CMay gallery is pleased to present Artificia, a large-scale installation by German-born artist and physicist Lothar Schmitz. This is Schmitz’ second solo exhibition at the gallery and the first at its new location at 5828 Wilshire Boulevard just across from the La Brea Tar Pits.
Drawing on his training as a scientist, Schmitz has created a complex new work in which he amalgamates the natural and the artificial, commenting on the rapidly changing relationship and interdependence of nature and culture.
This new installation, Artificia, evokes a contrived laboratory setting. The plants and “biotopes” assembled are drawn from disparate ecological contexts, blurring the distinction between indoors and outdoors. Video loops link these “artificial” environments to the underlying micro-biological processes and dynamics in plant metabolism, and to the resources enabling life and future bio-systems evolution. Conflating diverse lifeforms that cannot naturally co-exist in close proximity, they also allude to human transgression into nature, in the form of scientific intervention and genetic engineering, questioning whether we can subvert nature, and whether and when our intrusion compromises its integrity.
Artificia is also part of an ongoing investigation of how natural phenomena intersect with media and technology. In his previous solo exhibition Protosphere, Schmitz explored hybridization and its links to uncontrollable changes in evolutionary patterns. Paradoxically, in the absence of a symbiotic relationship with nature, it has become more difficult to define what “nature” really is.
Lothar Schmitz is a physicist at the University of California Los Angeles. His research focuses on plasma physics, nonlinear dynamics and turbulence, and magnetic confinement fusion. His artwork has been widely exhibited in the US and Europe, including in fifteen solo exhibitions and site-specific installations at venues such as the Phoenix Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside, the University Art Museum Long Beach (CSULB), and the Palazzo dei Consuli, Gubbio (Italy). He is a former recipient of a C.O.L.A. grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and a new media grant from the California Arts Council.
Selected Works
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