Galerie Siedlarek

Mia Rollins

Mia Rollins’ work examines the liminal spaces between the physical and virtual, science and magic, the technological and the human, and memory and imagination. Their practice incorporates archival and investigative video and animation, as well as new media technologies, such as photogrammetry and GPT-3 language modeling, into large-scale video/audio installations, investigating our individual relationships with current radical shifts in digital technology and scientific fields.

Rollins explores phenomena such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and aspects of astro, particle and quantum physics, proposing through them metaphors for metaphysical aspects of the human experience, such as memory, dreams, loss and love. They extrapolate these connections to imagine a sort of posthuman humanism. Rollins’ projects employ various digital fabrication techniques, including scanning, 3D printing, and projection mapping. They combine these techniques with new media and practical projection effects, using their experiments to investigate the divide between the physical and digital, examining memory and loss and exploring new interpretations through notions of the glitch, degeneration and resurrection. The audio components of their works largely draw from personal, historical, and scientific archival material, adopting mixing and sampling techniques to examine how entertainment media and science culture become entangled with our notions of ourselves, our relationships with technology, and our communication with others.

The artist´s research is driven by these questions: How can we express and embrace our entanglements with the rest of the universe? What is lost in the voids between the physical, digital, and spiritual? How do we define what is ‘human’ and how might we encapsulate the ‘human’ experience in other media and forms? How might we communicate through media and form notions of love, grief, and hope across differences, species, or even across planets? How can we grieve what cannot be encapsulated, that which we cannot understand, or that which is lost in translation? And how do we find beauty, even opportunity, in our own inherent entropy?

"Mia Rollins' solo presentation, 'Dreams Like Cherenkov,' showcases three of the artist's recent installations. The exhibition marks Rollins' debut in Germany."

Mia Rollins is an installation artist, researcher, and critical theorist. Born in 1995 in Nashville, Tennessee, Rollins received their B.A. in Visual Art and Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2017 and their M.F.A. in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design in 2022.

Rollins's work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including the 2021 RISD M.F.A. Biennial in Providence, RI, the 2019 Art of the South exhibition at Memphis College of Art, the 2021 Hypothesis exhibition at the Torpedo Factory Arts Center in Alexandria, VA, and the Chashama Gallery’s Inheritance show in New York in 2022. In 2021, Rollins exhibited their solo show, Phantasmagoria  at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, NH.  A significant aspect of Rollins’ practice is advocating for the incorporation of artists’ perspectives in STEM research. Residencies and collaborations with scientific and technological research projects are integral to their practice. Their projects have taken them to all manner of research sites, including CERN and Caltech’s C.A.S.T. laboratories. From 2021-2022, Rollins was the Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Nuclear Science Center,  researching Cherenkov radiation, gamma spectroscopy, and cosmic radiation. Rollins is a founding member of the Brown University Space Program, which launched SBUDNIC, a small satellite, into space in June 2022.

Rollins is now the Artist in Collaboration with the Flow Physics Facility at the University of New Hampshire, working alongside a team of physicists to develop new methods of flow imaging using projection mapping and smoke holography. Rollins received a 2023 NASA SCoPE Seed Grant grant to turn the entire wind tunnel into a live installation teaching flow physics to middle and highschool student groups, soon to be adapted into an interactive VR lesson on NASA’s Infiniscope teaching platform. They are currently a Professor of Physics and Engineering at the Community College of Rhode Island, teaching Blueprint Reading and Mechanical Engineering Design.

Ausstellung
Mia Rollins
Dreams Like Cherenkov
Sep 08 – Okt 28

Kontakt
Florian Siedlarek
Fahrgasse 20
60311 Frankfurt am Main

https://www.galerie-siedlarek.com/
mail@galerie-siedlarek.com