Eve Andree Laramee is an

installation art Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific art, site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior intervent ...

ist whose works explores four primary themes: legacy of the

atomic age The Atomic Age, also known as the Atomic Era, is the period of history following the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, The Gadget at the '' Trinity'' test in New Mexico on 16 July 1945 during World War II. Although nuclear chain r ...

history of science The history of science covers the development of science from ancient history, ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural science, natural, social science, social, and formal science, formal. Pr ...

environment Environment most often refers to: __NOTOC__ * Natural environment, referring respectively to all living and non-living things occurring naturally and the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism ...

and

ecology Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere lev ...

, social conditions. Her interdisciplinary artworks operate at the confluence of art and science. Laramee currently lives in

Brooklyn Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...

, New York, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the founder and director of ART/MEDIA for a Nuclear Free Future. Laramee is Professor Emerita of Art at

Pace University Pace University is a private university with campuses in New York City and Westchester County, New York, United States. It was established in 1906 as a business school by the brothers Homer St. Clair Pace and Charles A. Pace. Pace enrolls about ...

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." Uranium-Decay-film-still

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 Nuclear energy may refer to: *Nuclear power, the use of sustained nuclear fission or nuclear fusion to generate heat and electricity *Nuclear binding energy, the energy needed to fuse or split a nucleus of an atom *Nuclear potential energy, the pot ...

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 The International Uranium Film Festival was founded in 2010 in Rio de Janeiro, and has traveled to Germany, Portugal, India and the United States. This event merged art, ecology, environmentalism and environmental justice, to inform the public ab ...

. 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 commodification of nature is an area of research within critical environmental studies that is concerned with the ways in which natural entities and processes are made exchangeable through the market, and the implications thereof. Drawing upon ...

, 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 Environmental remediation is the cleanup of hazardous substances dealing with the removal, treatment and containment of pollution or contaminants from Natural environment, environmental media such as soil, groundwater, sediment. Remediation may be ...

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.

Slouching Towards Yucca Mountain

This photo and video installation is a post-atomic science fiction Western featuring twelve time travelers exploring the desert locations of the

Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioact ...

, the

Nevada Test Site The Nevada National Security Sites (N2S2 or NNSS), popularized as the Nevada Test Site (NTS) until 2010, is a reservation of the United States Department of Energy located in the southeastern portion of Nye County, Nevada, about northwest of ...

(NNSS), and

Death Valley National Park Death Valley National Park is a national park of the United States that straddles the California–Nevada border, east of the Sierra Nevada. The park boundaries include Death Valley, the northern section of Panamint Valley, the southern sect ...

Luminous Darwin: The Lost Notebooks of Charles Darwin

This installation of

magic lantern The magic lantern, also known by its Latin name , is an early type of image projector that uses pictures—paintings, prints, or photographs—on transparent plates (usually made of glass), one or more lens (optics), lenses, and a light source. ...

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 In History of the United States, United States history, the Gilded Age is the period from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, which occurred between the Reconstruction era and the Progressive Era. It was named by 1920s historians after Mar ...

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 The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. Early on, the paintings typically depicted the Hudson River Valley and the sur ...

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 Sediment Profile Imagery (SPI) is an underwater technique for photographing the interface between the seabed and the overlying water. The technique is used to measure or estimate biological, chemical, and physical processes occurring in the fir ...

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.

Exhibitions

Laramee's art has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. She has participated in exhibitions at the

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale ( ; ) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy. There are two main components of the festival, known as the Art Biennale () and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Architecture Biennale (), ...

, Mass MOCA,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT), the

Museum of Contemporary Art Museum of Contemporary Art (often abbreviated to MCA, MoCA or MOCA) may refer to: Africa * Museum of Contemporary Art (Tangier), Morocco, officially le Galerie d'Art Contemporain Mohamed Drissi Asia East Asia * Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai ...

, Chicago; the

New Museum of Contemporary Art The New Museum of Contemporary Art is a museum at 235 Bowery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker. History The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-name ...

, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; among other institutions.

Collections

Laramee's work is included in the collections of the

MacArthur Foundation The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private foundation that makes grants and impact investments to support non-profit organizations in approximately 117 countries around the world. It has an endowment of $7.6 billion and ...

, the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

, New York, the

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art art gallery, museum near Water Tower Place in the Near North Side, Chicago, Near North Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is on ...

, The

Fogg Art Museum The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...

of Harvard University,

, the UCLA Armand

Hammer Museum The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur- ...

, and other public and private collections. Her public art sculpture, 100 Years 100 Stones commemorates the centennial year of San Diego State University.

Grants and fellowships

Laramee has received two grants from the

Pollock-Krasner Foundation The Pollock-Krasner Foundation was established in 1985 for the purpose of providing funding to visual artists internationally to further their artistic practices. It was established at the bequest of Lee Krasner, who was an American abstract expr ...

, an

Andy Warhol Foundation Andy Warhol (;''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''"Warhol" born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol ...

Grant, two fellowships from the New York Foundation for Arts and grants from the Mid-Atlantic States Arts Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Museum Sculptor-in-Residence Program. International Sculpture Center.Morgan, Catrin. "Phantom Settlements," Ditto Press: Royal College of Art, UK., 2011

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Laramee, Eve Andree Environmental artists People associated with nuclear power Uranium mining Living people Artists from Los Angeles American installation artists American women artists American photographers 1956 births Sculptors from California 21st-century American women