Please join us for a talk by Rian Hammond, Günes-Hélène Isitan and Moira Williams, who are Spring 2018 artists in residence at the Coalesce Center for Biological Art. Each of these artists will present their residency artworks in progress, which include musical instruments that interpret unique ‘fingerprints’ of the gut flora, artistic explorations into hormone engineering, foraged bio-imaging-technologies and living Kombucha sculptures. Coalesce is a hybrid studio laboratory facility located on UB’s North Campus dedicated to enabling hands-on creative engagement with the tools and technologies of the life sciences. Each academic year, six to eight artists in residence are selected following an international call for proposal.

Rian Hammond is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher living in Baltimore MD. Their work explores the myth of scientific objectivity by focusing on the often unseen interplay between scientific advancement and cultural production, technological progress and desire. Most recent work, “Open Source Gendercodes,” focuses on the intersection of gender variation and technoscience. By developing novel hormone production technologies, OSG attempts to queer current regimes of ownership and bio-power. Rian is currently a pluripotent cell at the Baltimore Underground Science Space, and 2017-2018 artist in residence at COALESCE biological art laboratory of University at Buffalo, NY.
http://ryanhammond.us/

Günes-Hélène Isitan is a Canadian artist-researcher in biomedia arts. Her practice, at the intersection of art, biology and philosophy, challenges what it means to be human: created in a laboratory using methods borrowed from microbiology, her visual pieces and living installations sets forth a thoroughly entangled multispecies humanity. Going beyond anthropocentrism, her works thus reveals the interdependency relations and co-becoming fates from which us and our world emerges. Günes-Hélène has presented her series in individual and group exhibitions in galleries and museum in Canada, USA, Germany, Korea and Australia; they also have been featured in books and art magazines internationally. She is represented both by Galerie uNo in Quebec and the SciArt Center in New York.
http://www.gunesisitan.com/

Moira Williams’ performance, public walks, sculpture and sound work connects diverse bodies of knowledge to our environment and its complex ecology teeming with many forms of life and beliefs to ask: “How do we come to know what it is we know? How do we raise our consciousness? How do we venerate the individual and the community?" Moira’s work has been seen at Thomas Hirschorn’s Gramsci House Bronx, Walk 21 Munich, No Longer Empty’s This Side of Paradise Bronx, DUMBO Arts Festival, The Kitchen, Dorsky Curatorial Gallery, Bowery Arts + Sciences, Socrates Sculpture Park, Center for Book Arts, MoMA PS1, iLAND, Flux Factory, New Museum Idea City, Movement Research Festival, Alice Yard Trinidad, Ruimte in Beweging Netherlands and the Ghetto Biennial,Haiti.
http://www.moira670.com/

About Coalesce:
Coalesce: Center for Biological Art is a hybrid studio laboratory facility dedicated to enabling hands-on creative engagement with the tools and technologies of the life sciences. Coalesce is a facet of UB’s Community of Excellence in Genome, Environment and Microbiome.
http://www.buffalo.edu/gem/coalesce

Wednesday, May 9 at 7:00 PM Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY

Coalesce Center for Biological Art

308 Hochstetter Hall | UB North Campus | 716-645-9121