PAST PROJECT
Harumi Abe, Donna Ruff + Lauren Shapiro
April 16th - May 28th, 2023
Resources for Shapiro's artwork include MEGA LAB, California State University Northridge, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and Digitization Program Office. These organizations have worked to digitize and create online experiences for a collection of coral and reef-dwelling specimens. Approximately 25% of all marine biodiversity is supported by coral reefs.
WORK
ABOUT
Harumi Abe is a Japanese native artist from Tokorozawa who has lived in South Florida for nearly half her life. Referencing Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, her layered landscapes overlap memories to serve an idea of home and represent a "topography of our intimate being." Through color and placement, the Florida landscape serves as her muse while Japan remains her inspiration, magnifying a relationship called shakkei or "borrowed scenery."
Donna Ruff explores the limits of economic communication, questioning how much information can be removed while retaining a narrative. Since 2010, she has used the front pages of newspapers—primarily the New York Times—cutting patterns based on geometric forms typical of Moorish Spain and North African architecture. This process of removal highlights the content left behind, creating objects of fragile beauty where stories are simultaneously altered and preserved.
Lauren Shapiro experiments with art's possibility to affect change and cultivate environmental awareness. Working with scientists since 2018, she uses 3D models from scientific archives to digitally preserve coral specimens. These digital reproductions, made from photographs captured by divers, become the foundation for sculptures that share the beauty of endangered coral reefs in a compelling, non-destructive way.