2009-04-15--010-018 Painting

The role of the artist is to offer a point of view so that those looking at the work may better reflect on their ways of seeing. Until 2003 the places I painted were physical - the farmhouse in France, the view from the World Trade Center - but I saw my relation to them as exploring manifestations of humanity. Places carry the ideas of the cultures that built them, the scattering of things are traces of the people who lived there. Paintings of place are representations of World Views. In 2003 this interest in place and ideas has took me into an ongoing encounter with genomics and the space of science, a ten year involvement with the Broad Institute (a genomics research institute at MIT) and increasing engagement with the world of interdisciplinary collaborations. In this new body of work I am looking at Art and Science as interacting fields with which we construct meaning and structure our thoughts. As an artist I am used to making leaps of intuition towards new spaces of artistic inquiry. The most recent of these leaps occured in November 2016 when I attended the NAS conference “Discovering the Deep Blue Sea” which brought together a diversity of scientists, technologist, artists and educators, to focus their attention on the Mesopelagic zone. The working group on the microbiome and biodiversity of which I was part, came up with the fascinating overarching question: Does the Ocean have Memories? In other words, can we use the metaphor of memory to ask questions differently about the biological and physical systems of the mesopelagic? And how can interdisciplinary collaborations - including artmaking - lead to new ways of seeing and telling the stories about the ocean? I hope you enjoy these images, and find in them substantive points of entry into the flow of ideas that we call contemporary life.