Simon Gallery Contemporary Fine Art

Simon Gallery is pleased to present Laura McClanahan in an exhibit opening Tuesday, April 21 and continuing through and Saturday, May 23, 2009. An artist’s reception will be held Friday, April 24, 6-8 p.m. This is Ms. McClanahan’s first solo exhibition at Simon Gallery.

Laura McClanahan’s photography is an investigative study of the optical properties of water, glass and light. In her constructed worlds, she manipulates the mineral and through imposing surfaces and introducing filtered color, she works with life’s most elemental substance to create a narrative about what makes something alive. With her plates and vials she explores the ambiguities between familiar details and abstract configurations in the contained water. Fascinated by archetypal forms, (such as drop, wave and vortex),
captured in the surface tension, McClanahan draws relationships to the influences of repetitive patterning in nature and in the mind of the observer.

In these photographs, Photo Cells, the constructed imagery is an artificial environment that portrays a dream-like experience of swimming through a forest in the surf of the ocean. There are no real microorganisms from the sea involved. Rather, these micro-marine algae, plankton and seaweeds are the cumulative effect of many cells gathered together through her process and magnified by the zoom of the camera’s lens. They are portraits of green tides and algal blooms, bubbles of sea foam and nutrients decaying.  This is Laura McClanahan’s science fictional world of life sustaining qualities where technology takes the eye to places beyond what has been foreseen or imagined. These 30” x 40” digital photographs are part of an ongoing body of work that initiated in 2005.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT
The Hunterdon Art Museum is pleased to present Laura McClanahan: Planktonic Constructs,our first Member Highlight Exhibition. This solo show is awarded to an artist selected from the Annual Members Exhibition. Planktonic Constructs features color photograms and video abstractions inspired by different species of plankton. Using her darkroom enlarger as a microscope, and glass objects to represent microorganisms, the artist creates pictures that resemble various protists, plankton, diatoms and jellyfish. She invites the viewer into a constructed world entirely of her own making that convincingly replicates a scientific investigation. Two intriguing videos transform live jellyfish into a mesmerizing kaleidoscopic panorama. These works reflect McClanahan’s interest in probing life’s origins. The ambiguity of her mysterious forms challenges us to ponder similar questions.
—Mary Birmingham

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Sarah Tanguy, Curator, ART in Embassies Program, and independent curator and critic.
"I was delighted to critique the MFA thesis exhibitions of Class 2007. We had a wonderful exchange, and I hope the artists learned as much as I did from them. Following are some of the insights that emerged from our discussions.
The changing patterns of water are the primary source of inspiration for Laura W. McClanahan. Investigating the interplay between repetition and individuation, she isolates and simplifies water’s myriad energies to create components that evoke speech or thought. Like Chaos theory, the random dissonance seems overwhelming at first, but an underlying order presides. In her photographic collages, dancing meanders bring together distilled, flow patterns in long, vertical diptychs. The process of cutting the printed negatives recalls the power of water to alter its surroundings, while the spacing between the finished panels evokes water’s sense of infinity. Layering carries over into her videos from the Chaos Patterns series, which add the element of movement. In one, rain falls on the window of a moving car against the blur of passing trees in a landscape. Others study the motion of waterfall or the reflections of a pool. Both video and photography are shot in black and white to avoid the potential distraction of color. Through her eyes, we experience water “talking,” and ponder its many stories."