Denisovan coming to Pease Gallery

Artist Heather Freeman’s project “Denisovan” is coming to CPCC Pease Gallery from July 14 to September 4, with a closing reception on August 28 from 5-7 p.m.

She will show prints and text from the app she created to illustrate a fictional narrative of the Denisovan child.

About the project

Denisovan is an interactive artist’s book by Heather D. Freeman, Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  This mobile app is neither a game, nor a book, but resides somewhere between the two and is available on iPhone, iPad and Android mobile devices.

The story is a fictional imagining of a girl who died 40,000 years ago.  It was inspired by the genomic mapping of a contemporary of early humans and Neanderthal: the denisovan hominin.  Bone fragments from a single individual were found in a Siberian cave, and paleogeneticists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology mapped the genome, determining that the fragments belonged to a previously unknown hominid.

The story of human evolution is many things.  One part of this story is the nurturing of children by mothers and fathers, generation after generation.  We know that the denisovan girl had brown hair and eyes, but we can only speculate on her family structure, and how parent-child relationships may have evolved in the last 40,000 years.

Download the app for iPhone and iPad

Download the App for Android

Learn more here: http://denisovan.blogspot.com/

BURST installed

Images of the completed site specific installation BURST, designed by Andi Steele and installed in conjunction with CPCC Galleries.

On view in Ross I through August 7.

BURST in Progress

Andi Steele arrived Monday morning (5/12) to begin installing her site specific installation, BURST. She arrived with orange painted planks cut to 13′ tall and fitted with a line of fish-eye hooks. It took all of Monday to install these planks vertically throughout the gallery, with one long horizontal piece above the large window wall. The artist navigated unwelcome “surprises” like boarded up windows patches of brick behind the sheetwall, adapting her design so that it still achieved her goal.

CPCC Gallery Facilitator Heather Felts helped lead an installation team that included our workstudy Kelly Rambo, student volunteers, and Arts Programming Coordinator Alice Jenkins.The team worked all day to string red and yellow monofilament wire through fishhooks on alternate sides of the gallery to create a specific environment.