Open Door Interiews

Laurie Frick - Extraordinary

Artist's Statement
Frick uses pattern to replicate the feel of neurons firing in the brain. The use of vaguely familiar cut-up materials are representative of everything the brain processes, the amount that is seen and the amount stored - including the periferal things to which only partial-attention was given.
"I think neuroscience will find there is a link between how the mind processes pattern, and the underlying structure of the brain. How do I connect an abstract idea of neural processing to neuroscience in everyday life, and the rationale for my explorations? I like the idea of art artist expression anticipating scientific proof.", says Frick.

Neuroscience?
Frick has straddled both the world of technology and visual art. Over the past several years, she has studied the developments in neuroscience and believes scientists will begin to unravel the mystery of how the brain uses memory to develop an instant attraction to visual objects and surroundings. She believes aesthetics, is related to brain fluency and the desire to re-experience the familiar. Mathematical proportions are relevant, the attraction to external patterns may emulate the internal neural structure in the mind. "There is a human desire to find the neural mirror to ourselves, even at the most basic level -- the firing pattern of hippocampal neurons.
I'm currently investigating the notion that there is a statistical pattern underlying all cognition. If you could capture the neural rhythm and replay it, you might actually simulate the original experience.", says Frick.

Read more about Frick - Carolinas Health Care Artist-in-Residence in residency at McColl Center in Charlotte, NC.

"INTERSECTIONS OF ART AND SCIENCE"
by Diane Calder

"Invention is not the product of logical thought."--Albert Einstein"Organized perception is what art is all about."--Roy Lichtenstein (Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, East Los Angeles County) Since ancient times, when the Greek goddess Techne served as the inspiration for science as well as for art, individuals willing to look at the bigger picture have acknowledged some degree of mutuality in these seemingly disparate fields. The Greek verb, tikein (to create), and the word "technique" are both derivations of Techne's name. As techniques are employed to make mechanical instruments such as telescopes and microscopes more sophisticated, our range of vision into worlds previously unimagined is extended, opening opportunities for creative artists and scientists to interact.

These sorts of interactions and the focus of In the Minds Sky: Intersections of Art and Science. Curator Mary Davis MacNaughton’s discerning catalogue essay investigates the fusing of inspiration and intellect that probes the fundamental structure of nature, alters views of space and time and formulates new visions of the world. The exhibition presents the work of six artists who take their points of departure from scientific phenomena at extreme scales--from the cosmic to the sub-atomic.The surfaces of Nancy Macko's fourteen-foot long birchwood panels give birth to iridescent layers of meaning in Quintessence: New Constellations. Macko integrates her considerable skills as a painter, digital and graphic artist, as well as interpreter of feminist figuration into the creation of new galaxies filled with life giving, memory-bearing imagery. Constellations of winged beings light the way to free floating forms that suggest ancient ladder climbers searching out honeycombs, or tethered astronauts inhabiting Macko's vision of an egalitarian future.Carol Saindon marks the entry to her dark-walled installation with the phrase, "Because Distance is Impossible to Perceive." Velvety charcoal and white chalk drawings of clusters of stars, inspired by satellite photographs, float on the black walls, suggesting a complexity of time and space. Saindon's vehicle for bridging ancient cultures and distant galaxies is a transparent glass boat projecting the sounds and undulating images of distant oceans as it rides a spiraling swirl of glistening fragmented glass.

Claire Browne's modestly scaled, intuitive pencil drawings on canvas composed of patterns of circles, conjure images of expanding particles that could be cells or constellations. In direct opposition to Browne's subjective, repetitive surfaces are the large scale oil images painted by British artist Mark Francis. These masterfully rendered works pair groupings of dull surfaced black dots that hover above painterly blurred strokes, dancing across sensuously alluring surfaces. The dots resemble viruses, keys to life and death. They allude to the boundaries crossed by Francis in his search for similarities between viral decoding and the modernist grid.The layered stains that float through Dennis Ashbaugh's two huge, color-drenched canvases are inspired by the most cardinal of human identifiers, DNA sequencing. Ashbaugh's gene sequence portraits reflect his fascination with a culture obsessed with science and technology. The less structured of the two works, Montecito Micropore, discloses a red field whose cracked surfaces contain iron filings, holding within it a suggestion of the possibilities and threats inherent in genome experimentation.Recent advances position brain research on the brink of mind boggling revelations. This fact inspired an explorative collaboration between Susan Rankaitis and Dr. David Somers. Rankaitis, an esteemed artist/photographer who deftly seeds fragments of scientific imagery and codes throughout her layered, collage-like surfaces has found her reverse equivalent in Somers, a neuroscientist who studies brain processes with MRI imaging. Together they have fabricated a prototype for a learning lab inside curved grey walls fourteen feet in diameter. They trust the viewer to enter this waiting room and collaborate in the construction of meanings from the hundreds of 5 by 7 inch images that Rankaitis and Somers have fabricated. Manipulated MRI images inform schemes of brain mapping; suggested correlations between various parts of the body and mind mix with images influenced by mass media. Art and science indeed intersect.

More on art and and neuroscience colliding:
"I’ve developed a hypothesis — I think beauty or the sense of great comfort from art is related to the viewer’s early experience and the desire to recover something recognizable. Not at the literal or narrative level of memory, but where pattern operates like music, and provides a rhythm that feels like a familiar recollection at the level just below consciousness. I think science will find attraction and desire are based on brain fluency, which is wired from the cumulative stimulus of individual life experience. By extension, I believe each of us has something like a ‘genome of sensory preference’, which could be mapped. And eventually it’s possible a predictive model of aesthetics could be built for each of us." Laurie Frick

The bloggesphere connecting like firing neurons transferring information in the brain... more about Laurie Frick here

Neuroscience and Art

"The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other. From: To answer our most fundamental questions, science needs to find a place for the arts." By Jonas Leher

In working with Mitchell, (Mitchell's BIO) whose abstract photography is directly related to Neroscience, I have been seeking like minded artists. Here are some links on the topic of neuroscience and art: The work of Steve Miller, intergrating science and art. I like this quote on his website: "It seems to me that the most important gifts the sciences and arts have to offer eachother is a recognition and a synthesis of their different approaches to thinking, their different ways of being in the world. When these differences come together, often uneasily, we witness the full complexity and the mystery, and ultimately the grandeur of being human. Alan Lightman "Nature" vol 434, March 17, 2005. - -- A photographer who has had a history of experiencing/enduring repeated strokes Christian Erroi BIO Images --- Laurie Frick, mixed media artist states on the topic of neuroscience and art: I use pattern, words and color to replicate the feel of neurons firing in the brain. IQ points, bits of memory and accumulated media are all chopped up into a brain memory salad. Neuroscientists think memory is closer to bits flying out a blender than the often cited file-drawer analogy. I imagine the brain breaks down visual time into bits where the novel and odd are as important to recollection as the intensely emotional.

I use vaguely familiar cut-up materials as a stand-in for all the stuff you encounter in a day, where 24 hours are broken into corresponding mathematical equivalents and reorganized into a whole. Science is just moments away from explaining how our minds take in rhythm and how visual recollection and memory affect how each of us respond to art. Many neuroscientists are trying to assess from brain scans what is visually pleasing or beautiful. I think attraction is built on early experience, brain fluency and the desire to recover something recognizable. Not at the conscious or narrative level, but where pattern operates like music, and provides a rhythm that feels like a familiar recollection.
Mapping the brain is possibly the last big frontier, and it seems within reach. I compulsively study neuroscience – maybe deep down I worry about the slow deterioration of my mind and memory….does a fixation ever resolve anything? --- Susan Rankaitis, photographer in collaboration with neuroscientist David Somers. Her Limbick works at Robert Mann Gallery. Intersections of Art and Science at Scripps College - --"I Remember Better When I Paint", narrated by Olivia de Havilland, is the first international documentary about the positive impact of art and other creative therapies on people with Alzheimer's and how these approaches can change the way we look at the disease. A film by Eric Ellena and Berna Huebner, presented by French Connection Films and the Hilgos Foundation.. Among those who are featured are noted doctors and Yasmin Aga Khan, president of Alzheimer's Disease International and daughter of Rita Hayworth, who had Alzheimer's.