Courtney Egan

SEPTEMBER 19 - OCTOBER 31, 2015

Courtney Egan’s projection-based sculptural installations mix botanical themes with shards of technology. She projects large, vividly real botanical imagery onto walls, floors and sculptural elements. Fragments from the natural world are melded with non-natural techniques to create subtly impossible, hybrid tableaus. These electronically-forged composites place the viewer in a conversation between their memories of the natural world, and a new, mediated experience of a plant or flower. 

Egan's work questions how our perception of nature is changed by technology. The more attention visitors give to Egan’s digital flowers, the more elusive and intangible they become. The rich flora of New Orleans, where Egan has lived and worked since 1991, influences her imagery.

As enchanting as Egan’s work can be, it also contradicts the joy that nature typically inspires. One’s personal experience of the natural world is replaced by a new, mediated, technological experience. Beneath the wonder and delight, she presents a conundrum: with the exploitation and loss of natural resources and the expansion of urbanized land, will we still enjoy the natural world in our future? Will our future experiences of nature come only in the form of digital projections? These are questions posed by Egan as she presents the viewer with the splendor of nature as seen through the digital lens. 

Egan states, “The way that humans experience nature more frequently, through the glass of the computer or television, unsettles and inspires me.  There’s a sublimity that results from the convergence of technology with what we consider the natural. I am intrigued by how lens- and technology-based experiences of the natural world can be enjoyable, illuminating, disturbing, and ethically challenging, all at the same time.” 

This exhibition was organized by the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, Lafayette, Louisiana.