This month on Live Culture, Martha is delighted to be in conversation with artist Suzanne Anker about her exhibit After Eden, up now at The Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven CT. Suzanne is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, she calls attention to the beauty of life and the “necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s ‘tangled bank’.”

Anker is a pioneer in Bio Art, focusing on the alteration of nature, in both the natural world and the scientific lab. This exhibition marks the debut of After Eden, Anker’s most recent body of work, comprising a series of photographs and collages constructed over the last two years. Anker frequently works with botanical specimens, medical museum artifacts, laboratory apparatus, microscopic images and geological specimens. She works across mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights. All of the exhibition images represent botanical specimens she has grown – from flowers to ferns to trees. Employing traditional "cut and paste" techniques of twentieth-century collage, she creates imaginary specimens that one day may be possible to exist. Ceramic sculptures made from deep sea sponges appear as asteroids making the connection between how little we know about the oceans and outer space. Other featured works refer to genetics, the origin of life and synthetic biology.

Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Beijing Art & Technology Biennial, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Daejeon Biennale, Korea; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; P.S.1 Museum, New York, NY; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, Berlin, Germany; the Center for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Germany; the Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; the Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; and the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

Anker’s exhibitions have been the subject of reviews and articles in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and Nature. Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Her writings have appeared in Art and America, Seed Magazine, Nature Reviews Genetics, Art Journal, Tema Celeste and M/E/A/N/I/N/G.

She has hosted twenty episodes of the Bio Blurb show, an Internet radio program originally on WPS1 Art Radio, in collaboration with MoMA in NYC, now archived on Alana Heiss’ Clocktower Productions. She has been a speaker at Harvard University, the Royal Society in London, Cambridge University, Yale University, the London School of Economics, the Max-Planck Institute, University of Leiden, the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Banff Art Center, and many others.

Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave
traditional and experimental media in her department’s Bio Art Lab.

About ECOCA: The Ely Center of Contemporary Art’s mission is to reaffirm Grace Ely’s testamentary wishes for an art center where artists, arts organizations, and the public assemble, exchange, learn, and engage through exhibitions, performances, and emerging contemporary practice.The exhibition and talks are free and open to the public. The show was organized by Gallery Director Debbie Hesse and included a public talk as a part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven.

see more here: https://elycenter.org/
& here: http://suzanneanker.com/

Suzanne Anker: After Eden
June 5 – July 17, 2022
The Ely Center of Contemporary Art
51 Trumbull Street New Haven, CT 06510