Art/Science Talk: Jim Sanborn

Thursday / February 20, 2020 / 4:15 p.m.
Williams Center Gallery and Seminar Room 108

Join us for an artist’s talk by Jim Sanborn,”On the Fusion of Art and Science,” and a reception to celebrate his exhibition Looted?

For Jim Sanborn, science is “not the starting point, it is an integral part of his artwork.” In works like Terrestrial Physics, “these reinterpretations of the events and more importantly the influence of the visual context of these moments remind us of the risks, rewards and complexities of the decision-making processes involved.”

In an illustrated lecture, Grossman Visiting Artist Jim Sanborn will discuss five bodies of work:

• The story of Kryptos, a sculpture installed in 1990 at the CIA headquarters. It contains an 865-letter encrypted message—three of the four sections have been deciphered by members of the public and cryptographers at the National Security Agency. The code in the fourth message has not yet been broken—even after Sanborn provided clues in 2010 and 2014. As reported on January 29, 2020, in The New York Times, Sanborn has just released what he insists is the third and final clue.
• Topographic Projection and Simple Geometry (1995–1998), a groundbreaking series of large-format light projections on the landscape—some of the on-site projections were two miles wide and 200 feet high.
• Atomic Time, started in 1998, was a recreation of the 1944 Manhattan Project Laboratory that built the atomic bomb. Sanborn acquired many of the original parts of the first atomic bomb and the laboratory equipment used to build the lab.
• Terrestrial Physics (2010) is a reconstruction of the particle accelerator that, in 1939, spilt the nucleus of the uranium atom. Physicists Enrico Fermi, Neils Bohr, and Edward Teller were among the observers. Working from the Carnegie Institution’s physicists’ original notes, drawings, and photographs, Sanborn recreated the machine and repeated the original experiment of splitting an atom of uranium.
• Without Provenance (2012) and Looted? (2020, at Lafayette): Without Provenance was the first in a series of installations exploring the trade in stolen and forged antiquities, and is drawn from Sanborn’s early training as an archeologist and later as an artist following the auction trade. Determining the authenticity and provenance of stone antiquities—such as 8th–11th century Khmer sculpture—is particularly difficult, resulting in a very robust market for both stolen and forged objects.

The lecture is presented in conjunction with Looted?, Sanborn’s Williams Center Gallery exhibition. Looted? offers a glimpse into the antiquities trade in Cambodia, a country whose heritage sites are subject to a global market of looted and forged artifacts, and asks whether a more ethical kind of collecting can be fostered in the 21st century. The artist offers an intriguing proposal: to make what he describes as “high-end reproductions“ or “contemporary antiquities” that are indistinguishable from genuine artifacts. Consider for yourself whether Sanborn’s experiment might be capable of effecting positive change in an industry shadowed by illicit and destructive practices.

Free for all! No ticket required.

Presented by Lafayette Art Galleries.