Naoe Suzuki—Dreamcatchers

 

 

 

 

 

 

Naoe Suzuki—Dreamcatchersis the second show in the Thompson Gallery’s 2017-18 exhibition series entitled With Eyes Open—a series of four exhibitions celebrating women artists. Dreamcatchers is also the third and final exhibition in connection with Suzuki’sartist-in-residency at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in Cambridge, MA, which culminated with three exhibitions, at three separate venues in the Boston area including the Broad Institute (Stories Retold), Boston Arts Academy’s Sandra and Philip Gordon Gallery(Lost and Found), and, the Cambridge School of Weston’s Red Wall Gallery (Dreamcatchers). Fittingly, Suzuki chose two schools that value “the arts”—to the extent that they are considered integral and vital to academic edification—to exhibit her integrated studies at the Broad which is itself founded upon similar values. In general, Suzuki’s Broad Institute residency work can be described as “Weaving past and present together,” Suzuki’soverall project “contemplates data mining, knowledge, history, and our belief systems,” and “reflects her fascination with, and observation of the scientific community where she has been immersed since April of 2016.”[5] Dreamcatchers, is a series of drawings about cutting-edge medical science in the process of being created. Dreamcatchersequally celebrates disciplined research and creative inquiry, wonder and experimentation, which, when combined, can often yield leaps of the imagination and art.

 

Naoe Suzuki works primarily in drawing, works on paper, and installation. Born in Tokyo, Japan Suzuki currently lives in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is a recipient of many grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2015), Massachusetts Cultural Council (Drawing/Printmaking/Artist’s Books in 2006, and Sculpture and Installation in 2001), and Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation (2013 & 2004). Her residency fellowships include MacDowell Colony, NH; Blue Mountain Center, NY; Millay Colony for the Arts, NY; Jentel, WY; Centrum, WA; and Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo, Japan.

 

Dreamcatchers is an installation of archival digital prints on vellum and Tyvek, titled after a Broad Institute's computer scientist remarked, without knowing where the sources for the images came from, saying "the images look like a dream catcher." Suzuki was interested in the observation, “I thought it was very poetic, but his comment also resonated with the concept of scientific ideas as a magical web.”[6]

 

The Broad Institute was founded to seize the opportunity that arose from the Human Genome Project (HGP). Launched in 2004, the Broad Institute formed as an “experiment” in biomedicine exploring a “unique model of collaborative, inter-institutional research,” which values “promoting inclusion, sharing data and knowledge, building partnerships, empowering scientists, reaching globally, collaborating deeply, and propelling the understanding and treatment of disease.”[7] In addition to espousing these values within the global scientific community, the Broad Institute also builds partnerships in the visual arts. As described on their website:

 

The Broad's artist-in-residence program lies at the intersection of science and art. The program allows revolutionary scientists and forward-thinking artists to work, communicate, and learn together to benefit both science and art, spurring the creative thinking that drives innovation.[8]

 

Deeply appreciative of the creative and collaborative atmosphere, Suzuki adds, “The whole place is an experiment, and people encourage you to take risks. It really fosters creativity, innovation.[9]” Similar to science, which always begins with curiosity as it combines systematic observation, measurement, experimentation, and the formulation, testing, and the modification of hypotheses, Suzuki too began her work at the Broad with a period of deep observation, collection, inquiry, and play. Specifically, the Broad Institute’s culture of sharing knowledge and collaborating deeply prompted Suzuki’s interests. Suzuki points out, she felt "encouraged to wander and to take time to come up with ideas by observing and wondering," and she "sometimes just stared at the walls,[10] imagining possible projects. As pointed out on Broad Institute’s artist-in-residence webpage: 

 

Naoe Suzuki is Broad’s fifth artist-in-residence. Although she is not a scientist, Suzuki’s approach to art is scientific in that it incorporates periods of deep observation, data gathering, research, and experimentation…[11]

 

During the first few months of her residency at the Broad Institute in 2016, Suzuki spent many hours walking inside the Institute, wondering, listening, observing and acquainting herself with the spaces and people. She was given tours of many labs, talked to scientists, and witnessed the latest scientific technology being used to unravel some of medicine’s most vexing problems. During her walks, Suzuki noticed the many writings scientists left on the whiteboards—writings that would get erased by the week’s end. Suzuki became fascinated by the whiteboards filled with markings and notations beyond her ability to understand them:

 

 

For the Dreamcatchers, Red Wall Gallery installation, Suzuki pointed on ten-foot long scrolls of vellum and Tyvek. The imagery of Dreamcatchers is comprised up of tracings from the Broad Institute’s whiteboard notations, which were combined and modified using digital imaging software, rendering them even more indecipherable, and in some cases by also layering several sheets of traced writings atop one another. The result is a complex web-like imagery made up of lines, marks, shapes, and diagrams. Although mostly illegible to the layman, the attentive onlooker may easily find terminology such as “X, Y” and certain key words from genomic science. Suzuki’s Dreamcatchers are unrolled and made fully available to see in total. Scrolls are typically unrolled bits at a time in order to experience the passing of time. Suzuki’sscroll drawings, by contrast, capture only snippets of time, obscured by cropped and combined portions of the materials she originally traced, as if to suggest how ideas can be caught within a network of thoughts, repeating and mirroring until understanding through wider connection is procured.

 

Dream catchers, though widely adopted by many First Nation Peoples are an invention of the Ojibwa people. Made for children out of willow and sinew, are not meant to last—eventually, the willow dries out and the tension of the sinew collapses the dream catcher—belaying the temporary-ness of youth.[13]Made to “filter out all the bad dreams (bawedjigewin)[14] dream catchers are webs that catch the unwanted. Considering the Broad Institute’s mission—to improve human health by using genomics to advance our understanding of the biology and treatment of human disease, and to help lay the groundwork for a new generation of therapies[15]—Suzuki’s Dreamcatchers are netted, Broad Institute visualizations, caught in-progress, while in the process of designing the medicine of tomorrow. Made of transient and biodegradable materials that collapse over time due to changes in humidity, Dreamcatchers are drawings that are aiming to catch unwanted disease.

 

Adopting a pseudo-scientific method, Suzuki developed a style of notation to title the works:

 

As I worked on each image file, I set up a system to use the same file for a number of different ways by manipulating the contrast, and composing and layering in different ways. Each file was then numbered with several versions. For example, 01a, 01b, and 01c, and so forth.[16]

 

Todd Golub, Chief Scientific Officer at the Broad Institute and founder of its artist-in-residence program points out:

 

 

Albert Einstein described the processes of creativity this way: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. [Those] to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead—[their] eyes are closed.”[20]

 

Seeing with the mind’s eye is a mental process of collection, wondering, organizing and playing. Suzuki observed that there is a sense at Broad that “referring to pre-gnome science [completed in 2003] is ancient time,“ but further, "at the Broad Institute, scientists can't imagine doing science today without the human genome science.”[21] Moving forward in art and science requires a process of the opening up of the eyes in order to catch not only the imagined but also the unexpected.

 

Suzuki’s Broad Residency work engenders a contemporary artistic attitude: “we need to recreate new or reinventing with fresh eyes for our time.”[22]

 

 

Naoe’s work reminds us, as she has pointed out:

 

There is an uncanny relationship between artists and scientists because we are both explorers. Without this work, we are no longer moving forward. [24]

 

Todd Bartel

Gallery Director, Thompson Gallery