LOCATION in the Virtual Sculpture Park (DAAP)
Frances Whitehead's sculpture, installations, gardens and collaborative public works, operate at the nexus of nature and culture. Recent projects focus on work in the public sphere, environmental and technological issues. Her work with the Arts and Appalachia Clean Streams Program, a joint venture of the NEA and the U.S. Bureau of Mining combined artistic practice, community development, and pollution remediation. Upcoming projects include joining Spoleto USA, Charleston, S.C. as a member of a multidisciplinary urban re-development team to envision the city of the future, and a GIS garden, data-mapping Lake Michigan for the Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago. Frances Whitehead lives and works in Chicago where she has been a Professor of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute since 1985.
COMMENTAIRES DE L'ARTISTE
Understanding the cultural
imperative for artists to operate in a larger society as both citizens
and public intellectuals, I have come to think that artists, among
others, might focus on strategies to re-imagine knowledge;
to model complexity.
Working with a wide range of artistic genres and strategies, I am developing this thinking into a multifaceted aesthetic position, a kind of deep practice, that includes outward-looking, publicly engaged projects, alongside more culturally circumscribed works that are driven by private artistic preoccupations. Many of these projects have included embedded questions about the relationship of art and design, as well as reflections on science, and its apparent twin, technology.
Questions firmly on the table
include:
… What are the ethical underpinnings of my artistic process?
… In an increasingly artificial environment, how can artists participate in the formation and improvement of the larger built environment?
… What are the possibilities for creating a humane, sustainable, technological future, and what are the possibilities for artists to participate meaningfully in that process and in that culture?
… In a world of such apparent complexity, and overwhelming capacity for information, what is role of the artist? What is the future of this expertise? What even, is the future of sculpture ?
… What creative strategies can be used to address these issues?
The exploration of these issues
have formed the conceptual focus of recent projects, including the
exploration of rapid prototyping as a type of co nceptual
"production". The Metamohn ( meta poppy) series
is therefore an exploration into CAD and industrial output as the
lengua franca of design. A design studio, Atelier
Ætopia,
was rhetorically invented specifically for this purpose,
and we are making NATURE.