Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies

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Join ONCD Creative in Residence, Dr. Jennifer Willet, for a pop up exhibition at ArtSpeak Gallery. This work is presented in conjunction with a Baroque Biology Community Event & Science Fair happening at Point Pelee National Park. The exhibition will run from September 29th to October 13th. A tour bus will be taking folks to the Point Pelee Baroque Biology Event on October 6th. (See our other hub listings to learn more.)

Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies (2023-24)

In 2017, Jennifer Willet developed a performative alter ego called the Gentleman Scientist, an entertaining and gender fluid critique of the Western tradition of scientific rationality. The Gentleman Scientist is a ringmaster, a specialist, a time traveler, a buffoon, whose once white coat is filthy. He has 8 snow globes attached to the front and back like mutant breasts or egg sacks. Within each snow globe live colonies of microorganisms, bacteria, yeast, algae. They are fascinating, beautiful and putrid.

Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies is a 360° diorama installation installed on a sewing mannequin, which serves as a portrait of a character and a garment as it moves through ecologies and time, all the while accruing microbes and meaning–literal and metaphorical passengers.

Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies, like most of Willet’s practice, challenges hierarchies of truth, knowledge and experience within traditional manifestation of scientific rationality. With innovations in science and technology the future will be measured in multitudes, rather than fact or fiction. Willet’s work proposes iterative feminist, post-colonial, and post-speciesist visions of our shared biotech future that values scientific knowledge and biotech innovation in chorus with social, cultural, aesthetic and non-human knowledges. Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies is a cacophony ecology of human and non-human organisms living, reproducing and dying in a shared laboratory environment.

Original Coat design/fabrication: Shanti Freed for a project in collaboration with Kira O'Reilly.

Coat Modification: Billie Mclaughlin

Coat Train: Daniela Gaie

Project Assistance: Megan Andrews, Justin Elliott, Brodie MacPhail, Domenica Mediati, Hadia Nadeem, Dunia Roba, Nate Talbot.

Acknowledgements: This project gratefully acknowledges the support of Ontario Culture Days and Arts Council Windsor Region, as well as the University of Windsor, the Canada Research Chair Program, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts.

Links

• Our Website incubatorartlab.com

Organizer

Dr. Jennifer Willet & Incubator Art Lab

Dr. Jennifer Willet (she/her) is an artist, a Canada Research Chair in Art, Science, and Ecology, a Professor in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor and the Director of INCUBATOR ArtLab, founded in 2009. She is a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists in the Royal Society of Canada. Willet is a leader in the Canadian bioart community and works internationally as an artist and curator in the field. In 2018, Willet opened a new state-of-the-art bioart laboratory, and in 2020 a storefront bioart studio and community engagement centre in Windsor, Ontario.

About the Lab

INCUBATOR Hybrid Laboratory at the Intersection of Art, Science and Ecology is a physical and theoretical hub, a new art/science laboratory at The University of Windsor. Founded in 2009, it functions both as an apparatus in which environmental conditions can be controlled towards the assisted growth of life, but also as a site that supports the development of new ideas and artistic practices.

Physically and metaphorically INCUBATOR serves as a site for innovative productive and performative imaginings of biotechnology as a technology of the body – a complex ecology – that implicates each of us intellectually and biologically in the continued propagation of the life sciences.

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