Art + Bio Introduction

ART + BIO Based on the Art + Bio exhibition at Central Michigan University, March 1998

Introduction by David Stairs. __________________________________

In October 1993, George Gessert and I participated in a symposium entitled Assisted Migration which was hosted by the University of Oregon and featured the work of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison. For the better part of a week, we attended presentations, group dinners and colloquia in Eugene, Oregon, and at the town hall of Deadwood, Oregon. Other participants included students and faculty from the University of Oregon, employees of the U.S. Forest Service and members of the Deadwood community. As part of the event, and later while writing an essay about it, I began to realize the extent to which some artists were attempting to reconcile the practice of art to the methods of science.

George had been actively involved in such pursuits for years, through his interest in genetics and through his hybridizing experiments with Pacific Coast irises, and he was well acquainted with other artists working with living media and biological themes. The ART+BIO exhibition [1], which took place at Central Michigan University in March 1998, grew from a series of running conversations that George and I have had about art and its relation to science. We wanted to create a venue and continuing forum for artwork that addresses subjects such as botany, ecology and genetics.

As human beings enter a new millennium with an increased awareness of and sensitivity to the natural environment, it stands to reason that such issues will be reflected in art. The inhuman beauty of nature, long a staple source for landscape painters, now yields to interpretation of a different kind. If the history of human expression is an outing of emotion, the following work can be thought of as an emotional response to the expanding macro- and microcosms. It is the future writ large in the music of the interstices.

David Stairs - Curator, ART+BIO

Art Department

Central Michigan University

132 Wightman Hall

Mt. Pleasant

MI 48859

E-mail: David.C.Stairs@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU

Reference

Artists exhibited in the ART+BIO exhibition, curated by George Gessert and David Stairs, included Benjamin Potter, Suzanne Anker, Gail Wight, Ted Purves, Sonya Rapoport, Martin Zet, Marta Lyall and Hubert Duprat. See Hubert Duprat's work in his article The Wonderful Caddis Worm: Sculptural Work in Collaboration with Trichoptera, Leonardo 31, No. 3 (1998).

                                | gallery entrance |

                   
                            | past exhibitions |

                       
                               | Leonardo On-Line |