STEAM Art, Made By Makers

This past weekend I made a quick jaunt up to White Plains, NY to see STEAM at the Arts Westchester exhibition space on Mamaroneck Avenue. Since the show closes this Saturday, I clearly don’t expect many people reading this to change their weekend plans and re-route to Westchester County north of NYC. That said, if you do find yourself in NYC, it’s a quick ride from Grand Central on the Metro-North Harlem line, and it’s worth the trip.

I spent a few hours with the works by 31 artists and makers on view, expecting to see some familiar interpretations of ‘STEAM’ and surprised by others I wasn’t expecting. I won’t go over all the works, but given my own training I am clearly more aligned with the ‘A’ in STEAM than only the STEM fields. Arts for me provide that “aha!” or wow-factor or whatever you want to call it, that gets my mind thinking above and beyond the purely scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematical attributes of the world. From Leonardo to The Bean, arts can be STEM-inspired but ultimately have their own imaginative properties that no other field of study provides. Arts encompass multiple fields of study, and to me there’s no debate: STEAM is the way to go.

Works in STEAM range from a few flat wall art pieces, to giant wall-sized installations. From interactive sculptures to interventions in laboratories documented on video. Several approaches to projection arts are on view. And of course a few works combined technology, sound, light, and sculpture all in one. Those are really special.

Scholar’s Stones by Christopher Manzione. Clearly 3D-printed to you and me, but to someone new to the tech – or even me for that matter! – they look like fanciful formations extracted from some extra-terrestrial asteroid.

Another of Christopher Manzione’s Scholar’s Stones.

Cards with various netspeak acronyms trigger an iOS app to display datapoints, compressing information, perception (through a lens) and reality (a 3D-printed environment in the background) into one plane.

Believe it or not 3D-printers are still a new phenomenon to many. And here a MakerBot Replicator 2 sits adjacent to printouts containing information about the No. 14 Thonet chair, the best-selling chair in the history of humankind, and now yours for the low-low cost of a download.

Inside a box sits a giant chunk of amber and an insect encased inside. Or so it seems. This is actually a video and the insect moves incredibly slowly, the result of it’s capture by high-speed camera. Like a modern-tech Muybridge sculpture in a box, this piece is by Adrienne Klein.

Sherry Mayo’s Safe Haven contains several versions of convex perception: flat paintings made as though the viewer were looking through a fish-eye lens; actual convex mirrors reflecting the world; and security cameras looking back out through their secure bubble-domes.

Beautiful glass globes – some filled with actual blood – give a visual representation of Kathy High’s Blood Wars, “a competition between people’s white blood cells.”

Colored test tubes contain the genes for (from left to right) obesity, anger, serotonin levels, dyslexia, alcoholism, and sexual orientation. The piece ponders, can the human experience really be deduced to this? By Kristin Anderson

A full-size walk-in kaleidoscope by Claudia Jacques is completely disorienting. Will the real Nick Normal please wave hi?

Evan Read’s ultrachrome inkjet prints are the result of influences ranging from television test patterns to the psychedelic. He also just happens to be a geneticist who works for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Trippy!

The largest piece in the show, Rebecca Kamen’s Divining Nature: An Elemental Garden reimagines the Periodic Table of Elements as a series of sculptures that can flexibly fill their environment, be it a museum floor, a gallery wall, or hallway, etc.

Another look at Kamen’s installation, here pictured installed on a wall.

Speak a story into Rebecca Mushtare’s Story Quilt and it will randomly generate a quilt pattern projection.

The story I told resulted in this pattern.

Portable Air Scrubber by William Meyer imagines a polluted environment, where we need plants strapped to our person just to breathe. When not dressing mannequins for the forthcoming airpocalypse, Meyer is a landscape architect focused on designing green roofs.

One of those ‘surprise’ pieces I mentioned earlier, Endless Stories… by Philippe Safire projects bits of fleeting text and image that looks something like a sequencing structure. It also vaguely reminds me of the image macros used as passwords in the film Johnny Mnemnoic.

Tower Epoch by Chris Jordan (CJ). What can I say about this piece other than I’m partial to it. I love it, and have written about one of CJ’s similar pieces previously.

Overlapping projection on clay sculpture, Carl Van Brunt’s North Star is like fractal geometry on hallucinogens. The title alludes to navigation by the stars, always with an orientation, a focus, a wayward point.

Another ‘surprise’ work, this one by friend and fellow maker Maria Michails. Titled The Petri Series: Benzene, a stationary but vehicle-like contraption invites you to crank the bike pedals, generating the necessary power to turn on lights below the ‘petri dish’ sculptures dotting the floor. When lit, the images are microscopic shots of cancer cells. Benzene, known to increase the risk of cancer, is also vital to the manufacturing of gasoline. Oof.

A close-up of one of the petri dishes when lit by pedal-power.

Also not shown is a projection on a pinhead, an interactive staircase with an embedded audio experience, layered photographs of nature reclaiming architecture, Kinect-based heat projection mapping, sandblasted glass sculptures, and much more. Like I said, if you can get there by this Saturday consider a trip to Arts Westchester. If not, look for more maker-influenced and Maker Faire-inspired art shows in your town. It almost begs a whole new taxonomy of art-making, like how a photographer uses photographs or a painter uses paint. What is maker art?

Artists in the exhibition: Kristin Anderson, Lisa Crafts, Scott Fitzgerald, Matt Frieburghaus, Kathy High, Carter Hodgkin, Katherine Jackson, Claudia Jacques, Chris Jordan, Chris Kaczmarek, Rebecca Kamen, Adrienne Klein, Deborah Krikun, Martin Kruck, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, Nora Ligorano and Marshal Reese, Chris Manzione, Sherry Mayo, William Meyer, Maria Michails, Rebecca Mushtare, Patricia Olynyk, Debra Pearlman, Curt Belshe & Lise Prown, Evan Read, Philippe Safire, Jeff Taylor, Carl Van Brunt, April Vollmer