art

The Department of Art is pleased to announce that Prof. Shannon Collis, Prof. Jowita Wyszomirska, Prof. Matthew McLaughlin and MFA candidate Dan Ortiz-Leizman are the recipients of the 2023 Clarvit Research Fellowships. This award - the result of generous support from the Clarvit Family provides critical support for our faculty and graduate students to engage in new methods and modalities of research, giving them the time and resources to undertake ambitious new trajectories within their respective fields of creative research.

In its second year, the Clarvit Faculty and Graduate Student Research Fellowship aims to foster new uses of creative technology within the University of Maryland and to aid in the professional development of faculty and graduate students within the Department of Art, as described in the mission statement of the fellowship:

"The creation of new knowledge in the arts does not usually come from commonly sourced techniques; this is doubly so where technology intersects with the arts. Oftentimes, works of creative technology involve the invention of entirely new and novel visual media, which can create a significant barrier to entry for artists. This fund will provide opportunities for faculty and students in need of time and resources to create new works of creative technology in the arts and design and will help recruit graduate students to the Department of Art MFA program.”

More information about each recipient is below:

Professor Shannon Collis:

Shannon Collis investigates relationships among multiple sensory modalities and
between visual and acoustic phenomena in perception. She creates audiovisual
installations and interactive environments that highlight the situated, embodied
experience of hearing and seeing.
Her work has been widely exhibited across North America and abroad, including solo
exhibitions at The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art (Ursinus College, PA), The
Dalton Gallery (Agnes Scott College, GA), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), and Open
Studio Contemporary Printmaking Centre (Toronto, Canada). Other collaborations and
screenings include projects at the Murray Art Museum (Albury, Australia), the Walters
Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Baltimore, MD), and the Currents New
Media Festival (Santa Fe, NM). She has been awarded the Robert W. Deutsch
Foundation’s Rubys Artist Grant and was a finalist for the Janet and Walter Sondheim
Artscape Prize. She has received numerous individual and project grants from the
Canada Council for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council. Collis is a 2005
graduate of the Master of Fine Art program at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Professor Matthew Mclaughlin:

Matthew McLaughlin is a mixed media artist and curator whose work explores the human
relationship with their environments and spaces, both physically and psychologically. He
received his BFA degree in Fine Arts from Ringling College of Art and Design and his MFA
degree in Printmaking from Arizona State University. Matthew has had solo exhibitions in
Washington, DC and Phoenix, among other areas. His work has been included in group
exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, in commercial galleries, artist-run spaces and
museums. He has received numerous awards including the Maryland State Art Council
Individual Artist Award 2016 in Works on Paper. His work is in the collections of the Library of
Congress, the Zuckerman Museum of Art and various universities, along with private collectors.
He has curated for numerous national exhibition spaces including the American University
Museum in Washington, DC.

Professor Jowita Wyszomirska:

Jowita Wyszomirska is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing and large-scale installations. Her work has been exhibited nationally in solo and two-person exhibitions. Some of her honors and awards include the Good Hart artist residency, MI; Andy Warhol Preserve Artist in Residence program, Long Island, NY; Wrangell Artist Residency in McCarthy, Alaska; Jentel Foundation, Wyoming; Soaring Gardens artist in residence program, PA; Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska;  Maryland State Art Council Individual Artist Award, and Board of Governors Award (b grant), William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund, Baltimore, MD . Wyszomirska's work, represented by a DC-based gallery, Neptune & Brown, has been included in many private, corporate, and institutional collections, with a recent acquisition by the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

MFA Student Dan Ortiz-Leizman:

Dan Ortiz Leizman is an artist, writer, and educator currently working towards an MFA at the University of Maryland. They received a BA in Philosophy and Studio Art from Goucher College in 2020. Ortiz Leizman’s work approaches mark-making as an embodied practice that sometimes leads to communication but often actively resists legibility. Their practice is utterly interdisciplinary, rejecting false divisions between art, performance, theory, science, and technology.  Themes in their work can be distilled into the endlessly repeating and very queer phrase “words and bodies and words and bodies and words.”

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Images of massive chunks of ice collapsing from Greenland’s glaciers into the ocean have become emblematic of a changing climate and the need to drastically reduce global carbon emissions.

University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Art Cy Keener is working to characterize some of these icebergs—capturing their unique identities and the ways they change as they drift in the sea.

His collaborative “Iceberg Portraiture” series is part of an exhibition now on view at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C., which Keener created with landscape researcher Justine Holzman, climatologist Ignatius Rigor and scientist John Woods. It’s the result of almost four years of trips to the Arctic in which they placed trackers onto the ice to collect data with the hopes of making that information tangible and visceral.

At NAS, the 7-foot-tall digital ink-and-pastel portraits provide a glimpse into the life of four icebergs with vastly different scales and shapes—some the size of a car and others a third of a mile wide—observed and recorded in August 2021 in western Greenland.

“Each of these [icebergs] is a piece of 10,000- to 40,000-year-old ice coming off the Greenland ice sheet into the ocean,” Keener said. “In this exhibition we understand them as living things, falling apart in front of your eyes, constantly changing. We show their diversity and beauty.”

Keener’s efforts began with the development of a low-cost, open-source buoy to collect meteorological and oceanographic data to use in his work. He first traveled to the Arctic in Spring 2019 with Rigor, a senior principal research scientist at the University of Washington and the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program, whose members maintain a network of buoys across the expanse of the Arctic Ocean.

At VisArts Gallery in Rockville, Maryland, he and Holzman created “Sea Ice 71.348778º N, 156.690918º W,” an installation that used hanging strips of 6-foot-long, blue-green polyester film to reflect the thickness and color of the Arctic ice based on the buoy data.

He also created various versions of “Digital Ice Core,” a sculpture piece that used electronics, data and satellite communication to link a remote field site with a digital light sculpture, made up of 1,000 LED lights. Viewers were then able to see a recreated version of the ambient light in the air, ice and ocean in close to real-time.

In 2020, Keener received a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his work. And in Spring 2021, he spent nine days on a Danish navy ship on the west coast of Greenland.

In addition to the iceberg portraits, the NAS exhibition includes a continuation of Keener’s work to represent the thinning of sea ice. The nearly 8-feet-tall “Sea Ice Daily Drawings,” made of aluminum, acrylic, paper and ink, are based on some 27,000 data points that come from sensors buried meters into the ice. They show subtle temperature and color variation throughout a vertical profile of air, sea ice and ocean.

The drawings, while visually appealing, are yet another stark reminder of the inexorable changes occurring in the Arctic, Keener said: Before the 1980s, the surface of the Arctic Ocean was thoroughly covered with this thick, multi-year ice. Now it’s predicted to vanish by the middle of the century.

“As an artist, I get to go out there, be in this environment and stand on this ice before it disappears, and then try to bring life to that through installation, drawing and sculpture,” Keener said. “I’m using data not to get more statistics, but to make these things that are on their way out physically real—to extend the experience through time and tell a longer story.”

We Have an Artist on Our Team

In addition to an oceanographer, climatologist, data scientist, and outreach educator, we are lucky to have an artist as a Co-PI (primary investigator) on our team.

Cy Keener installing his Light Ice Mass Balance Buoy 100 miles north of Barrow Point on the Arctic Ocean. Photo by John Woods

Cy Keener is an interdisciplinary artist who uses environmental sensing and kinetic sculpture to record and represent the natural world. He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Emerging Technology in the Department of Art. His work includes a range of data-based installations to visualize diverse phenomena including sea ice, wind, rain and ocean waves. He received a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University, and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Cy has completed commissioned installations at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Stanford University, Suyama Space in Seattle, and the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas.

Check out short videos of Cy's work on Vimeo.

Listen to Embedded.fm Episode 365: Barbed Wire Fence and Great Wifi with Cy Keener

Digital Ice Core re-presents ambient light readings in the ice and ocean at full scale. photo from https://19.piksel.no/2019/11/21/digital-ice-core/

The image above was the piece Cy created after the March 2019 IABP trip to Utqiagvik, Alaska to deploy RGB light and temperature sensors through the sea ice. The data was shared real-time through satellite technology and was displayed as light in the Digital Ice Core. This light sculpture re-presents ambient light readings in the ice and ocean below at full scale, recorded at noon local time between April 5 and June 14, 2019. The sculpture enables viewers to experience a critical but vanishing aspect of the Arctic environment through open source electronics and data.

The Light Ice Mass Balance buoy Cy deployed on April 3, 2022 on this trip, will inspire another art installation in the coming year or so.

Cy Keener assembling ice cadet buoys before deploying them.

By Christine Zhu

The University of Maryland is debuting an immersive media design major this semester, the first undergraduate program in the country that synthesizes art with computer science.

There are two tracks available in the program: an art track leading to a bachelor’s of arts degree from the college of arts and humanities, and a computer science track leading to a bachelor’s of science degree from the college of computer, mathematical and natural sciences.

The program works with creating virtual and augmented realities, offering a wide variety of courses for whichever track a student wants to take. 

One of the classes, Introduction to Immersive Media, covers history and research in the field. Its projects involve sensors, augmented reality and virtual reality.

Another class, Introduction to Computational Media, teaches students about the computing that’s required for each type of media. For example, imagery deals with computer graphics and sound deals with synthetic audio.

“We’re investigating ways to use modern technology and media to take the place of information that you would perceive with your senses in a natural environment,” said Stevens Miller, an adjunct lecturer in the department of computer science. 

As a result, students can create artificial environments where they control interactions with the senses — sight, sound and even touch and smell in some cases.

Studio arts lecturer Mollye Bendell used the Artechouse, an art center in Washington, D.C., as an example of a virtual reality experience that uses immersive media design. 

“[It’s] a gallery that specializes in the intersection of art and technology,” she said. “[An example is] an augmented reality application where you’re looking through the camera on your phone and … you see a 3D model appear.”

An immersive media design exhibit was held at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center as a part of NextNOW Fest in mid-September. About 15 students displayed their projects, Bendell said. 

In one student’s project, people were able to play chess remotely with others around the world, Miller said. 

“Instead of being limited to a two-dimensional point and click-with-your-mouse way of interacting with the chessboard, you actually saw a three-dimensional chess set in front of you that you could manipulate even though it doesn’t actually exist,” he added.

While all immersive design students need to have coding ability, the computer science track covers more of the technical components while the art track focuses on the perceptive side, Miller said.

Sophomore Maggie Letvin, a studio art major and hopeful immersive media design major, is planning on the art track. She’s used to approaching projects from the angle of an artist, and said that programming was hard for them.

“[With] programming, you have to know what you want to do ahead of time,” she said. “I approach art from a standpoint of, ‘I have the materials, I’m just gonna work with my hands and figure out what happens,’ but you can’t exactly do that with coding.”

In later years, students from the art track are paired with students from the computer science track. As a result, students are able to work with a partner from a different background and learn more from each other.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Emerging Technology Cy Keener has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his work blending science, technology and art to convey the thinning of Arctic Sea ice.

The five-year grant, totaling nearly $207,000, will allow Keener to develop and test a low-cost, open-source buoy to provide meteorological and oceanographic data, a project he has been working on since 2018. In collaboration with research scientist Ignatius Rigor, a senior principal research scientist at the University of Washington, Keener will also travel to the Arctic and make visual art with data collected through the instruments deployed.

Given that such buoys normally cost thousands—or even tens of thousands—of dollars, the $300-$500 device Keener is seeking to develop could potentially “double the number of sensors” currently being used in the Arctic Ocean, he said. That could enhance a critical dataset used in weather forecasting and studies of climate and climate change.

“It’s an honor to be involved in this work,” said Keener, who teaches art and electronics at UMD. “And to use my art to get people to understand what’s happening up there.”

Keener first traveled to the Arctic in Spring 2019 with Rigor, who is the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP), whose members maintain a network of buoys across the expanse of the Arctic Ocean. On that trip, Keener installed measuring instruments that he then used to create a series of art pieces. 

At VisArts Gallery in Rockville, Maryland, he displayed “Sea Ice 71.348778º N, 156.690918º W,” an installation that used hanging strips of 6-foot-long, blue-green polyester film to reflect the thickness and color of the Arctic ice as collected daily via satellite from the buoys.  

He also created various versions of “Digital Ice Core,” a sculpture piece that used electronics, data and satellite communication to link a remote field site with a digital light sculpture, made up of one thousand LED lights. Viewers were then able to see a recreated version of the ambient light in the air, ice and ocean in close to real time. 

Currently, he is seeking to improve a custom circuit and code that he has been working on since 2016, that will go in the sensors. He is hoping to travel to the Arctic in Spring 2021.

Photos courtesy of Cy Keener.