Holly Sumner “Luminescent Radiolaria”

Mixed Greens Gallery

poster for Holly Sumner “Luminescent Radiolaria”

This event has ended.

Mixed Greens presents Luminescent Radiolaria, a site-specific window installation by Holly Sumner. Known for her work that often combines informational diagrams with depictions of a living organism, Sumner will present large-scale ink drawings of Radiolaria on translucent logarithmic paper for each of the three windows on 26th street.

In her past work, Sumner has explored the poetic relationship between various forms of abstraction using natural history compendiums, field guides, and old zoology textbooks as a source of inspiration. Both the images and scientific data from these sources inform the structure and composition of the work. Drawings of an enlarged living organism such as plankton or seaweed are laid over colored blocks and lines that resemble flowcharts and diagrams, portraying information invisible to the naked eye through the alteration of scale and graphic charts.

For the window installation, Sumner created large ink drawings of Radiolaria, which are tiny zooplankton (0.1-0.2 mm diameter) that produce intricate mineral skeletons. Found throughout the ocean, they are key components of the marine ecosystem along with phytoplankton. Drawings of these microscopic organisms are made on multiple sheets of logarithmic paper, a material once commonly used for plotting scientific data but now replaced with calculators and computer software, and attached together. Drawing images of tiny marine creatures collected from old textbooks on a medium obsolete in its intended field of use, Luminescent Radiolaria romantically captures a past moment of visually recording and communicating natural life.

Media

Schedule

from January 15, 2015 to March 21, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-01-15 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Holly Sumner

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use