Luke Laffan
The Scientific Art
16 August 2005
Ethical debates, technology, social expression, economic return, controversy and shoulder-shrugging are just some of the common encounters artists and scientists share in their day to day existence. And the commonalities don’t end there: analysing, inferring, synthesising and evaluating are again common processes that inform both the scientific and artistic processes.
Valency is an exhibition of works by six artists who all engage with the art of science directly or thematically in their art-making practice and the show, curated by Executive Director of Craft ACT, Barbara McConchie, is part of the 2005 Science Week Festival.
For McConchie the term chemical valency proves an apt description of the artists and their work that she has brought together for the exhibition. A term describing the power or competence of the atom to perform or connect, Valency brings together artists whose works form “visual intersections with theories, debates, processes and outcomes that have an origin in different scientific disciplines.”
Says McConchie, “People have a strong need to know things, perhaps matched only by a need to classify things… Only until we stumble across inconsistencies, find ourselves in real need of understanding how things work and happen…. are we conscious of the benefits and detriments (of) science.”
The six artists in Valency – Luke Laffan, Anna Gianakis, Avi Amesbury, Brownwen Sandland, Ken Yonetani and Jacqueline Gropp – each have a particular area of science that fascinates them. For Laffan it is the pseudo-sciences of the 19th century such as phrenology, and how the human image came to be centrally located in the supposedly enlightened scientific world. For Gropp it is ideas of conceptualism and essentialism – drawn as they are from art, science and cosmology.
Ceramist Gianakis’ interest lies in the structural formations and configurations of gaseous, liquid and solid matters while for Amesbury political science, particularly as it relates to the government policies that have created Indigenous/Non-Indigenous Australia informs her practice.
Sandlands’ work explores the ethics of animal testing for medical research while Yonetani’s video work documenting his delicate installation uses extinct butterfly forms as a symbol of environmental fragility.
McConchie believes that art and science are made up of a number of different fields but that fundamentally they still germinate from the same very simple starting point – asking “what if?” Art and science are the domains of the imagination she says, “and like any competent atom will seek and find each other in unexpected yet illuminating ways.”
More Information
Valency
14 – 26 August
CSIRO Discovery
North Science Rd, Off Clunies Ross St
Black Mountain, Canberra
Mon-Sun: 9am – 5pm
Inset image: Bronwen Sandlands
Website: http://www.valencyart.com/
