Art & science of brain function is focus of WUSTL researchers' dialogue with artist Deborah Aschheim, March 20

March 6, 2008 -- Artist Deborah Aschheim, known for her focus on interactive multi-sensory responses to neuroscience, memory and cognition, joins Washington University faculty from art, medicine, psychology and neuroscience for a free public panel discussion examining the relationship between Aschheim's art and brain science at 6 p.m. March 20 in Room 110, January Hall.

The program is funded by Laumeier Sculpture Park, the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (PNP) program in Arts & Sciences and the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University. For more information, contact PNP at 935-4297.

Aschheim's art, influenced by family experience with Alzheimer's disease, is on display through May 11 at Laumeier Sculpture Park, 12580 Rott Road in St. Louis County, near Interstate 44 and Lindbergh Boulevard. The "Deborah Aschheim: Reconsider," exhibition explores why we remember what we see and hear and why we forget, while offering a solution to curb the "forgetting curve."

Described as "an intensely immersive sensory experience," Aschheim's "Reconsider" exhibit includes a refined version of her six-part series of neural network installations. Among new work in the exhibition ise a site-specific "memory web," an expansive network of audio-video elements that integrate songs created in collaboration with musician Lisa Mezzacappa. Linked by LED light nodes and colored plastic fibers, the installation winds through the museum galleries. Aschheim also has recreated an outdoor work, "Arborization" — a network-based sculpture making a visual connection between the microscopic systems of the body, the electrical networks of the city and the branching patterns of the living trees supporting it. Additionally, a gallery is filled with video, drawings and ephemera from many of the artist's perception experiments.

Laumeier Sculpture Park is free to the public and open daily from 8 a.m. until 1⁄2 hour past sunset. The museum is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays from 12 p.m. until 5 p.m.

For more information on Aschheim and her installation, call Laumeier at 314-821-1209 or visit their web site: http://www.laumeier.org/.