Laura Splan

About

American   —   Laura Splan is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work mines the materiality of science to reveal poetic subjectivities. Her mixed media projects destabilize notions of the presence and absence of bodies evoking the mutability of categories that delineate their status. Splan’s work compels an intimate engagement with detail calling into question how things are made and what they are made of. She reconsiders perceptions and representations of the corporeal with a range of traditional and new media techniques and often combines the quotidian with the unfamiliar to interrogate cultural constructions of self and other. Her frequent combinations of textiles with technology challenge values of "the hand" in creative production and question notions of agency and chance in aesthetics. Her "Embodied Objects" series uses biometric sensors to create data-driven forms and patterns for digitally fabricated sculptures, weavings and works on paper as well as for movement in her "Material Expressions" performances. Her recent solo exhibition, "Conformations", combines biotech imagery, artifacts and devices with sculptures made from the hand-spun wool of laboratory animals. Splan's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design and Beall Center for Art + Technology. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally and is included in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation and the NYU Langone Art Collection. She has received research funding from The Jerome Foundation and her residencies have been supported by The Knight Foundation, The Institute for Electronic Arts, Harvestworks, and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford University teaching interdisciplinary courses including “Embodied Interfaces”, “Data as Material” and “Art & Biology”. She is currently a Creative Experiments track member at NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator.