Art Talk with Suzanne Anker – 1/11/14

The MAC is pleased to welcome Suzanne Anker for an Art Talk and discussion of the exhibition While Darkness Sleeps at 4:30pm on January 11th.

Saturday, January 11 | 4:30pm – 5:30pm

Please join The MAC for an Art Talk with Suzanne Anker in conjunction with her exhibition While Darkness Sleeps. 

From microscopes to video animations to time-lapse photography to rapid prototyped sculpture, While Darkness Sleeps, is an ode to nature’s delicacy and decay. While high technology tools extend our vision to access sites yet unknown, at the same time such intrusions can be dire.

While Darkness Sleeps brings together underwater motifs of animals that look like flowers, “vanitas” in Petrie dishes inspired by art history, porcelain sponge sculptures that appear as coral or meteorites, and high tech 3-D extruded sculptures which reference tiny wondrous landscapes.

Continuing to work at the nexus of art and the biological sciences, this exhibition brings into focus visions of a “future/natural” in which life’s ebb and flow, always in flux, combine with its synthetic other.  In Anker’s work nothing is what it appears to be, yet visual representations abound.  Although there are many references to the “still life” as a genre in visual art, the moving images address the fact that life is not still.

Working with images garnered from marine research centers such as Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and MOTE Marine Laboratory, on Summerland Key in Florida, the viewer becomes aware of the intricacies of nature and the need to preserve it.  Other images are derived from the Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico’s research facility in which samples are collected in the wild and housed in drawers and cabinets for further study.

Several other specimens present themselves as images through glass.  Such dioramas incorporate changes in the viewer’s perception based on reflected and faceted light. Like a permanent zone for the once-living, these creatures are suspended in time, located at the National Museum’s Natural Science and History Collections in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Not intended to be a scientific study of nature as data, these images and objects talk at once to a scientific imaginary fused with cultural necessity. How we perceive the natural world is tantamount to discovery. How we re-imagine the living world as an interconnected network fuses what was once science fiction to the real.

Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences.  Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Phillips Collection, P.S.1 Museum, the JP Getty Museum, the Mediznhistorisches Museum der Charite in Berlin, the Center for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, the Pera Museum in Istanbul and the Museum of Modern Art in Japan. Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington,D.C. Her writings have appeared in Art andAmerica, Seed Magazine, Nature Reviews Genetics, Art Journal, Tema Celeste and M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Her work has been the subject of reviews and articles in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Nature and has been cited by Barbara Maria Stafford, Donna Haraway and Martin Kemp in their texts. She has been a speaker at the Royal Society in London,Cambridge University, Yale University, the London School of Economics, the Max-Planck Institute, University of Leiden, the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Banff Art Center and many others. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative.

Exhibition Sponsors
Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston

Displays Fine Art Services

Exhibition runs January 11 – March 11, 2014

The MAC is open Wed – Sat 11am – 9 pm

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC