Laumeier Sculpture Park: Saturday, 9 February 2008

Deborah Aschheim, Neural Network IV (on Memory installation detail at the Mattress Factory), 2006, mixed media

Laumeier Sculpture Park presents the work of Deborah Aschheim in an exhibition which opens February 9, 2008. The exhibition opens Saturday, February 9, 2008 with a public reception from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. and continues through May 11, 2008. The exhibition will transform the Laumeier galleries into an intensely immersive sensory experience. Deborah Aschheim comes from a family with a history of Alzheimer’s disease. As a result, much of Aschheim’s work focuses on creating sculptural and interactive multi-sensory responses to neuroscience, memory and cognitive processes. Much of the work emanates from her personal experiences.

"…the thing that I wanted to do next, was also the scariest thing for me ­ to do more autobiographical work ­ something where I would be dealing with the networks of memory, but also incorporating my own specific memories, autobiographical memories and how memories come up almost involuntarily,” Aschheim said. “I am really interested in things that are both literal and metaphorical.”

The exhibition will include a refined version of her six-part series of neural network installations. Among new work in the exhibition will be a site-specific “memory web,” an expansive network of video and sound, linked by LED light nodes and colored plastic fibers, that will wind though rooms (public and private) of the museum itself. Aschheim will also create an outdoor work, Arborization ­ a network-based sculpture making a visual connection between the microscopic systems of the body, the electrical networks of the city and the branching patterns of the living trees supporting it. Additionally, a gallery will be reserved for video, sound works and ephemera from many of the artist’s perception experiments as well as video from the artist’s medical experiments and material from recent collaborations with musicians.

The exhibition will feature a catalog with an essay by Meg Linton, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Otis College of Art And Design in Los Angeles. A collaborative lecture with Washington University’s Department of Psychology’s Dynamic Cognition Laboratory is being planned as a mid-exhibition event.

Laumeier Sculpture Park is located at 12580 Rott Road in St. Louis County, near Interstate 44 and Lindbergh Boulevard. The park is open daily from 8 a.m. until ½ hour past sunset. The museum is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays from 12 p.m. until 5 p.m. For more information, call 314-821-1209 or visit us at www.laumeier.org.