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
ARTIST STATEMENT
This body of work called Planktonic Constructs is a search for origins and a look into the underlying structure of life. In a kind of spontaneous generation I transform silica, light and chemicals into these science fictional life forms. Like looking at glass slides under a microscope I can see deeply into the organisms to find their diatomic test or cell membrane. I create photograms with clear glass objects, some of my own design, to serve as models of plankton. I place them on light-sensitive paper in the darkroom and use white, color-filtered or laser light to expose the paper. This casts a shadow of the glass onto the paper and reveals its microstructure and imperfections not normally visible.
I often video water forms such as waves and vortexes that create hypnotic effects. In the video, Free Associations,the movement of the primitive moon jellyfish is recorded. To emphasize its movement I put it into a four-square grid creating a correspondence to human symmetry. Like the Rorschach Inkblot test I ask the viewer, “What might this be?”
The second video in the exhibition, Hydrosis, is a pun for hydra and hypnosis. (Hydrotherapy is the treatment of illness through water therapy.) Regarding our own psychology, the emphasis today is so often on diagnoses, prescriptions and drug and alcohol abuse, that I cannot resist questioning what makes us sane. As an alternative to medication I want to point in the direction of meditation. By recording hypnotic movements, viewers can get involved in a meditative state and perhaps lose their sense of control and fear.

—Laura McClanahan