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Jan Estep

  • Art
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Thinking Portraits

[2011-2012] Thinking Portraits is a series of drawings on digitally printed anatomical scans of my brain. The drawings arose out of an art and neuroscience collaboration with colleagues Wilma Koutstaal and Sheng He and their graduate students in Psychology at the University of Minnesota. From 2009 to 2011 the interdisciplinary group researched the neural and cognitive bases of semantic knowledge and the role of scientific imagery in conveying empirical data. Scientifically the project used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the relationship between abstract and concrete language as processed by the brain during semantic decision tasks. Artistically I was motivated by a question of what brain scans could and could not show about human experience, our emotions, and the impact of trauma. I collected the brain images as a test subject in the group's fMRI study. Once inverted, the objective data became a catalyst for my subjective response to them. Drawings are listed chronologically. Oil pastels, colored pencil, digital print on paper.

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