Laura Splan is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work mines the materiality of science to reveal poetic subjectivities. Her mixed media projects destabilize notions of the presence and absence of bodies evoking the mutability of categories that delineate their status. Splan’s work compels an intimate engagement with detail calling into question how things are made and what they are made of. She reconsiders perceptions and representations of the corporeal with a range of traditional and new media techniques. She often combines the quotidian with the unfamiliar to interrogate cultural constructions of order and disorder, function and dysfunction. Her frequent combinations of textiles with technology challenge values of "the hand" in creative production and question notions of agency and chance in aesthetics. Her recent Embodied Objects series uses biosensors (electromyography, electroencephalography) to create data-driven forms and patterns for digitally fabricated sculptures, weavings and works on paper as well as for movement in performances with sensor-actuated apparatus. Her current solo exhibition, Conformations, combines biotech imagery, networked devices, and artifacts with sculptures made from the hand-spun fiber of laboratory animals.

Splan's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design and Beall Center for Art + Technology. International audiences for her work have included Iceland, South Korea, England, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and Canada. Her work is included in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, the NYU Langone Art Collection, and the Science Center. Her biomedical themed artworks have been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation, the Gen Art New Media Art Exhibition and Davidson College. She has received research funding from The Jerome Foundation and her residencies have been supported by the Knight Foundation, the Institute for Electronic Arts, Harvestworks, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford University teaching interdisciplinary courses including “Embodied Interfaces”, “Data as Material” and “Art & Biology”. She is currently a Creative Experiments track member at NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator.
Sound & Vision is sponsored by Golden Paints.