Bulletin News

04/02/2010 

Scottish digital artist Paul Higham teams up with British sculptor Coral Lambert to present an exhibition titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” from April 5-16 at Dowd Gallery.

Presented in part by the Campus Artist and Lecture Series and the Art Exhibition Association, all events of the exhibition are free and open to the public.

On Monday, April 12, Higham will offer a workshop and demonstrations in the Old Main Sculpture Studio, located in Room G-35.

The artists will discuss their work at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, April 14, in Dowd Gallery. A reception will follow from 4-6 p.m. in the gallery.

On Friday, April 16, Lambert will present an iron pour starting at 2 p.m. in the annex building adjacent to the Professional Studies Building) construction site.

A digital image by Paul Higham

Paul Higham

Considered an electronic art pioneer, Higham studied fine art at Liverpool and Goldsmiths School of Art in London. The late British artist Carl Plackman (1943-04), whose own works greatly influenced late 20th century scupture, once described Higham’s work in the early 1970s as “schematic entropy machines,” referring to his 1975 vacuum-formed, plastic prototypes, also called a progenitor of “virtual sculpture” and  “data sculpture.”

Higham creates his works in formats such as rapid prototype, projection, maps and ‘datasonification’ and he uses matrices of sampled sources such as the Statue of Liberty, weather data, oil futures and the Dow Jones index.

 “These data sculptures are synthetic, computational works that deal with the ‘commodification’ of information and dynamics of data itself,” Higham said. He harvests grains of information from digital streams in real time and his continually evolving model reveals societal transformations over time, for example, the freezing and crash of the dollar.

In 1996, he was awarded an  “Artist of Extraordinary Ability” green card allowing him to work freely between the U.K. and U.S. Higham continues to exhibit Internationally, including at the New York Digital Salon, Wedgewood Memorial Sculpture Park in the United Kingdom, Pirkala Sculpture Park in Finland and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans.

He recently served as a visiting faculty member at the New York Institute of Technology, where he designed and set up the Digital Foundry course. A judge for Ars Mathematica/Intersculpt, he was honored as the Jerome Mcknight Electronic Composer and awarded The New Media Initiative by the Walker Art Center. He has served as visiting artist and lecturer at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Sante Fe Art Institute and the New York Institute of Technology.

Coral Lambert

Lambert currently serves as an assistant professor of sculpture at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University, where she also heads the National Casting Center’s Sculpture Foundry Program.

She studied in the U.K. at Central School of Art in London, Canterbury College of Art in Kent, and received her Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Manchester in 1990.

Over the past 20 years, Lambert’s work has been exhibited at the Barbican Center in London, ‘Convergence’ in Providence, R.I., Chicago’s Pier Walk, Pirrkala in Finland and The National Metal Museum in Memphis, Tenn. Internationally recognized for working in cast iron as well as producing large-scale outdoor pieces, Lambert recently received the Gottlieb Foundation Award and The Joan Mitchell Grant.

She is currently working on “Fallen Sky,” commissioned by Sculpture For New Orleans, after which she will be in producing work for Salem Castle in Germany.

For more information, contact interim gallery director Bryan Thomas at (607) 753-4311.