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. The University of Dundee Museums’ latest exhibition featuring a unique artistic response to D’Arcy’s collection by New York-based artist Ellen K Levy.
Levy is a multimedia artist and writer whose work explores complex systems and some of the unintended consequences of technology. She highlights these issues through exhibitions, educational and curatorial programmes and publications. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad. Levy first visited the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum as part of an artist’s residency in 2014 and has since gone on to co-edit an anthology about Thompson’s legacy in the arts (published by Bloomsbury Press in 2021) and curate the exhibition From Forces to Forms in the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York in 2022. Her current exhibition in Dundee is the culmination of her interest in Thompson, featuring a site-specific installation of prints and video work in the Tower Foyer Gallery with additional interventions in the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum.
Seeing Through explores the zoology collection through the lenses of two other key figures of 20th-century culture, futurist author J G Ballard and pop-artist Richard Hamilton. Her artworks feature dizzying view of merged organic/machine hybrids, eco-catastrophes and space travel, as alluded to by Hamilton and Ballard. Some of the artworks appear to be penetrating the walls and display cases in the exhibition space.
Levy’s speculative exhibition explores our synergistic relationship with technology, including our aspirations and its threats.
Watch artist Ellen K Levy introduce her exhibition Seeing Through in conversation with curator Matthew Jarron.
The exhibition is presented in two locations, the Tower Foyer Gallery and the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum. The Tower Foyer Gallery is open 6 April – 29 June, Mon-Fri 9.30am-7pm Sat 11am-4pm. The D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum is open on the second Saturday of every month 2-4.30pm and on Fridays 2-4.30pm from 7 June. Find out more at Ellen K Levy – Seeing Through | University of Dundee, UK