Gail Wight (born 1960, in Sunny Valley, Connecticut)[1] is an American new media artist and professor, whose work fuses art with biology, neurology, and technology.
[8][9] In a 2008 project, Ground Plane, for example, she photographed fossil bones in snowflake-like patterns to create a meditation on both ephemerality and deep time.
[10] Wight's concentration on scientific and technological elements in her artwork stemmed from a childhood curiosity about a family member's illness that was never talked about.
Learning all that she could about contemporary biology prompted her to branch out in her artwork, and today she works with a mix of sculpture, video, interactive media, installations, print, and text.
In exploded views, Wight pulls apart wind-up mechanical toys, “arranging their mechanical parts into anatomical charts, the quintessential tool of Cartesian understanding.”[13] Elizabeth Mickaily-Huber, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor, Department of Engineering at the University of San Francisco, writes, “Gail Wight’s work brings to mind a child's natural inclination to break toys apart to understand how they work and what's inside….Gail's selection of toys goes from those that represent the genius of nature to those that represent the intellect of humans, from animals to little robots.”[13] Wight has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at the Beall Center for Art + Technology (Irvine, California), the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno), and the San Francisco Center for the Book, as well as numerous group exhibitions around the world, including the International Biennial of Contemporary Art Of Seville (Spain), the Natural History Museum (London), and The Physics Room (Christchurch, New Zealand).