Gail Wight: The Hexapodarium

Gail Wight: The Hexapodarium

Gail Wight works primarily in sculpture, video, interactive media, and print. Wight constructs biological allegories, examining the impacts of life sciences on humans, plants, and animals. The interplay between art and biology, theories of evolution, cognition, and the animal state-of-being are themes that have, over the last two decades, become central to Wight’s art.

To create The Hexapodarium series, Wight focused her creative vision on the housefly, an insect that evolved sixty-five-million-years ago. Their wings display a variety of unusual and beautiful shapes. After cleaning her studio on a particularly hot summer day, she was amazed at the insects’ resiliency and decided to photograph it’s wings beneath a few different types of microscopes, which accounts for the color difference in the final images.

Gail Wight is associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University where she teaches Experimental Media Arts. She holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute where she was a Javits Fellow, and a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Wight’s work has been exhibited internationally, in venues including the Natural History Museum in London; the National Art Museum of China in Beijing; Cornerhouse, Manchester; and Foxy Production in New York City. Wight’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Spain. 

©2016 by the San Francisco Airport Commission. All rights reserved.