(North Adams, Mass) Eve Andree Laramee will be at MASS MoCA Monday, March 20 through Friday, March 24 to install Apparatus for the Distillation of Vague Intuitions for MASS MoCA's upcoming Unnatural Science exhibition. This massive work will be installed in the WLS Spencer Family Gallery on MASS MoCA's first floor.

Born in Los Angeles in 1956, Eve Andree Laramee currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is an installation artist and sculptor and a member of the sculpture faculty of Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Laramee uses the materials, processes, and aesthetics of science to expose the subjectivity of science. She reminds us of the many mysteries still unexplained by science. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. She has received a regional NEA grant from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. She was named the Guggenheim Museum Sculptor-in-Residence in 1992 and received grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Laramee's work is included in the collections of the MacArthur Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Apparatus for the Distillation of Vague Intuitions (1994-1998) consists of an array of dysfunctional scientific apparatus installed on suspended laboratory tables. The work will fill the gallery on five tables and range in size from 28' x 6' to just 28" x 32".

At first, Apparatus for the Distillation of Vague Intuitions looks like a careful and methodical laboratory. However, close inspection reveals it to be more mythological than methodical. The beakers are hand blown with words and phrases etched into the glass labeling the contents with such intangibles as "Delusion", "Devotion" and "Leap in the Dark". These glass vessels are based on 15th and 16th century alchemist's vessels which had names like "The Bear" or "The Pelican" referring to their function. Theoretically functional batteries, subtle sexual imagery, and live flowers add not only aesthetically, but also hint at an invisible life force which powers the machine. Laramee challenges the authorities that set standard measurements by labeling measurements as "mouthful" and "handful" using her own hands as the standard. The piece is different each time it is installed so what appears to be fixed is actually fluid. According to Ann Reynolds, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, "Eve Andree Laramee's Apparatus for the Distillation of Vague Intuitions is indeed beautiful, seductive, and formally complex... Science and art interrogate each other and the results are marvelous... and rare."

Unnatural Science, which opens June 3, brings together contemporary works that use the discoveries, inventions, and methods of science as a springboard for fantastic aesthetic and intellectual investigations. The exhibition features fourteen works by fifteen artists, including several room-sized installations, all of which are united by an idiosyncratic approach to scientific authority. The pieces were created between 1987 and 1999 by such artists as Kiki Smith, Matthew Ritchie, Catherine Chalmers, Steina Vasulka, and Young Sun Lim. Many of these works remain in the artists' personal collections and have rarely been exhibited due to their great size. The scale of MASS MoCA's unusual exhibition spaces enables it to bring together the monumental and complex ensemble of work in Unnatural Science, an exhibition that literally could be shown nowhere else in the world.

MASS MoCA, the largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts in the United States, is located at 87 Marshall Street in North Adams on a 13-acre campus of renovated 19th-century factory buildings. MASS MoCA focuses on the work of artists charting new territory; works that blur the lines between visual and performing arts; and works that have seldom, or never, been exhibited because of physical demands such as scale, materials, and fabrication methods.

MASS MoCA is located at 87 Marshall Street in North Adams, Massachusetts. Admission is $6 adults, $4 seniors and students, $2 children 6-16, and free for children under 6. Admission to MASS MoCA is free to members at all times. MASS MoCA is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 AM to 4 PM.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Katherine Myers
(413) 664-4481 x8113
katherine@massmoca.org