A Conversation with Sara Garden Armstrong and Barb Bondy
Zoom
Free
Join artists Sara Garden Armstrong and Barb Bondy on December 8th, 2020, for a conversation about their artistic practices and shared interests in the intersection of art and science. Don’t miss this engaging conversation with two fascinating Alabama artists whose multidisciplinary work has continued to evolve over many decades and explore a wide range of topics including human physiology, neuroscience, cognition, sleep, and various biological systems.
The talk will take place on Zoom and is free and open to the public.
Sara Garden Armstrong’s exhibition Threads and Layers is on view at WMA through December 31.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist working in myriad directions and
on a vast array of scale, from large site-specific sculpture to artist’s books,
all of which examine organic processes of transformation. Chance and
change drive her artwork as she explores and pushes the possibilities of
materials. In the work you see movement, repetition, transparency,
layering, and mapping with organic shapes and forms, at times
incorporating systems of sound, movement and light. Her most recent work
investigates the interactions between various physiological phenomena and
the human body.
Armstrong has exhibited nationally and internationally. She is a 2015/16
recipient of a CALL (Create a Living Legacy) grant through Space One
Eleven, funded and developed by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her artist’s
books can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. Her
atrium sculptures can be found in corporate and university collections. After
35 years in New York City, she now lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama.
Barb Bondy holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is currently a Professor of Art at Auburn University. In 2018, Bondy was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Artworks: Research grant for an interdisciplinary, collaborative research project with a cognitive neuroscientist at Auburn University. Using MRI technology, the project studies brain plasticity; more specifically, if learning to draw from observation in a one semester drawing class changes the brain of drawing students. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally and she is a past recipient of an Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellowship.
Bondy’s creative research connects science, art, and the humanities. The cross-pollination of these disciplines leads to thought experiments of a sort that probe for a deeper understanding of the human mind and the construction everyday reality. Focusing primarily on drawing, Bondy’s work centers on various aspects of metacognition (thinking about thinking) and how humans experience and make sense of the world. Through processes of tracking, tracing, measuring, documenting, and recording, questions are both pursued and raised in the making of the work. Bondy’s current drawings conceptually explore possibilities for cognitive entanglement among the artist, the work, and the viewer.