is represented in the
collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NYU’s
Langone Art Collection, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Reviews and articles including
her work have appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Discover, designboom, American
Craft, and Frieze. Publications featuring her artwork include the “Antennae Journal
of Nature in Visual Culture,” “The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art &
Architecture,” and “Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday
Objects.” Her writing and interviews have appeared in Art Practical and SciArt
Magazine. Splan’s research and residencies have been supported by the Jerome
Foundation, Institute for Electronic Arts, Harvestworks, the Knight Foundation, and
the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Gail Wight

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