* naturetech (on view at the Fitchburg Art Museum)

http://www.fitchburgartmuseum.org/naturetech.php

naturetech


naturetech spotlights three Massachusetts artists – Nathalie Miebach (sculpture), Cristi Rinklin (painting), and Michelle Samour (mixed media) – whose colorful, data-driven, abstract artworks are fueled by collisions of art, nature, science, and technology. Miebach, Rinklin, and Samour each employ unique visual vocabularies that prompt questions about the natural world and offer creative ways to see, organize, depict, and understand it.
 

Nathalie Miebach’s turbulent, explosive artworks are rooted in real-world scientific research. Miebach translates climatic data derived from high and low-tech instruments, as well as personal observations, into three-dimensional sculptures. Woven from reed and rope and punctuated with paper in a prism of hues, Miebach’s dizzying forms transform information normally relegated to two-dimensional charts, maps, and graphs into abstract objects that burst with knowledge about weather patterns, hurricanes, storms, blizzards, changing tides, temperatures, and whipping winds. These contemporary basketry-based sculptures are artworks and tools, creative expressions and authentic records that combine the methodologies of astronomy, ecology, and meteorology with those of art.
 
 
 Cristi Rinklin’s billowing, swirling, smoldering, atmospheric paintings are inspired by portrayals of the landscape (including rivers, mountains, clouds, smoke, and fog) throughout the history of art as well as those found in wallpaper, video games, and virtual realms. In every case, the artistic landscape is a constructed space of questionable authenticity when compared to the natural world. Rinklin both exposes and embraces this artificiality. She fuses and manipulates appropriated landscape imagery beyond recognition and uses the resulting digital collages as source material for her mesmerizing paintings.  Rinklin’s new, uncharted, improbable terrains hover between fantasy and reality, premonition and memory.
 

 

Michelle Samour’s multi-media artworks and vibrant tinsel paintings are anchored in an affinity for Victorian-era scientific illustrations, instructional charts, and cabinets of curiosities. She is drawn to the order, symmetry, and shimmer found in the natural world (single-cell protozoa about to divide, butterflies and plants with central radii, or beetles with iridescent bodies, for example), and the ways our technologies make such data and imagery accessible to us. According to the artist, we live in an age “in which computers and phones have become virtual wonder cabinets of visual and textual information.” Samour’s eclectic artworks highlight the patterns and couplings so prevalent in nature and – by extension – our increasingly digitized lives. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
naturetech will be on view at the Fitchburg Art Museum from March 8 – June 7, 2015.
 
naturetech was organized by Curator Mary M. Tinti.