DEDICATION
This year we are dedicating our Festival to artist Juan Geuer who passed away May, 2 2009.
Juan was a good friend of Subtle Technologies. His work exemplified the beauty of merging art and science. Artist Caroline Langill will be saying some words of tribute at the opening of our Festival Friday June 12th.
This years Subtle Technologies Festival is dedicated to the memory of Juan Geuer, a pre-eminent artist who’s work explored the congruence of Art and Science.
By: Caroline Seck Langill
“The interesting thing is my interest in science and my deep involvement with this whole scientific business was really marvelous, and for me it was a real revelation…it brought me to a deeper spirituality and to a much more intense feeling of which I am a part of, this earth – this very earth.” - Juan Geuer, Almonte, Ontario, 2006
The dedication of this year’s Subtle Technologies Festival to the memory of Juan Geuer is particularly apt as the theme of networks is evident throughout his work. Not just networks within systems, but also between systems, between social and scientific bodies. In his technically demanding DIY sculpture/installations, Juan used laser projection and sensitive mechanical devices to draw our attention to larger physical forces that remain invisible to bodily perception. Al Asnaan (1979) and Loom Drum (1986-1992) are two of many spectacular examples of his technical acumen, and his ability to incorporate micro and macro systems into his pure aesthetic.
Al Asnaan’s highly sensitive horizontal pendulum responds to movements in the earth’s surface, translating them into swaths of laser-produced light that seem to pierce the walls of its grotto-like permanent home at the Ottawa Art Gallery. Juan has referred to Al Asnaan as a “people participating seismometer,” inviting his audience into the system of representation, making us aware of our collective human effect on the earth’s surface. It is an artwork, but it is also a material agent aiding us to recognize how we connect to events beyond our bodies and geographical region. Al Asnaan draws its title from an earthquake which resulted in the loss of lives in El Asnam, Algeria in 1980. The seismic event was apparent in the Juan’s Almonte studio as it generated broad sweeps of light across the wall of his space, facilitating an attachment to a real-time event. In contrast, Loom Drum depicts 5, 500 earthquakes measuring 4.0 or more on the Richter scale, recorded in North America from January 1960 to January 1989, collapsing time and space into a harmonic network of lights flickering on the drum’s surface. In both works time acts as a network, connecting us to the past and inculcating us into the present.
Juan Geuer undertook to depict the world we cannot see, to bring our attention to events taking place in the natural world which our senses cannot perceive. In doing so, he opened up a space for science and art to meet, a paradoxical space of demystification and, in turn, re-mystification of the physical forces that create the world as we know it. When Juan Geuer passed away on May 2nd, 2009, we lost a visionary artist who, through his pursuit of “aesthetics of purity,” contested the authority of science with the power of his art.