Suzanne Anker
Concerned with genetics,[2] climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, her work calls attention to the beauty of life and the "necessity for enlightened thinking about nature's 'tangled bank'.
[10] The same year, she participated in the North American Hand Papermaking exhibition organized by Richard Minsky at the Center for Book Arts in New York City.
[11] For her 1979 solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Anker installed large limestone planks that extended from the interior to the exterior of the gallery.
1's "A Great Big Drawing Show" curated by Alanna Heiss with artists Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, Frank Gillette, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, and others.
[16] Her sculpture Cyber-chrome Chromosome from 1991 was included in the exhibition From Code to Commodity: Genetics and Visual Art at the New York Academy of Sciences in 2003.
[18][19] Suzanne Anker curated the exhibition Fundamentally human: contemporary art and neuroscience at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2011.
Co-edited by Suzanne Anker and Sabine Flach and published by Peter Lang since 2013, "it focuses on transdisciplinary, epistemological and methodological approaches to contemporary art.
Linking artistic and scientific practices, tools, techniques, and theories, the volumes investigate the cultures of aesthetics and science studies as they relate to works of art".
[22] Published titles include: Anker co-authored The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age[23] with the American sociologist of science Dorothy Nelkin.
In 2011 Anker contributed to Interspecies, Social Text issue 106 (Volume 29, Number 1, Spring 2011[29]), published by Duke University Press.
[31] Suzanne Anker wrote the foreword to the book Bio Art: Altered Realities, authored by William Myers in 2015.
Appropriating scientific images, she created Gene Pool in 1991, a body of work that includes suspended pigment on large vellum sheets and expansive sculptural arrays employing metallic fibers of stainless steel, copper, aluminum and bronze.
The installation work is emblematic of the interaction of art and science and "conjures up the alchemist's medieval laboratory and its mottled crystal ball".
[50] It features a large glass vessel filled with water and an installation of sculptural forms reminiscent of chromosomal pairs from fish, frogs, gazelles and primates (gorilla, chimpanzee and orangutan[51]), emulating the laboratory technician's charts of the subtle genetic differences between species.
Zoosemiotics was included in Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution curated by Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric, originating at Exit Art, New York, September 2000 and touring to museums nationally through March 2004.
By superimposing images of butterflies on MRI brain scans, the artist explores the ways in which human perception relies on figure/ground relationships.
In this body of work, the artist employs computer-generated 3D modeling and printing processes[64] to produce symmetrical sculptures that resemble the tests created by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach.
Laboratory Life (2005-2007) is an artwork composed of photographs of scientific apparatuses overlaid with images of nature, man-made gardens, and wild floral outcrops.
They are constructed spaces, framed with either pastoral delight in mind, or as a site where nature is scrutinized, expecting to surrender its secrets.
[62] The work was featured in the exhibition GLOBALE: Exo-Evolution (2015-2016), curated by Peter Weibel, Sabiha Keyif, Philipp Ziegler and Giulia Bini at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany.
Produced with a 3D printer employing pigmented plaster and resin, the work takes its cue from the disastrous impacts of toxicity and war.
The title of the project "Remote sensing" originated from a term used in satellite technology to describe computer-generated data used to assess geographical areas that are too problematic or dangerous for human intervention.
These high-resolution images are reprocessed through computer programs converting the photographs' color arrays into 3D protrusions, a technique called displacement mapping.
Employing many Petri dishes, Anker arranges the natural and artificial objects by color, from red to yellow to green to blue to violet.
