Artist: Jennifer Steinkamp
Title: EON
Date: 2020
Photo Credits: Christina Murrey
Dimensions: Leyard Planar LED Display 2.5mm 37.7 x 8.93 feet
Part of the Collection: Landmarks, University of Texas at Austin, Texas
Exhibition History: Permanent installation, opened September 10, 2020, Landmarks, Welch Hall, College of Natural Sciences,
University of Texas at Austin, Texas, curated by Andrée Bober.
Description: Andrée Bober the founder and director of Landmarks contacted me in 2018. She proposed a commission for the Welch Hall renovation at UT Austin, part of the College of Natural Sciences. The school contains a vast number of scientific disciplines. My commissions generally respond to the context into which they are part of, the architecture, the people, the history. I use these factors as inspiration for the artwork.
I considered the first life forms on Earth and how we came to be as a way to refer to the Natural Sciences. I looked at fossil records of the first multi cellular organisms of the Ediacaran Period, 555 million years ago for inspiration. I was struck by the theory of symbiosis in evolution; our DNA ancestors are the resultant fusion of single cellular organisms and bacteria. The millions of bacteria in our bodies are our foremothers. EON is a speculative fiction, a depiction of early life forms underwater.
The Universe was formed 13.7 billion years ago.
The Earth is 4.543 billion years old.
Cyanobacteria or blue-green algae were the first microbes to create oxygen on Earth via photosynthesis 3.5 billion years ago.
First humans 200,000-300,000 years ago.
