A candid chat with the artist about connection, inspiration, subverting norms and science.

Tell us about yourself

I’m a multidisciplinary artist and a child of immigrants. I have a back- ground in neuroscience and spent several years studying Alzheimer's and the aging brain. I had an encounter with a patient that made me want to share all of the ideas and discoveries and motivations behind science and research with a broader audience that might not know our jargon or background. As I hope people see from this show, I have a lot of interests and work in a variety of mediums. I focus on the idea or question I want to express first, and I find the appropriate discipline/medium follows after.

For those who aren’t familiar with your work, what should people know?

My work invites the audience to play. To press buttons and touch panels and answer questions. If everyone is just politely standing and nodding at something from 10 feet away, I’ve failed. My work explores the scale, structure, and presentation of things that are sometimes difficult for us to see normally, and it’s always fun to make the invisible, visible.

Wherever possible my work tends to subvert norms and juxtapose settings. The busts from In the Company of Great Scientists feature notable women, instead of notable men and are made out of 3D printed plastic instead of marble. Strange Sequences is like the circus fortune teller made into decision trees from the future. Impulse turns a microscopic organic process into a large electronic one. Rest In Prowess collected stories from a virtual phone booth made possible by Google Voice. There are no particles only fields transforms the intangibility of particle physics into a hulking steel installation that is extremely tangible.

Finally, this exhibition in particular examines principles that are fundamental to our existence. Subatomic particles are fundamental to our existence. Our DNA is fundamental to our existence. Collective action is fundamental to our existence. We are not separate from these things. They are us and we are them. My hope is that viewers not only feel connected to those with them and near them, but more broadly to the ecosystems of life all around us.

How did the exhibition come to be?

In 2017, I was contacted by two bright UNLV students who had seen my portrait series Beyond Curie. They had founded UNLV’s chapter of Scientista, a national organization that supports women in STEM and invited me to come out and speak to them. They wanted their members to hear about my experiences as a woman in STEM and how I’ve used my background to help people see science and the human experience differently. They even offered to do a small showcase of the portraits. I couldn’t refuse. It just so happened that the space they obtained for the showcase was the Barrick and that’s how I met Alisha Kerlin, the executive director.

We covered a lot in our first conversation and she actually encouraged me to use augmented reality to expand on the Beyond Curie portraits. I ended up bringing AR into that project and others like a fashion line of atomic elements that make up our world. And we kept in touch. After Beyond Curie AR exhibition went up in the East Wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Alisha wondered if there was work I had wanted to do that fit more of a fine arts setting. Of course there was, and so we began discussing what would become Connective Tissue.

Where did you get the inspiration for your pieces?

Much of my inspiration comes out of spaces where the natural world and human world overlap. For instance, I saw parallels between social phenomena like #metoo or Black Lives Matter and biological processes like action potentials or activation energy which are gated by certain thresholds. The reach of our actions are limited when we operate independently, but can be exponential when we work together. Similarly in biology, there are times when a change in a cell or in an environment can have a cascading effect. The bobtail squid glows blue due to its symbiotic relationship with the Vibrio fischeri bacteria, only activating under particular circumstances related to time and light.

How else has your scientific background influenced your work?

My background in neuroscience and medical research makes me keenly aware of new developments in many fields, but even I can be surprised. I had been considering taking a genetic test like 23andMe to see what I could learn from my DNA. But a friend of mine who works in biotechnology at Stanford warned that my genetic data might be used in ways I couldn’t foresee.

I looked more into it and realized these tests are not innocuous. There are serious implications from companies having access to so much information about people’s genetic makeup. And meanwhile, they serve to reinforce racial inequalities: the genealogy data for people of color is often less available because they often weren’t in a position to document their family history and aren’t well represented in the company’s reference data. One major provider has 296 ethnic regions identified for people of European descent but only 33 for people of African descent.

That got me thinking about other ways that people in power can uphold their advantages. Maybe they can pay for certain benefits or unload problems onto others. What does that mean for our society? That’s what my piece Strange Sequences digs into.

There's a lot of mural art of the walls, which isn't something you often see in a fine art exhibition.

There’s an explicit cultural connection between white backgrounds and high art. Most major museums and galleries have their art shown on blank stark white walls. Obviously there are practical reasons for that: it’s a neutral background that goes with everything as opposed other colors or patterns. But it’s more than that.

The marble statues we think of from classical Greek and Roman art were actually painted in bright, bold colors that some might consider gaudy. But when they were dug up, the paint was chipped, and when it was cleaned and power washed, they decided it would be easier to not restore the color. Meanwhile, colorful art from other cultures like Asia, Latin America, or Africa is considered less elite. Not as serious. It’s what gets rolled out during “multicultural” events and programming.

The murals on the walls pay homage to the connection that I have to my Southeast Asian culture which is vibrant and full of life. It’s contents feature women supporting and communing with one another. In many communities, it is the women who are the connective tissue that keeps the group humming and running smoothly, and so it’s only natural that their image is made visible on our walls.