THEORETICAL ANIMAL FORMS

Opening reception:
January 21, 2016 5-7pm
Art|Sci Gallery
CNSI 5th floor

Workshop
February 4, 2016 5-7pm
Art|Sci Gallery

LASER symposium featuring Anna Dumitriu (bio-artist), Alex May (digital artist) and Pratik Shah (biomedical engineer)
February 4, 2016 7-9pm
Presentation Space, CNSI 5th floor

A solo exhibition of speculative morphologies by Amisha Gadani featuring birds without beaks, uni-colored chimeras, and a series of boxfishes that may exist, may have existed, or may exist in the future. The inspiration for the paintings and drawings in this exhibition stemmed partly from Gadani's two year artist residency in both the UCLA fish-focused evolutionary biology lab of Dr. Michael Alfaro and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics.

Bio:
Amisha Gadani is an artist, educator and illustrator based in Los Angeles. She is interested in unique animal morphologies and adaptations; from swarming behaviors and elegant defense mechanisms, to superorganisms and animals of the deep sea. Her work ranges from unsettling beak-less bird paintings and underwater videos to her on-going series of interactive animal-inspired defensive dresses that can, for example, inflate like a blowfish when the wearer is intimidated. She has spent over four years working at the art and science focused Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco in education, exhibits and illustration; and two years working at UCLA in two biology labs as an illustrator producing over fifty scientific illustrations featured in journals and research papers and as an outreach educator using drawing and sculpture focused workshops to explain scientific concepts to local elementary school students.
Her work has shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Pittsburgh, New York City, and Tokyo; has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, and Scientific American; and has been published in LIMN magazine, the journal Method Quarterly and the book "Future Fashion: Innovative Materials and Technology" by Barcelona-based maomao publications.
Amisha earned a B.F.A in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007.