Ellen K. Levy and Patricia Olynyk “Skeptical Inquirers”
Baruch College/Sidney Mishkin Gallery
This event has ended.
Baruch College presents the exhibition Some Provocations from Skeptical Inquirers: Painted Prints, Photographs, and Videos by Ellen K. Levy and Patricia Olynyk at the Mishkin Gallery.
The magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, was founded in 1976 to promote scientific inquiry, examine claims of pseudoscience and science deniers, and investigate extraordinary occurrences. Acting in its spirit, Ellen K. Levy and Patricia Olynyk will exhibit a selection of their artwork in a range of media that confronts disinformation about climate change (Levy) and misguided perceptions of the medicalized body (Olynyk). Their targets include science deniers, ill-advised medical diagnoses and treatments, and misperceptions of the past and of our time. Levy and Olynyk explore the consequences of false reasoning while looking critically at some historical and contemporary scientific practices.
Ellen K. Levy’s project, Strange Bedfellows, confronts science deniers with seemingly surreal adaptations to climate change. Mixed media works portray morphing, organic forms invading the built environment. Enlarged details of microorganisms are integrated with bits of information from the internet and other human-made systems, showing the changing of biological traits as nature and technology are mutually transformed. JellyfishRods shows jellies clogging the cooling systems of nuclear reactors. BrooklynSlimeMold references scientific work that is attempting to use ancient organisms to solve modern transportation problems. In Migrations 20/20 heat fuses the eye’s network of nerve fibers with interlacing freeways and parched land. Unnatural colorsevoke hallucinatory symptoms of dehydration.
Patricia Olynyk’s work examines the ways in which culture and institutional structures shape our knowledge and understanding of history, science, and the natural world. Her work addresses how interpretation fluctuates between fact and speculation. Large-scale photographs of prosthetic devices probe the practice of bio-elective enhancement, Posthumanism and the human desire to anthropomorphize fetish objects. Comprised of a series of photographs and performance videos, The Mutable Archive enlists a varied group of writers, artists, scientists, medical ethicists, and others to produce a collection of fictional biographies based on a 19th-century physiognomist’s collection of skulls, each inscribed with a tattoo that offers only minimal information on the life of each person.
Levy and Olynyk have collaborated to produce Scenario Thinking, a work that is based on archives of The Skeptical Inquirer. It asks us to consider which categories of human nonsense and pseudoscience have undergone revision or remain persistent over a twenty-year span.
Media
Schedule
from February 19, 2016 to March 26, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-02-18 from 18:00 to 20:00