On View in the D'Alessandro Auditorium
November 21, 2024 - February 9, 2025
Tuesday - Saturday: 10 am - 4 pm • Sunday: 12 pm - 4 pm
The Cape Cod Museum of Art proudly presents the debut of
​
Mariniana: The Interrupted Wave
Techspressionist moving image works by
Karen LaFleur
Renata Janiszewska
This is the first Techspressionism exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art!
"Techspressionism" is an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. It introduces a new art-historical term to distinguish expressive fine art created with technology from other genres such as animated mainstream movies and video games. Learn more at https://techspressionism.com
Mariniana features the moving images of two artists: Renata Janiszewska and Karen LaFleur who are both are actively involved in the "Techspressionism" worldwide community of artists. Although all of the images created for this exhibition relate to the Ocean, each artist sought their own inspiration from very different sources: LaFleur from Science and Janiszewska from Myth.
SCIENCE
• Karen LaFleur collaborated with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientist Lukas Taenzer, through the Rhode Island Art League Synergy Program. LaFleur fills her Techspressionist moving image works with invented sea-creatures and swirling water movements to visually interpet Taenzer's scientific studies on how the coastal and open ocean intermingle and mix with one another by using data based on ocean salinity, temperature, and currents.
MYTH
• Renata Janiszewska’s moving images express the ocean in Myth. Her readings of early maritime narratives colour the subjective content of her works in Mariniana. From Inuit tales of Sedna to Mermaids to the Sirens of Greek and Roman mythology, she captures human responses to the drama and unknowns of the sea, through curious movements, colours and sounds.
This exhibition of moving images will be shown on a continuous loop in the Cape Cod Museum of Art’s D’Allessandro Auditorium. Viewers may watch Mariniana in its entirety, or view it in smaller segments at different times, just as one would look at paintings in a gallery. Admission to Mariniana is included with paid museum admission and free for CCMoA members.
The Interrupted Wave
An "interrupt" is a signal that requires the operating system (os) in a computer to pause and figure out what to do next. This takes the everyday definition of "interrupt" from "stop and start again" to "interrupt" as "pausing to decide what to do next." It is within this latter definition that the artists Karen LaFleur and Renata Janiszewska create their moving image works for the exhibit Mariniana. In it they illuminate ocean mysteries through Science and Myth.
Artists
RENATA JANISZEWSKA - renatajaniszewska.com
Renata's images in Mariniana are presented in three sections: Sedna’s Lament, Mermaids and Sirens.
Renata Janiszewska paints on an electronic canvas. Her work uses both digital and analog elements to articulate themes of chance, intoxication, shamanism, bio-degradation, and feminism. Her vocabulary of metamorphizing forms, textures, colours and paradoxical spaces suggests how the organic human, art history, and the machine realm of technology combine to create a new form. In her moving image works she marries disparate elements both to each other and to an original musical score of her own making.
​
The music accompanying Renata’s images in Mariniana is composed, recorded and produced by Janiszewska in her Studio.
KAREN LaFLEUR - lafleurartworks.com
In Mariniana, Karen LaFleur creates a trilogy of moving image works that imagine the connections between ocean water bodies. Part one takes the viewer through a vertical water column from the deepest ocean to the surface. Along the way life-forms increase in biological complexity. Part two expresses eddy movements (small whirlpools) that mix along shelf-break boundary zones between coastal waters and the open ocean just south of Cape Cod. This section is inspired by the studies of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientist Lukas Taenzer. Part three reveals an overhead view of the global conveyor belt system of connected ocean water currents that distributes heat, nutrients, and supports the engine of life on our planet.
Karen LaFleur is a Techspressionist artist, writer and fine art moving image animator. Her work explores the interplay between interior and exterior worlds with a focus on adaptability. She reveals vulnerabilities in complex relationships and highlights resiliencies in these ever-shifting landscapes. Motion is an integral part of her creative process whether digitally rendered or traditionally captured. Her pencil drawings on vellum form a base for her moving image works and include the tiniest of details. Each piece is then digitally painted in a variety of softwares. Her skill in visual storytelling combined with Nancy Tucker's narrative music, brings her moving image works to life with a fluidity of gesture and story rhythm that enriches the work's believability.
Karen LaFleur's fascination with the ocean began as a child living by the ocean and traveling inter-tidal waters in her small boat. Unhindered by parental constraints, she was free to discover and observe nature first-hand. Today the ocean's ecosystems and current dynamics still influence her work.​​
Collaborators
Lukas Taenzer • Oceanographer for Karen LaFleur's Artwork
Lukas Taenzer studies Ocean and Climate Physics while pursuing his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MA, USA. He is fascinated by how waters of coastal and open ocean origin intermingle and mix with one another. Through his work, he strives to improve our understanding of how water exchange processes between the open and the coastal ocean affect coastal ecosystems and communities in New England through climate change. As a seagoing oceanographer, Taenzer combines data from a variety of sources: measurements from research vessels, ocean robots, moorings, satellite images, and ocean models output. He follows temperature, salinity, and ocean current signals in the water to identify cases for when open ocean water mixed with coastal ocean water and changed coastal ecosystem conditions. Lukas' work has brought him onto research cruises in the Northwest Atlantic and in the Arctic Ocean.
Working together with Techspressionist artist Karen LaFleur allows Taenzer to bridge the gap between what we already know about the oceans from roughly 120 years of research, and the signals he finds in the data today. Observing the earth is not a carefully controlled science experiment in which all but one variable is eliminated and is repeated many times. Instead, we only have one earth to conduct experiments on, and all ocean and atmospheric processes operate at the same time. Taenzer's mooring and ocean robot might not be placed at exactly the right spot in space and time to identify one of the highly localized and turbulent 'exchange' events where open and coastal waters swapped places. In contrast, circumstantial evidence is typically much easier to observe, and it encourages earth scientists to come up with creative ways to learn more about the earth from our data. In combining the dots between evidence in the data and the shadowy 'exchange' process in question, art can help!
Through art, LaFleur and Taezner collaborate on Techspressionist moving image works that incorporate both our established knowledge about the oceans and the new ocean data at hand.
The result collectively enhances our knowledge and creatively expresses that understanding.
It's a true collaboration between art and science.
Nancy Tucker • Composer for Karen LaFleur's Artwork
"I love to write music and I've had my sights set on writing for visual art for a long time. When Karen first asked me to compose for her animations I was thrilled.
And as more people requested music for their projects, my opportunity to explore composing for moving images expanded.
The process of writing for animations...It is a matter of feeling it ... trying to feel what it is an artist is trying to get across, and also getting the rhythm right so that when images appear, there is music that coincides with whatever is coming into frame. Artists and videographers sometimes just send me still pictures ... and from that I really get a sense of what it is they are trying to do with an animation.
Sometimes we are working in our separate corners, and when we put the music together with the visuals, it just works and it's magic."
