ELIZABETH DEMARAY

I am a sculptor who works in eco-art, art and technology, art/sci collaboration and biodesign. In these veins, I build listening stations for birds that play human music, culture lichen on the sides of skyscrapers in New York City and create floraborgs, AI supported robotic supports that allow  potted plants to move freely in a domestic space. In 2019, supported by the John Dighton Lab at Rutgers University, I began work on Home Is Where the Plastic Eating Stomach Is, a sculpture that consumes plastic by virtue of living fungi. This project has evolved into a series of artworks that are now part of Cookbook for When the Sun Goes Out. This 2023 exhibition of speculative works considers a potential climate warming scenario in which the rain forests dry-up and burn. In this chain of events, the sky may darken and the Earth may experience another ice age. Respond to this possible scenario, the artworks in Cookbook propose non-heliocentric energy sources and consider what us humans may do and eat when the sun goes out.

Writing about my art, Richard Klein, Exhibition Director at the Aldrich Museum, states: “Demaray provokes complex questions concerning memory, knowledge, and the collaborative cognitive process that exists between artist and viewer … while making a body of work that has consistently confounded expectations by creating connections between diverse and often contradictory bodies of knowledge.”

I am the recipient of the National Studio Award from the New York Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts Fellowship, the Art Omi Residence Award, the EAF Award at Socrates Sculpture Park, the World Trade Center Studio Residency, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Studio Award and the Aldrich Museum’s Emerging Artist Award. My work has been supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Association of Environment Science Studies. In 2019 the Floraborg IndaPlant Project was singled out by the National Associations of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine as the integrative practice in Creating Robotic and Plant Life Interfaces in Branches from the Same Tree: The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in Higher Education.

I am a professor in the Department of Visual, Media and Performing Arts at Rutgers University-Camden where I am head of the concentration in sculpture and the concentration in intermedia and electronic arts. On the Rutgers, New Brunswick, campus, I am an advisor in the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which is a platform for artistic practice in the fields of computer vision and machine learning. M

I am a sculptor who works in eco-art, art and technology, art/sci collaboration and biodesign. In these veins, I build listening stations for birds that play human music, culture lichen on the sides of skyscrapers in New York City and design alternative forms of housing for hermit crabs, out of man-made materials. In 2019, supported by the John Dighton Lab at Rutgers University, I began work on Home Is Where the Plastic Eating Stomach Is, a sculpture that consumes plastic by virtue of living fungi. This project has evolved into a series of artworks that are now part of Cookbook for When the Sun Goes Out. This 2023 exhibition of speculative works considers a potential climate warming scenario in which the rain forests dry-up and burn. In this chain of events, the sky may darken and the Earth may experience another ice age. Respond to this possible scenario, the artworks in Cookbook propose non-heliocentric energy sources and consider what us humans may do and eat when the sun goes out.

Writing about my art, Richard Klein, Exhibition Director at the Aldrich Museum, states: “Demaray provokes complex questions concerning memory, knowledge, and the collaborative cognitive process that exists between artist and viewer … while making a body of work that has consistently confounded expectations by creating connections between diverse and often contradictory bodies of knowledge.”

I am the recipient of the National Studio Award from the New York Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts Fellowship, the Art Omi Residence Award, the EAF Award at Socrates Sculpture Park, the World Trade Center Studio Residency, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Studio Award and the Aldrich Museum’s Emerging Artist Award. My work has been supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Association of Environment Science Studies. In 2019 the IndaPlant Project was singled out by the National Associations of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine as the integrative practice in Creating Robotic and Plant Life Interfaces in Branches from the Same Tree: The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in Higher Education.

I am a professor in the Department of Visual, Media and Performing Arts at Rutgers University-Camden where I am head of the concentration in sculpture and the concentration in intermedia and electronic arts. On the Rutgers, New Brunswick, campus, I am an advisor in the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which is a platform for artistic practice in the fields of computer vision and machine learning. My studio can be contacted at elizabethdemaray@gmail.com (put “studio” in the subject head) and recent works can be viewed on Instagram: @elizdemaray