Eve Andree Laramee is an installation artist whose works explores four primary themes: legacy of the atomic age, history of science, environment and ecology, social conditions. Her interdisciplinary artworks operate at the confluence of art and science. She is currently professor and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Pace University. Laramee currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is also the founder and director of ART/MEDIA for a Nuclear Free Future.
Work summary
Laramee's interest in the history and culture of science has resulted in collaborations with physicists, hydrologists, geologists, biogeographers, and ecologists since the 1980s. Laramee believes that, "by sharing innovations, art-and-science collaborations can energize action to initiate positive social change and promote awareness of environmental and health issues by directly involving communities, extending ways in which cultures imagine, create and understand." . Responding to the ongoing Fukushima meltdowns the video illuminates the 4.47 billion-year half-life decay cycle of uranium-238 superimposed onto thermographs and news footage. As uranium decays over geological time, it transmutes into “uranium daughters” that cascade into other elements and finally to stable Lead-206. As we are learning post-Fukushima, when climate change occurs and vulnerability spectrums shift, nuclear sites and the life forms surrounding them are at increased risk. In her recent creative work, Laramee speculates on how human beings use and misuse the natural environment. Artworks that investigate the environmental and health impacts of atomic legacy sites track the invisible radioactive contamination, residues of the nuclear weapons complex and the nuclear energy industry. This multifaceted work cites uranium mining, milling, plutonium production that have resulted in the contamination of surface water, well water and deep aquifer water, soil and air pollution, social injustice, and the consequences upon forms of life. Her work on atomic legacy issues has been featured in the International Uranium Film Festival. Other forms of environmental degradation that she addresses are desertification, climate change, and dredging. The aspects of the history of science that she explores include alchemy, subjectivity in scientific research, such legendary figures as Charles Darwin and Johannes Kepler. The environmental/ecological issues that appear in her work include commodification of nature, the political and cultural history of the national parks in the US, and the correlation between human blood and ocean water. Social conditions that she addresses include the impact of radioactive waste and weapons testing upon indigenous peoples in the American West. Laramee's social-sculpture interventions activate community participation in environmental remediation efforts, encourage responsible behaviors, and invoke political critiques. She is currently the executive director of ART/MEDIA for a Nuclear Free Future, an offshoot from ART/MEDIA, a social sculpture founded in 1984 that supported public art works presented in the mass media and created by such invited artists as Jenny Holzer, Hans Haacke, Rachel Rosenthal, Terry Allen, and others. Their projects included artist-designed billboards, television, radio and print interventions, museum exhibitions, lectures, and performance art by disseminating political, environmental, and social activist art works to people who were not members of the traditional art audience.
Major works
Apparatus for the Distillation of Vague Intuitions
Influenced by alchemy, this installation of hand blown glass vessels engraved with text refers to subjectivity, intuition, and guesswork in scientific inquiry. The art historian Ann Morris Reynolds describes this work as an "apparatus": a means by which a "distillation of vague intuitions" concerning art and science is performed. And true to the second meaning of the term, a political organization or an under ground political movement, Apparatus counters the business-as-usual experience of both. Science and art interrogate each other and the results are marvelous... and rare.
Halfway to Invisible
An installation comprising videos, kinetic sculpture, photography, and an archive of government documents, Halfway to the Invisible exposes the environmental legacy of uranium mining in the American Southwest. Between 1949 and 1980, these mines produced more than 225,000,000 tons of uranium ore. Epidemiological studies provide evidence of the effects upon the health of the predominantly Native American laborers and their families.
Luminous Darwin: The Lost Notebooks of Charles Darwin
This installation of magic lantern styled video sculptures, faux historic devices, and didactic text referencing Darwin's late work on metaphysics. Laramee created three fictional notebooks she attributed to Darwin corresponding to the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms: "Notebook X: The Awareness of the Cells", "Notebook Y: The Dreams of the Plants", and "Notebook Z: The Memories of the Stones". This deviation from conventional scientific/historic exhibitions was installed within an actual historic exhibition, "Dialogues with Darwin" at the Museum of The American Philosophical Society, a repository for original Darwin materials.
SugarMud
This installation, installed in the drawing room of a Gilded Age mansion consisted of a room-sized mound of golden-colored sugar that referenced two local issues. One was the golden hue associated with the historic Hudson River School of painters and the accumulated toxic sediment from the sugar factory sludge located on the shore of the Hudson River. Collaborating with environmental scientists, Laramee created Sediment Profile Imagery using benthic disturbance mapping of the river bottom documenting the channels where 80,000 tons of sludge were dredged and relocated to the ocean floor.
