New York-based artist Emilie Clark creates art installations informed by the history of science and natural history. The latest in series of works focused on the work and lives of Victorian women scientists and naturalists, Sweet Corruptions departs from the work of Ellen H. Richards—a sanitary chemist who studied air, water, and food.

Richards was the first female student and then professor at MIT, and had a profound interest in the relationship between people and their environment. She also brought the word “ecology” into the English language. Clark uses Richards’s work as a structure and guide, treating her own studio like a laboratory.

The work in this project includes the collection and preservation of the artist’s family’s food waste for one year; an interactive Research Station sculpture that includes an audio piece, specimens, a dissecting microscope (for the public’s use) and terraria; a book; and, drawings and paintings.

Sponsors

Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller

Maya Lin is inevitably cast as an architectonic artist, but over the past decade she has engaged the vocabulary of a cartographer, making artworks that help viewers to visualize complex natural and cultural systems operating in the world. This exhibition unites sculptural objects alongside what Lin considers to be her final memorial project, What is Missing? An interactive mapping website, What is Missing? relies upon triaxial dimensions of space, as well as those of time—past, present, and future—to engage us with species and habitats that have disappeared or may soon vanish. Utilizing both memory and projection, objective numbers and subjective narrative, What is Missing? asks us to reconsider our relationship to nature at time when it is critical to do so.

Based in San Francisco, photographer and installation artist Stephen Galloway’s technique is directed towards vivid detail, giving every stick, rock, root or shrub a sense of presence. With this site-specific installation, he combines sculptural elements, composed of natural materials gleaned from the Sierra Nevada, with photographic images of the same materials. His work alludes to various aspects of nature, from the physical to the cosmological to the mythic.