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March 09, 2006
Ellen K. Levy
Ellen K. Levy, an artist and teacher of art, science, and technology interrelationships, is President of the College Art Association (2004-6). Recipient of a NASA commission and of an AICA Emerging Artist Award, she was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Arts and Sciences at Skidmore College in 1999, a position funded by the Luce Foundation. She creates genealogies of technological inventions, using the citations that accompany patents to locate earlier manifestations of a particular technology. The more recent inventions incorporate useful aspects of the earlier patents, reflecting that learning (adaptation) has taken place. This procedure is dynamic, involving feed-back, and it can suggest how seemingly obsolete technologies can become “exapted” for new uses. Levy has exhibited widely in the US and abroad, most recently at the Michael Steinberg Gallery (NYC) and the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University (CT). She has been a contributor to symposia and to several books and journals dealing with art and biotechnology. Her publications include Art Journal, Leonardo, Endeavour, and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.
{"Ellen K. Levy's installation of scrolls and outsized 'patent' drawings speaks to our collective imagination in a language that is seductively aesthetic and cerebrally challenging. Her 'collaborations' with inventors transform and combine images and texts from registered patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database to create a genealogy of inventions. These multimedia works, explore the intersections of several industries (e.g., the biotechnology, oil, space, and nuclear industries). Levy offers a running commentary on the nature of capitalism, innovation and our expansive desire to invent future worlds, leavened by poetry and wit."
Zilkha Main Gallery (curated by Nina Felshin)}
Posted by gharp at March 9, 2006 11:31 PM