Artist Lecture

I attended Gail Wrights lecture at the Nevada Museum of Art on May 4, 2012. Wright has been creating art since the early 90's and while she mainly works with living mediums, she has also worked with interactive sculpture, video, prints and electronic sculpture.  At the NMA she presented examples of her work and discussed the process, reasoning and work that went behind them. Most of her work was based off of the fungal group and working with slime molds. What first began as an experimental project where she monitored the slime mold using using three cameras that corresponded to video frames, soon evolved into an in depth analysis that used different colors for each slime mold and 9 video frames. With each project Wright grew more interested in how the slime mold morphed, which ultimately led to more and more projects involving slime mold. She also grew more dedicated and committed to the projects and perfecting them. Wright would adjust the camera every three hours for a period that lasted over two months long. The project not only grew on her, but her surroundings as well, as Wright described finding slime growing in her home, office and even her car. What was most interesting to me was the final slime mold project that Wright worked on using the nine lcd screens and different colored slime mold. This piece was visually appealing and was also aesthetically pleasing. The natural and progressive movement of each slime mold was really brought to life when combined as a larger unit, and monitored for a long period of time. The video stream created by molds truly shows the growth and possibilities that something we usually take for granted is capable of doing.