Interthinking Art and Science

Various Artists

February 27 - March 3, 2023

Gordon Snelgrove Gallery 

STRUCTURIST FELLOW 2023 RESEARCH OUTCOMES AND ACTIONS

Dr. Márton Orosz, Founder and Curator of the Collection of Photography and Media Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts–Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest and Acting Director of the Vasarely Museum is only the second recipient of the ambitious and interdisciplinary Structurist Fellowship Creative Research Grant.

The fellowship was established to propagate the legacy of The Structurist, an international interdisciplinary journal founded in 1960 by Eli Bornstein that addresses art, architecture, ecology, culture and communication.

Dr. Orosz will present a public keynote lecture, chair a mini-symposium of international and emergent scholars, and introduce the documentary film produced throughout his fellowship entitled, György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science, at its world premiere screening at the Remai Modern. These events will be scaffolded by an exhibition of ephemera, original documents and artworks inspired by the intersections of imagining technologies, light and other phenomena as artistic material, and the aspirational social ideals that proliferate within the pages of the Structurist. This fecund milieu is brought into historic and specific focus in the film, the expanded programming and specific events bring into rich conversation the constant oscillation of art and science.

exhibition
Interthinking Art and Science
Monday, February 27 to March 3, 2023
University of Saskatchewan, Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, Murray 191

Weeklong Structurist Fellowship Events

artist's talk
Sahar Soheilisadigh, MFA CANDIDATE ARTIST’s TALK
Wednesday, March 1st, 2023, 12:30 to 1:20 PMUniversity of Saskatchewan, Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, Murray 191With tea and small cakes + fruits

artist's talk
Shelby Lund, MFA CANDIDATE ARTIST’s TALK
Wednesday, March 1st, 2023, 6:30 to 7:20 PMUniversity of Saskatchewan, Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, Murray 191With canapes and donation bar  

public lecture
Art as Luminoscience: György Kepes and a new medium sculpted from light
Thursday, March 2nd, 2023, 4:00 PMUniversity of Saskatchewan Convocation Hall, Saskatoon CanadaLight snacks and refreshments will be provided

mini symposium
How To Design a Car that Can Make Friends with a Tree: György Kepes and the Agency of Visual Research from Mid-Century into Contemporary Art
Friday, March 3rd, 2023, 1:00 - 4:00 PM
University of Saskatchewan Convocation Hall, Saskatoon Canada
With Márton Orosz, Nina Czegledy, Oliver Botar, Steven Rayan and Jean-Sébastien Gauthier
Light snack and refreshments will be provided

film premiere
György Kepes: Interthinking Art + ScienceDirected by Márton Orosz2023, Hungary, 80 minutes
Friday, March 3rd, 2023, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada

“With the scientist’s brain, the poet’s heart and the painter’s eye”— this was the proverb of Hungarian-American artist, educator, and impresario György Kepes. A forgotten precursor of media art, Kepes was among the first to use the term ‘visual culture’ as an independent research subject in a contemporary sense. As the architect of the Light Workshop at the New Bauhaus/School of Design in Chicago in 1937, and as the founder and first director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachussets Institute of Technology in 1967, Kepes’s enterprise was to fill the gap between the humanities and the sciences. The powerful new tools he offered to “intersee” and “intercommunicate” knowledge on a participatory basis proved to be foundational for a program that defined the aesthetic agency of the ecological consciousness.

Márton Orosz’s documentary film is the first comprehensive assessment of Kepes’s animated life, which introduces him not only as a shapeshifter of modernism but also as a polymath and visionary thinker. Kepes’s legacy and faith in optical democracy grant him a pioneering role in the history of the Art and Technology Movement.

With introduction by Márton Orosz and post-screening question period. 

György Kepes, the founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT, 1967. Photo: Ivan Massar, Black Star

 

Márton Orosz interviewing Friedrich St. Florian architect and former CAVS Fellow in his office in Providence, Rhode Island, 2011. Photo: István Kaczári 

 

György Kepes, Juliet Peacock Feather and Red Leaf, 1938. Courtesy of Kepes Institute, Eger, Hungary

 

György Kepes, What Little Girls are Made of, 1938. Courtesy of Steven Daiter Gallery, Chicago

György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science

  

Recorded Events

public lecture
Art as Luminoscience: György Kepes and a new medium sculpted from light
Thursday, March 2nd, 2023, 4:00 PM

 

mini symposium
How To Design a Car that Can Make Friends with a Tree: György Kepes and the Agency of Visual Research from Mid-Century into Contemporary Art
Friday, March 3rd, 2023, 1:00 - 4:00 PM
With Márton Orosz, Nina Czegledy, Oliver Botar, Steven Rayan and Jean-Sébastien Gauthier

 

About

Márton Orosz
Márton Orosz (b. 1979, Budapest, Hungary) is the Founder and Curator of the Collection of Photography and Media Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts–Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest. He is also the Acting Director of the Vasarely Museum affiliated with the same institution. He has published widely on new media, kinetic art, concrete art, photography, and film history, and curated exhibitions on these subjects internationally.

Oliver Botar 
Recipient in 2022 of the prestigious Moholy-Nagy Award, Oliver A. I. Botar is Professor of Art History and Associate Director at the School of Art, University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. His Ph.D. (Toronto) was on Biomorphic Modernism and Biocentrism. The nexus of Biocentrism-Modernism, the Hungarian avant-garde, László Moholy-Nagy and the origins of new media art have been research focuses. He has lectured, published, and curated exhibitions in Canada, the US, Europe and Japan. He is author of Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered (2006), Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts (2014) and a book on Andor Weininger’s Canadian sojourn, as well as numerous articles, book chapters and exhibition catalogues. He is co-editor of Biocentrism and Modernism (with Isabel Wünsche, 2011), and telehor (with Klemens Gruber, 2013). Botar also works on Canadian art, and is currently working on a book on settler art in Winnipeg. 

Nina Czegledy
Nina Czegledy is an independent curator, media artist, researcher, and educator based in Toronto, Canada. She collaborates internationally on art, science, and technology projects. Changing perceptions of the human body and its environment, as well as paradigm shifts in the arts and sciences inform her projects. She has curated, exhibited and published widely, won awards for her artwork, and has initiated and led workshops, forums, and festivals worldwide. Her latest curatorial projects include A Light Footprint in the Cosmos (2022), Sensoria: The Art and Science of Our Senses: LAZNIA Contemporary Art Centre, Poland and Sensorium, York University, Canada (2022). Adjunct Professor, OCADU, Toronto; Research Fellow, KMDI, University of Toronto, Researcher Hexagram, Montreal; Senior Fellow, Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Honorary Fellow, Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design, Board member, Leonardo/ISAST; Researcher NOEMA Italy; Trustee Intercreate org. New Zealand

Steven Rayan 
Born and raised in northern Ontario, Steven Rayan (he/him) is a mathematician — more specifically, a geometer. His world consists of numbers and shapes, and he uses them to gain insight into the universe around us. Most recently, he has been using geometry to discover new features of quantum science, including quantum materials, and his work has been highlighted in venues such as Scientific American. In the last five years, he has been the recipient of two research and two teaching awards at USask.  Steven serves in a few different roles in the University: professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, lead for the new Signature Area of Research in Quantum Innovation, director of the Centre for Quantum Topology and Its Applications (quanTA), director of Interdisciplinary Programming in the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, and chair of the Mathematical Physics program. He enjoys these roles and finds tremendous synergy between them. Before arriving at USask in 2016, he earned his doctoral degree at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford and then spent a few years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Steven strives to support interdisciplinary, high-risk, high-reward research, and these efforts include serving as a co-chair of the national multidisciplinary review committee for the Tri-Agency's New Frontiers in Research Fund (Exploration Stream) in recent years.  Saskatchewan has been an especially inspiring place for Steven to develop his perspective and research.  With its tall grasses, pristine lakes, and glimmering sky, this is the right place to think big! 

Jean-Sébastien Gauthier
Jean-Sébastien (JS) Gauthier is a sculptor, new media artist who adopts diverse forms of inquiry and experimentation to create works of time-based art. To this end he deploys an interdisciplinary mix of technical and conceptual approaches ranging from traditional sculpture practice, interactive video production, performance art, 3D rendering and most recently cutting-edge scientific imaging technologies.

 

Márton Orosz