Currents: Experiments in Art-Science Collaboration

Currents: Experiments in Art-Science Collaboration

When: January 22 – March 7, 2026

Where: Stirek Gallery

Curated by: Carly Solström and Ashley Stull Meyers 

Gallery Hours: 

• Open Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Open on performance evenings in Detrick Hall and Ray Theater
• Closed Sundays

Parking: Don't have a campus parking pass but want to visit Stirek Gallery during the week? Contact the PRAx Box Office for a pay station code, on us! 

Opening Celebration: Join us on the evening of January 22 for an event celebrating the opening of Currents. 

Currents represents the inaugural and annual arts-science-humanities visual arts takeover in PRAx. See other related exhibitions: 

• Ray Theater: September: Orange│January 5-24, 2026 
• Arts Corridor: Threshold 32ºF│January 5 - February 7, 2026) 
• Lightboxes: Wandering Trees│January 5-24, 2026 
• Join us for the Opening Celebration of Currents: Experiments in Art-Science Collaboration at PRAx on January 22, 2025. 

One of the most astonishing things about being human is our instinct to reach beyond what we know. Our minds are wired to question, to observe, to wonder, and to keep trying to understand the world around us. Artists and scientists are both driven by these currents of curiosity, but they have developed different ways of looking at the world.

Artists explore questions through things like painting, metaphor and music. Scientists explore questions through things like data collection, experiments and mathematical modeling. When they share their approaches, something new is created that can illuminate both the meaning and the mechanics of our world, revealing new insights and questions. This collaborative process can leave both the scientist and artist changed, carrying new tools and ways of experiencing and exploring the world.

The Currents exhibition includes collaborative art-science pairs from two programs:

PRAx Collaborative Faculty Fellowship

Through our annual fellowship program, PRAx pairs professional artists with Oregon State University science and engineering faculty.

Our instructions are simple: Spend a year together exploring a shared curiosity. 

Our invitation is expansive: Let your exploration change and develop in response to each other. 

This exhibition features six collaborative pairs who embraced that invitation. They met in the field and explored — sometimes climbing thousands of steps up a FLUXNET tower, walking across massive satellite bowls, or kayaking through glacial melt. Through visual art, performance and sound, the artists help illuminate the questions at the heart of our campus’s research, from shifting shorelines and cosmic disturbance to glacial change and wildfire. These projects reveal a world that is more than data — alive, fluid, and part of a shared current of creativity and inquiry. 

2024-25 Faculty Fellows and Artist Collaborators

• Dee Denver (Biology) x Jovencio de la Paz
• Chris Still (Forestry) x Julia Oldham
• Jeff Hazboun (Physics) x Brian House
• Rebecca Hutchinson (Engineering) x Grisha Coleman
• Erin Pettit (CEOAS) x Luciana Abait
• Peter Ruggiero (CEOAS) x Douglas Ross

fluxART

FLUXNET is a global network of nearly 1,000 research towers that track water, carbon and energy moving between ecosystems and the atmosphere. It gives us a continuous and precise record of how the planet breathes, which helps us understand how soils, plants, people and climate are connected through cycles of change.

But FLUXNET is more than data — it’s a community. Each tower tells a local story, yet together they reveal a planetary perspective that no single site, lab or country could achieve. Built on trust, generosity and curiosity, this network shows how science grows when people work together. 
 
In the spirit of collaboration, FLUXNET’s community also invites artists to engage with scientists, the global datasets and the ecosystems they study. They explore climate change, drought and fire disturbances, the renewing rhythms of landscapes, and the often-invisible processes that sustain life on Earth — turning flux science into stories and embodied experiences of nature’s resilience.

Currents features five projects emerging from this exchange at FLUXNET research sites around the world, including artworks from the 2024-25 fluxART residency cohort and one project developed in the framework of the Climate Whirl Art&Science Program. 

2024-25 fluxART Collaborative Fellows

• Maoya Bassiouni (University of California Berkeley) x Rosa Lewis
• Chris Gough (Virginia Commonwealth University) x Sara Bouchard
• Marcy Litvak (University of New Mexico) x Mallery Quetawki 
• Chris Still (Oregon State University) x Julia Oldham
• Ulla Taipale (University of Helsinki) x Agnes Meyer-Brandis