Invisibility: Powers & Perils

On View: September 17, 2024 - February 22, 2025

Closed Dec. 21 - Jan 6 for Holiday Break

The condition of invisibility—and its counterpart, hypervisibility—has long played an important role in science, literature and the arts. More recently it has become the locus of some of the most pressing struggles of our time. Vulnerable populations around the world have long borne the effects of both invisibility and hypervisibility—increasingly so in the digital age of drone warfare, facial recognition and surveillance. The politics of the invisible also permeates the planet’s ongoing environmental destruction by human beings. Even if we have begun finally to acknowledge the reality and consequences of climate change, the complex invisibility of its causes and its incremental, often hard to see impacts–species extinction, sea rise, desertification—remain a constant challenge.

Invisibility demands that we both recognize and attempt to think beyond our current conceptual limits. It is what science encounters when it confronts phenomena such as black holes. Ninety-nine percent of the universe, namely dark matter and dark energy, is invisible to us. Indeed the world is shining with things we cannot see. Once grasped as a challenge to an all-too human-centered worldview, invisibility can teach us to discover a multiplicity of exquisite visibilities–such as those of bumblebees, mycelium, and birds– that reveal the myriad blind spots of the human sensorium.

This exhibition highlights the work of artists and scientists striving to render visible the people, histories and planetary conditions that have been erased within the cultural mainstream, helping to make legible the limits of our own conception of the invisible and its ecological and humanitarian ramifications.

Participating Artists: Adam Harvey, Nene Humphrey, Susanne Kriemann, Cécile Lapoire, Juergen Mayer H., Richard Mosse, Operator (Ania Catherine & Dejha Ti), Katie Paterson, Sondra Perry, Afroditi Psarra, Sarah Rosalena, Ix Shells, Tavares Strachan.

This exhibition also includes ephemera related to rare invisibility amulets, first edition books by H.G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, specimens, and images either provided or produced by Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHTC), Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), LIFE Magazine (Gordon Parks & Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man issue), Occidental College Moore Lab of Zoology, Occidental College Special Collections, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

Screen Reader Friendly Exhibition Guide

This exhibition is curated by Yael Lipschutz and presented in collaboration with Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

"Invisibility: Powers & Perils" is among more than 70 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

closeup black & white portrait of artist, partially obscured by web query graphics

Adam Harvey

A person wearing glasses with short brunette hair writes in a book

Nene Humphrey

A person with blond hair and glasses on faces the camera, one arm propped up on a chair.

Susanne Kriemann

over the shoulder close up of the artist looking directly to camera, wearing a white hard hat and a headlamp

Cécile Lapoire

A bald person with facial hair wearing a black long sleeve shirt faces the viewer with his left hand gripping his left wrist. He looks content and serious.

Juergen Mayer H.

A man holds a large camera in a grassy fiel.

Richard Mosse

Two people face us with intense expressions of seriousness. The left person is shorter than the right. They both have short hair and wear fashionable clothing.

Operator

A person with blond hair wearing a white T shirt faces the viewer, looking serious.

Katie Paterson

medium portrait of artist, smiling, wearing blue button-up shirt and glasses

Sondra Perry

A person with brunette hair and bangs llooking to the bottom right corner of the frame, wearing an ornate shirt.

Afroditi Psarra

A person with long black hair and round silver earrings looks at the camera, serious.

Sarah Rosalena

A digitally abstracted image of a person making eye contact with the viewer, with a serious expression. The distortions are pixelated white lines on a black background that form the image of the person.

Ix Shells

A man faces the camera with a serious expression and wearing a black turtleneck.

Tavares Strachan

Adam Harvey (US/DE) is an artist and applied researcher based in Berlin focused on computer vision, privacy, and surveillance. He is a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (2010) and is the creator of the VFRAME.io computer vision project, Exposing.ai dataset project, and CV Dazzle computer vision camouflage concept.

adam.harvey.studio

Nene Humphrey was born in Portage, Wisconsin and has lived in New York since 1978. Her work explores loss, the neurobiology of emotion and the beauty inherent in both. The integration of art and science is fundamental to Humphrey’s practice. As a long-term artist in residence at New York University’s LeDoux Lab, she collaborates with neuroscientists to depict the seemingly infinite space of emotion and memory as it is processed in the brain. This work includes, drawing, field recordings and videos, and is integrated into performances, installations, sculpture and video works. Collaboration across disciplines has become increasingly important to Humphrey’s practice. Collaborators include: Mallory Catlett,
Roberto Carlos Lange, Matana Roberts, Ziboulkle Martinaityte, Anaïs Maviel, and Simon Harding.

Humphrey has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Sculpture Center, New York, NY the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX, Mead Museum, Amherst, MA, Palmer Museum, PA, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and the Lesley Heller Gallery, New York, NY.

She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, Brown Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Dora Maar Foundation, Watermill Arts and Anonymous was a Woman among others. Her work has been written about in numerous publications including The New York Times, Art in America and ArtNews, and Sculpture Magazine.

https://www.nenehumphrey.com/

Susanne Kriemann is an artist, professor for Code & Image at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, and lecturer at NYU Berlin.Together with Aleksander Komarov she co-organizes the artist initiative ABA AiR Berlin Alexanderplatz since 2010. With an expanded concept of the photographic document, Susanne Kriemann explores landscapes as analogue ‘recording systems’ for human-caused processes. Ecology is prevalent in both her subject matter and working methods. An intrinsic feature of her work is the application of the researched material in prints and exhibitions. This approach is interwoven with archaeological and geological research, allowing the (distant) past to be layered with the shared present and a speculative future. Matter, whether organic or industrially produced like (micro)plastics or radioactive fission products, incorporates this broader perspective of agency. For some years now, Susanne Kriemann has been exploring the idea of collaborating with entities or aspects of nature that are not traditionally considered human. With her work she raises hopeful questions as we witness climate change and technological disruption.

Kriemann’s work was exhibited internationally, upon others at The Wattis San Francisco; Kunsthalle Wien; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Winterthur, CO Berlin and MK&G Hamburg; She has participated in the 2nd Diriyah Biennale Riyadh, 11th Shanghai Biennial, 10th and 11th Gothenburg Biennial, 2nd Karachi Biennial, 5th Moscow Biennial and 5th Berlin Biennial. Further she participated in various artist residency programs, including 2019 NTU CCA Singapore and Goethe Institute Colombo. Since 1998 she has co-authored seventeen artist’s books.

https://susannekriemann.info/

Cécile Lapoire was born in Northern France. Early on she was determined to understand the universe and to do so studied the laws of physics. She eventually obtained a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics and participated in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at CERN, Switzerland. Since then, she got caught by the beauty of the world and is spending her time exploring it and experimenting with different media through fiber works.

Juergen Mayer H. is a German architect and artist. His office, together with partners Andre Santer and Hans Schneider, J. MAYER H. und Partner is an international award winning architecture office with projects at the intersection of architecture, communication, and new technology. J. MAYER. H. has a wide array of completed national and international projects and has been honored with many international awards. He studied at Stuttgart University, The Cooper Union and Princeton University. His work has been published and exhibited worldwide in museums and biennales and is part of numerous collections including MoMA New York, SF MoMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, Kunstbibliothek Berlin, State of Berlin Museum Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlinische Galerie State Museum of Berlin, Architekturmuseum der TU München, Architekturmuseum Berlin as well as numerous private collections. Memberships include the advisory boards at Princeton University Architecture School, The Bauhaus Stiftung Dessau and Flussbad Berlin e.V. and the University of Miami School of Architecture.

https://jmayerh.de/

Richard Mosse lives and works in New York and Ireland. Recent exhibitions include the NGV Triennial, Melbourne, Australia; Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, China; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Nasher Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Duke University, Durham, NC; Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; National Gallery of Art in Washington, Washington, D.C.; Barbican Gallery, London, UK; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; International Center of Photography, New York, NY; and Tate Modern, London, UK. He is a recipient of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Yale Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, a grant from Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and has received a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship. Mosse represented Ireland at the 55th Venice Art Biennale. His latest monograph, The Castle, was selected as The New York Times Magazine’s Top Ten Photobooks of 2018. Mosse earned his MFA from Yale University and a Postgraduate Degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London.

https://www.richardmosse.com/

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are an artist duo whose collaborative practice, Operator, develops critical and conceptual approaches to experience. With Ti’s background as a multimedia artist and HCI technologist, and Catherine’s as a choreographer and performance artist, they engineer medium-agnostic output, joining environments, technology, and the body. Their exploration into privacy and extractive technologies began with their installation On View (2019), commissioned by SCAD Museum of Art, and continues with the Privacy Collection, a durational release of works exploring the tension between privacy and transparency in blockchain technology. For their most recent work, Human Unreadable, they created an on-chain generative choreography method.

Operator has been awarded by The Lumen Prize (Immersive Environments in 2021 and Generative Art Award in 2023) ADC Awards (Gold Cube), S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention), and MediaFutures (a European Commission funded programme). They have spoken at events and institutions including Christie's Art+Tech Summit, University of Cambridge, Art Basel, ZKM, Francisco Carolinum Museum, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, and MIT Open Doc Lab. For MoMA’s 2023 Postcard Project, Operator was included as one of the first 15 artists to launch the project to the public. Originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Madrid, Spain.

https://www.operator.la/

Katie Paterson is known for her conceptual artworks that have involved broadcasting the sounds of a melting glacier live to a visitor on a mobile phone in an art gallery, mapping all the dead stars in the universe, compiling a slide archive of the history of darkness across the ages, custom-making a light bulb to simulate the experience of moonlight, burying a nano-sized grain of sand deep within the Sahara desert, and sending a re-cast meteorite back into space. Katie has exhibited internationally, from London to New York, Berlin to Seoul, and her works have been included in major exhibitions such as Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Guggenheim Museum New York, and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She was the winner of the Visual Arts category of the South Bank Awards, and is an honorary fellow of Edinburgh University.

www.katiepaterson.org

Sondra Perry makes videos and performances that foreground the tools of digital production as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and to remobilize their potential.

sondraperry.com

Afroditi Psarra is a multidisciplinary artist and an Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington where she runs the DXARTS Softlab. Her research focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts with a critical lens. She is interested in the use of the body as an interface of control, and the revitalization of tradition as a methodology of hacking existing norms about technical objects. Her art practice builds on and extends the work of Cyber and Techno-Feminism(s) and the idea of bodies as archives of information, and manifests through e-textiles, wearables, performances, installations, and sound art.

She has exhibited her work internationally in venues such as Onassis Stegi, Bozar, Laboral, EMST, Ars Electronica, Transmediale and CTM, Eyeo, Amber, Piksel, and WRO Biennale between others, and published at conferences like Siggraph, ISWC (International Symposium of Wearable Computers), DIS (Designing Interactive Systems), C&C (Creativity and Cognition), and EVA (Electronic Visualization and the Arts).

http://afroditipsarra.com

Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) is an interdisciplinary artist who works between traditional craft techniques and emerging technology. She is Assistant Professor of Art in Computational Craft at UC Santa Barbara. She was recently given the Creative Capital Award, the Artadia Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize. She has had solo exhibitions with the Columbus Museum of Art, LACMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Clockshop, and Blum Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collection at LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.

https://www.sarahrosalena.com/

Itzel Yard, known by her artistic pseudonym Ix Shells, is a Panamanian-based new media artist specializing in sound, generative art, and the creative space between the two. Working with TouchDesigner, a visual node-based programming language, she explores the evanescent interactions between wavelength, velocity, and visual expression, shaping a creative process driven by intuition and emotion. Architecture, namely the geometric structures of Brutalism, is key to her practice as she creates works with exquisite detail and spatial depth. Actively seeking new inspiration, she pulls patterns present in her daily life, before abstracting them together through elements of digital aesthetics like glitch, gradients and pixelation. The resultant compositions are methodically layered tapestries pulsating with energy and rhythm. Yard has become widely recognized for this style in the contemporary digital art space, which she refers to as 'Caribbean glitch'. In May 2021, she became the highest-selling female generative artist when her piece Dreaming at Dusk was purchased for over $2 million. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and, following a residency at the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark), Yard features as the only digital artist in the museum's exhibition, Against All Odds.

https://y.at/%E2%9B%93%F0%9F%95%B3%E2%9C%A8/go

Tavares Strachan's artistic practice activates the intersections of art, science, and politics. Themes of invisibility, displacement, and loss are central to his work, which questions historically canonized narratives that exclude or obscure others. Strachan’s ambitious, open-ended practice has included collaborations with numerous organizations and institutions across the disciplines. Strachan was born in 1979 in Nassau, Bahamas, and currently lives and works between New York City and Nassau. He received a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. He has exhibited internationally and received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2022).

https://www.instagram.com/tavaresstrachan/?hl=en

About the Curator

Yael Lipschutz

Yael Lipschutz is an artist and curator. She holds a PhD in Art History and has organized large-scale exhibitions such as Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Ai Weiwei: Trace at the Skirball Museum, Los Angeles. Yael is the curator of two Getty PST Art + Science exhibitions: World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project (co-curated with Cameron Shaw at The California African American Museum, Fall 2024) and Invisibility: Powers & Perils (OXYArts, 2024).

Invisibility: Powers & Perils

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