From the Curator of Museum Services at the University of Dundee :
The ideas and collections of D’Arcy Thompson, the University’s first Professor of Biology, have profoundly influenced many artists and writers who re-interpret natural history, projecting it through the lens of evolution, fantasy, consumption, fear or desire.
This unique exhibition features site-specific prints and video work in the Tower Foyer Gallery with additional interventions in the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum.
“Seeing Through” proposes tours of Thompson’s collection visualised as if through the lenses of futurist author J G Ballard and pop-artist Richard Hamilton. We visit the collection through dizzying perspectival renderings of merged organic/machine hybrids, eco-catastrophes and space travel, as alluded to by Hamilton and Ballard. Levy’s speculative exhibition explores our synergistic relationship with technology, including our aspirations and its threats. Our notions of evolution are, themselves, evolving.
Dr Ellen K Levy is a multimedia artist and writer based in the US. Her works explore complex systems and some of the unintended consequences of technology. Levy highlights these issues through exhibitions, educational and curatorial programmes and publications. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad.
With Charissa Terranova, she is co-editor of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Generative Influences in Art, Design: From Forces to Forms (2021, Bloomsbury Press) and she co-edits the Science and the Arts since 1750 book series for Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
The exhibition in the Tower Foyer Gallery until 29th June. Additional elements in the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum may be seen on our monthly Saturday openings on 11th May and 8th June - and on Friday afternoons from 7th June.