by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Atheists might appreciate artist Gail Wight's exhibition on the importance of science and how it mixes with art.
"I'm definitely an atheist," Wight said. "It's why I enjoy the attempt that science has made to explain things that have previously been accredited to mythical, spiritual or otherworldly powers."
Wight teaches at Stanford as a professor of experimental media arts. She gave a talk Tuesday at the UNM Art Museum about new media and her lower-gallery exhibition called "The Evolution of Disarticulation," which runs through Sunday.
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"I'm interested in science, even though the talk is about new media," Wight said. "I feel like new media is a dangerous name for things that will grow old really quickly. And it also implies technology."
She described her mixed-media show as "a humorous walk through the history of taking things apart in order to understand them." She starts at the 1600s, with naturalists gathering bugs to pin down and
label.
"There are also chromosome printouts from mouse genes on rice paper," Wight said. "Then I fed them to mice and let them chew them up and pee on them."
There are a few pieces about mice, which is fitting, because they're a staple of lab experiments. There's a looped video of a mouse interacting with a wind-up toy mouse.
With her rice paper series, she made a print of 21 individual mouse chromosomes. The mouse she assigned to chew the rice papers was lazy, she said, so she brought in an avid chewer to inspire the
first mouse.
Some pieces are about robotics and genetics, which politicians have a lot of influence over, she said.
"Right now, there's a big focus on genetics as being the uber definition of life," Wight said. "I'm a little suspect of how much of the questions we have left genetics can answer for us. I'm interested in the ways humans define life and consciousness and how those definitions have changed over time. In the past, there have been all kinds of other definitions of life - some have been scientific, and some have been spiritual."
She also teaches an art and biology class at Stanford, where students research artists who have worked with biology-related ideas and topics, such as the
environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy and the modern painter Alex Grey, who illustrates the psychedelic cosmos because, in college, he sometimes dropped acid and hung out in the cadaver room, Wight said.
"It's an advanced class - I teach them how to grow microorganisms," she said. "Art projects are based on topics we've been discussing. So they have to, say, make a work that addresses cosmology, meaning a way that you would organize all life in the world."
They also study the biological breakdown of things that rot
and decay.
"They have to do an assignment that deals with the future, where they think science might be headed in the future," Wight said. "They have to deal with scientific controversies in some way. We often talk about genetics in that piece. There's much political controversy in genetics."
But with all this talk of science, she's adamant that she is no
scientist.
"I'm a layperson, and I really want to understand," she said. "Part of making art is a way of sharing my confusion and my naivetÇ with other laypeople."
