​"Un-Natural Nature"

a virtual & pop-up exhibit
Creations Gallery (NYC)
March 2015
Nature today is a push and pull between preservation and expansion. As urban sprawl continues to domineer, the organic world is transitioning from a natural occurrence to a corralled phenomenon. The man-made world reorients our perception, and nature is becoming less organic and more hyper-mediated. As nature gives way to a growing man-made jungle, how does this affect our reflection of the Sublime? "Un-Natural Nature" explores the ever-changing landscapes of a 21st-century world.  

Curated by Danielle Kalamaras
Reviewed in Art the Science, featured in ISSUES in Science and Technology
"My work explores how distinctions between organic and inorganic entities can be blurred to offer up new ways of defining our environment... As art and science commingle in practice and theory, I am inspired by both disciplines and the possibilities they present in redefining our environment and our identity."
"My photographic work explores the interplay between the natural world and the synthetic imitations that humans have conceived to re-create nature... [and] is a contemporary investigation of the human drive to create an idealized but altogether artificial representation of the natural world."
"I use collage to explore the idea of evolutionary dislocation that occurs when a species is abruptly ousted from its evolutionary context. Humans have undergone this sort of dislocation at our own hands as we have reshaped our surroundings through technological advances."
"My artwork is map collage that offers the viewer a combination of imaginary landscapes with mystical, biblical, scientific, and ecological themes. The visual description of a three-dimensional world on a flat plane is conjoined with the depiction of the metaphysical."
"At the depth of the Pacific Ocean, millions of living creatures glow in the dark...I transfer pieces of the DNA from the coral into living mammals and record them during sleep. The cellular ecosystem is transformed into an un-natural hybrid...The result is perpetually imperfect and unique." 
"'Lover Earth can be formally understood as a forest green fagotty cyber goddess dyke drag queen. She [video above] appears on YouTube in several video narratives that seek to explore the far-reaching socio-cultural, historical, and ecological factors of the climate change problem."
"I have been making work about the impact humanity has been having on this Earth for quite some time—this concept always seems to resonate in my art time and time again. The way that we demolish entire ecosystems in the name of progress is a double edged sword."
"My work engages the intersection of science and art to research, reveal, and inform. The Raw to Processed series began with a consideration of food and its relationship to our health... on eating processed foods and their role in developing disease within the human body." 
"Displaced Dodder shows a parasitic plant—the Golden Dodder—floating in space, isolated from its host and the surrounding ecosystem. Deleted Dodder shows the environment around the parasitic plant, but the plant itself is absent. Beneath the Sinkhole allows us to peer down into the crust of our planet, showing what we could never know without the aid of geologists."
"Much of my work consists of images, etched via sandblasting onto glass panels, lit along the edge by programmed LED strips, and wall-mounted, suspended, or free-standing in steel or wood stands...The LEDs shine up through the etched panels... making vivid the shifting perspectives that haunt our attempts to observe and interpret the world."
"My artwork revolves around three concepts: Time, the Human Condition, and Transformation... the intention of my work is to inspire reflection on where we’ve been, how it relates to where we are now, and how we may want our thoughts and experiences to evolve in our shared future."
"The significance of our connection to the world has been lost, with consequential destructive results...My photographs aim to force the viewer to look beyond the obvious...to reveal the essence beyond the normal visual spectrum."
"to arrive by chance is an interactive, moving artwork that explores 21st-century views of animals through poetry, game-play, visual art, and sound art...The tendency for humans to move into the territory of other animals...is evidence that we need to reconsider, as a species, how to sustainably interact with important and sublime keystone animals."
"Long inspired by the principles and poetry in D’Arcy Thompson’s book, On Growth and Form (1917), I have been developing a body of work that applies his theory of constraints and view of organisms as dynamical systems to a changing world, one that is increasingly out of balance... [I] probe the boundaries between the animate and inanimate."

R. Levy

Buyuan Ma
"Drawing on a background in neurobiology and applied mathematics, I use electromechanical sculpture to explore issues encompassing technology, control systems, and the boundary between play and violence. Allegory of the Battle of Dan-no-ura concerns a naval battle in feudal Japan (1185 AD)...The "allegory" reconceives the battle as an electronic board game."
"My art is intended to be an aesthetic expression of the scientific and technological way of thinking. Nature presents the raw material of our sensory perception. It is characterized by randomness, chaos, and undifferentiated richness, and is usually represented in my art as primordial and romantic sceneries in the background."
"I work with organic materials and objects that are often unwanted, abandoned, or ignored. Using models of human relationships and coping mechanisms, I find ways to relate to or interact with the materials by abstracting the materials from their surroundings through anthropomorphizing and identification with the natural objects."
"I am interested in exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world through the way we inhabit and manipulate it. Taking inspiration from termite mounds and skyscrapers, caves and minimalism, and wasp nests and cityscapes, my works are manifestations of the complex set of tensions and overlaps between human logic and nature's own logic."
"My paintings explore the unseen energy fields that are part of our environment. Today’s interest in the Higgs particle, the growth of cell phones, and the invasiveness of the NSA started me thinking more about the unseen energy that surrounds us. I want to call attention to the invisible and make the viewer of my art think about these forces."
"This work is a product of research at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland.  The text is from the chalkboards of the Theory Group at CERN with the background images taken inside the tunnels and detectors of the Large Hadron Collider...What is so un-natural about nature today is the way we measure it. " 
"Oceanic Scales explores the symbiotic relationship that phytoplankton sustain within our planetary ecosystem. Players explore their role in maintaining a stable ocean ecology to inspire sustainable living practices and social change by engaging the public to reflect on and perhaps better understand how people impact the environment at local and global scales."
"Using acid mine drainage to produce this body of work has become a means for me to connect, to bear witness, and concede responsibility for my place in this time and space... these paintings [are] an invitation to take part in an intimate conversation with the landscape; a memorial to those lands that have been purged in an effort to sustain our own existence."
"I’m fascinated by scientific methods of observing, collecting, dissecting, and classifying to define the world around us...In my artwork I hope to challenge our assumptions and to lead the viewer to a place where the scientist’s lab and the artist studio collide—a place where the reflection of our selves can have a terrifying beauty and an ethereal sensation."
"In my artwork I aim to dissect the ever-eluding dichotomy between subjective perception and objective reality...I take pleasure in finding the ways in which the most ordinary and familiar bodily forms can become alien through representation...In this Saints Series, each piece is an abstract representation of how each respective saint was martyred."
"The Urban Wild refers to remnants of a natural ecosystem found in the midst of an otherwise highly developed urban area. While being environmentally and formally aware, my recent work explores interactions between primal and urban agencies in the global village...This approach has allowed me to introduce a tactile, colorful, and emotional 'ecological self' into the complex equations of environmental balance."
"In DeNatural Disaster, one may choose whether or not to distinguish between natural and anti-natural devastation: Is it the barrenness of a stark landscape or the remnants of a battlefield? Is it the dense black and grey of storms or the debris and smoke from a detonation? Disasters construct and destruct reality. They change Nature (and our nature) and define history. Destiny does not specify if it was an intervention of human brutality or the power of Nature."
"Spannungsfeld ("tension field") originated in physics but is used in contemporary German almost exclusively in a metaphorical sense, implying a dynamic tension, often between polar opposites, that permeates everything in its vicinity...Inspired by quantum physics, I developed an approach that transforms the human figure into a large number of vertically arranged, parallel steel slices with constant spacing." 
"I make things to confront my spinelessness, my constant need to mutate and transform for survival. Without authority I float with the microbial, the cellular, the wild, and the untamed. My art explores the relationship between design, the body as a biological system, technology, and emotion."
"Science is the lens through which I understand the world—particularly paleontology and evolutionary biology. The writer who most significantly shaped my view of life was Stephen Jay Gould, whose essays I greatly miss.  Often without conscious intent, my paintings reflect natural history and frequently contain oblique references to whatever I am reading."  
"I frame instances of uninhibited consumption and the damaging consequences they often bring. Eat, Drink, and be Merry [video above] involves the use of insects and animals as allegorical stand-ins for human situations of desire, indulgence, and self-destruction. I experiment with the conditions of the life of these beings by setting up situations in which allegories occur."