audart
C Bangs - New York
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C Bangs has been exhibiting
her work, internationally, for over twenty-five years. In 1997, she
created
an installation at Audart for "The Art &
Technology
Circus". Through a combination of paintings and sculpture, some of
them
self-portraits; others depicting images of her late father, C Bangs
depicted
the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, with her father in the image of
The
Green Man, a male archetype of oneness with Earth, and herself as the
Earth
Goddess Gaia. An altar, at the center of the installation, held a clay
sculpture of her father as he approached death or the end of his life
on earth. C Bang's work has, historically, been scientific in nature,
as she works equations and quantum diagrams around or over the figures
in her paintings. The figures themselves are images of family and
friends. The personal element in Bangs work helps her to better
understand her own feelings about death and rebirth and to draw
parallels between the Earth's ecology and the human body.
In July of 2000, C Bangs curated "Messages From Earth", an exhibition of 8.5" x 11" color Xeroxes by 35 artists. The works were displayed in Aosta, Italy's five hundred year old chapel of San Grato. The exhibition was in conjunction with an astronautical conference titled Missions to the Outer Solar System and Beyond, the third IAA Symposium on Realistic Near-Term Advanced Scientific Space Missions in Aosta. Copies of color Xeroxes were taken to Huntsville, Alabama and are on permanent display in the offices of the Advanced Space Transportation Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. In 2001, Dr. Gregory Matloff and C Bangs investigated a prototype, white-light, holographic message plaque for a forthcoming interstellar probe at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, a project for which C Bangs received a grant. White-light holography is an excellent medium for this application because of its resistance to space radiation and its enormous information-storage capability. A very wide variety of multiplexed images could be incorporated in a single thin-film holographic message plaque. C Bangs, in conjunction with the New York gallery, Art Resources Transfer Inc., set up a Call for Art on the gallery web site (www.artretran.com). Work of the many artists who have participated in previous "Messages from Earth" shows curated by C Bangs demonstrate the wide variety of possible message plaque images. Images in a holographic message plaque might demonstrate to hypothetical space-faring extraterrestrials how humans interact with the Earth. Alternatively, message plaque images may relate to our astronomical knowledge of the universe as a self-organizing entity. This concept is demonstrated by the Hubble-derived work of S. Diehl and the Chaos-theory inspired work of J. Feldschuh. C Bangs and Dr. Matloff traveled to Paris in March of 2002 to submit the color Xeroxes and resumes for the proposed exhibition at the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) in Toulouse, France, in conjunction with COSPAR (committee on Space Research) in Houston, Texas in October 2002. C. Bangs has a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art and an MFA from Pratt Institute in painting and sculpture. Her work is included in the permanent collections of museums in the United States and Italy and has been featured in books authored by Dr. Gregory Matloff. C Bangs has also been included in The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. |