CHAIRS: Stephen Nowlin and Robert Crouch

Grab some refreshments and join an avid audience of curious participants in the art-science dialogue, and speakers sharing their art/science/technology/media explorations and adventures in short 15-minute bursts -- followed by a conversational walking tour of the Williamson Gallery's MOONS exhibit. Totally free, but seating limited -- so RSVP (Register) today! Speakers include:

Melanie King

MOONS participant Melanie King is a London artist and curator with a specific focus on astronomy. She is co-Director of super/collider, Lumen Studios and the London Alternative Photography Collective. Melanie is currently studying towards a practice based PhD in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. She is a graduate of the MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins and the BA Fine Art at Leeds Art University. Melanie is an external member of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Melanie is also a member of ITACCUS, the Committee for the Cultural Utilisation of Space.

Karley Sullivan

MOONS exhibit artist Karley Sullivan is an L.A.-based idiosyncratic artist-photographer. She has made drawings of each of the moons of our solar system, a visual interpretation of chapter eight of Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space in the form of hallucinatory oil paintings, and is generating an expansive photographic study of her transracial family in the American South. Her projects are on-going and constellative, intersecting at lived experience and the creation of personal mythologies. Her work has been exhibited at Whitespace Gallery of Atlanta, Yogiga Artspace of Seoul, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibits, and printed in various publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, and Bomb Magazine. She holds a BFA in Drawing from the University of Tennessee, and an MFA in Photo/Media from the California Institute of Arts.

Shirley Watts

Shirley Alexandra Watts is curator of the ongoing project Natural Discourse, a series of symposia, publications and site-specific art installations that explore the connections between art, science and the humanities within the framework of botanical gardens and natural history museums. Natural Discourse began with an exhibit of site-specific installations on view at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden from July 2012 to January 2013. Shirley has organized six daylong symposia at the Berkeley Botanical Garden, the LA Arboretum, the LA Natural History Museum and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. In fall 2016 she curated the exhibit Digital Nature at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden. With support from the NEA, Digital Nature 2019 will happen at the LA Arboretum the last weekend of February 2019.

MOONS Exhibit Stroll

Grab a glass of wine and join curator Stephen Nowlin and miscellaneous MOONS artists for a casual walk-thru, commentary, and discussion of the Williamson Gallery's current science-art exhibition. Ponder artworks and artifacts by the artists and sources contributing to MOONS: Alternative Moons (Nadine Schlieper & Robert Pufleb), Carnegie Observatories, Caltech Archives, Kevin M. Gill (JPL), James Griffith, Tim Hawkinson, The Huntington Library, Melanie King, Sarah Perry, Steve Roden, Karley Sullivan, Penelope Umbrico, Mount Wilson Observatory and Jacqueline Woods. Says Nowlin, "Celestial bodies tethered by orbital physics to our solar system’s planets, commonly known as moons, comprise a consortium of enticing worlds that are rocky, wet, icy, cratered, hot, cold, and puzzling, with veneers textured by mountains, lakes, concealed oceans, valleys, volcanoes, geysers, canyons, and plains. Such objects lead us to both the poetics and the disruptions ignited by an age-old urge to ponder reality beyond the single planet in which we are cradled."

SPONSORS:

LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks is Leonardo's international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. LASER Talks were founded in 2008 by Bay Area LASER Chair Piero Scaruffi and are in over 30 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. 

The mission of the LASERs is to provide the general public with a snapshot of the cultural environment of a region and to foster interdisciplinary networking.