The Visionary Potential of Science and Art: Q & A with Gloria Duan

Gloria is a Chinese-American artist currently based in Chicago, IL. Her practice falls within the poetics of science and philosophy, examining concepts of the un-guessed.

http://www.gloriafanduan.com/

Tell us how you make the large cyanotypes that are part of this exhibition? Do you consider them 2D pieces or do you think of them as more sculptural?

I first make a few cyanotype pallets to paint with. Each mixture contains varied amounts of potassium ferricyanide, ferric ammonium citrate, and water. This gives me a range of cyan and orange tones to work with. Next, I paint the cyanotype onto loosely draped silk under red light to minimize UV exposure. I wait for the cyanotype to dry, and then move the fabric outside onto a clear plastic sheet, quickly placing hand-blown glass objects, and contains with water, onto the fabric so as to create the second painted layer. I also wet some areas with water, and add more cyanotype to other parts. I wait for the fabric to expose depending on the weather conditions. Sometimes I expose under sunlight, and other times by moonlight. During the exposure, I move objects around and fold the fabric into different configurations. Afterwards, I remove the objects, rinse the cyanotype residues, and dry the silk. When the fabric is dry, I repeat this process to create more depth in certain areas. Because of this process, I consider these pieces paintings to be viewed from 360 degrees, and so, utilizes a Mobius strip form that considers both sides of the image as frontal. I view paintings as objects with a surface of illusion, and see them as inherently sculptural.

What other artists or individuals influenced your work and what aspects of their creations sparked inspiration and why?

This current work is in discourse with installation artists who create ephemeral and elemental works involving ideas of weightlessness, light, water, and space. Such artists include Tomas Saraceno, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, and Do Ho Suh. Unlike Turrell’s Skyspaces and Eliasson’s Fog Assembly however, being literal light and water installations, this project is an exploration of compiling marks made by these ephemeral bodies, especially water, light, and the many forms of waves. In this way, the works’ process is more similar to Thomas Ruff’s topographical photographs of windswept Mars, and the moody water textures of Sayre Gomez’s paintings.These works draw literary influences from novelist Haruki Murakami’s many metaphysical metaphors involving water and the psychic landscape, and the book of poetry about the color blue, Bluets by Maggie Nelson.

Your pieces and presentation involve a variety of materials that work together to create the piece. What brought you to each of these mediums and inspired you to combine them?

This project aims to semantically describe mutable and ephemeral subjects, phenomena, and materials, through their unguessed synchronicities. Topics include waves, water, wind, light, shadow, glass, pure energy, floating, suspension, and expansion. This cyanotype process indexes transparent materials such as water, hand-blown glass objects, and clear plastics in order to photograph the disembodied physicality of transparent materials, as an autonomous form within space, rather than a distortion that reflects its surroundings. The transparency of these mediums allows varying degrees of light to reach through each object and display its composition through an x-ray-esque projection. Through cyanotype, the incorporeal materiality of transparency is captured and becomes indexed within a photographic afterimage. Built from the catalytic effects of light and heat, the cyanotype process also parallels the chemical reactions and thermal energies that form each transparent medium. This exploration into transparent and translucent materials simultaneously solidifies the ephemeral, and presents solidity as fluid and disembodied. The suspension of the work in mid-air is to simulate the weightlessness of microgravity. Its Mobius shape questions the cyclic nature of physicality, and form in space. The hexagonal and octagonal mixed media paintings display recurring symbols, which reference the mediums and motifs used in the cyanotype, to narrate the visual poetics of an idea that can be seen to center around capturing an ephemeral body.

Your work combines art and science and this is reflected in your life having attended Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology as well as the Rhode Island school of design. At what point did your interests combine? How was/is your experience finding and conveying the relationship between science of art?

My practice and interests are still evolving. I’ve always been interested in the visionary potential of science and art, which for example, has been well established through science fiction. Specific to my practice, I am interested in challenging perception, through a scientific and artistic lens. I am interested in the unknown ways of seeing- multi-dimensionally, or beyond our visual spectrum and magnitude- and how these ideas challenge our focus of the human experience.