Rachel Sussman: Artistic Explorations of Natural Wonders
Rachel Sussman is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn.
Rachel Sussman
Sussman is a Guggenheim, NYFA, and MacDowell Colony Fellow, and two-time TED speaker. Her critically acclaimed, decade-long project “The Oldest Living Things in the World” combines art, science, and philosophy into a traveling exhibition and New York Times bestselling book. In 2014 she began developing new installation work deepening her explorations of personal and cosmic time, the universe, nature, philosophy, and beauty. With the support of the LACMA Lab, and working with SpaceX, NASA, and CERN, and her new work can be found at MASS MoCA, the New Museum Los Gatos, and the Des Moines Art Center. She is currently an artist in residenct with the SETI Institute. Her exhibition record spans more than a decade in museums and galleries in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
“Since 2004, I’ve been researching, working with biologists, and traveling the world to photograph continuously living organisms 2,000 years old and older: ‘The Oldest Living Things in the World’.“The work spans disciplines, continents, and millennia: it’s part art and part science, has an innate environmentalism, and is underscored by an existential incursion into Deep Time. I begin at ‘year zero,’ and look back from there, exploring the living past in the fleeting present. This original index of millennia-old organisms has never before been created in the arts or sciences.“I approach my subjects as individuals of whom I’m making portraits in order to facilitate an anthropomorphic connection to a deep timescale otherwise too physiologically challenging for our brain to internalize. It’s difficult to stay in Deep Time – we are constantly drawn back to the surface. This vast timescale is held in tension with the shallow time inherent to photography. What does it mean to capture a multi-millennial lifespan in 1/60th of a second? Or for that matter, to be an organism in my 30s bearing witness to organisms that precede human history and will hopefully survive us well into future generations? ”
– Rachel Sussman
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Public Health Landscape or Valent BioSciences, LLC.
