Britt Ransom: Sticky
January 14 @ 12:00 pm - February 28 @ 5:00 pm
EXHIBITION
January 14–February 28, 2025
Glassell Gallery
LECTURE
Monday, February 10, 5 p.m.
130 West Howe-Russell Hall, LSU
RECEPTION
Saturday, February 8, 6– 8 p.m.
In Sticky, 3D printed ants and sugar serve as metaphors for sugar’s journey from production to consumption. Linking together to stay afloat, ants speak to the tenacity of survival and the interconnections of our troubled ecologies of exploitation and extraction.
LSU School of Art will present Britt Ransom: Sticky January 14 through February 28, 2025, in Glassell Gallery. Integrating local history, ecologies, and research, Sticky, features 3D-printed ant raft sculptures carrying candy oil barrels made of sugar down an abstract model of the Mississippi River. Ants and sugar serve as metaphors for the complex journey of sugar from production to consumption connecting it to troubled ecologies of exploitation and extraction. Today, sugar’s dominance in the food landscape masks its exploitative history. Sticky invites reflection on these entanglements, urging us to confront the sweetness of consumption and its bitter legacy.
Sugar’s narrative is one of sweetness and moral complexity, with ants symbolizing humanity’s relentless pursuit of this commodity. Our craving extends beyond natural instincts, driven by industrial systems and global trade, making sugar a ubiquitous part of life. Norbert Rillieux’s 19th-century invention revolutionized sugar refining, improving efficiency but also reinforcing the exploitative economic structures of the time. The Mississippi River is a crucial link connecting slavery to America’s sugar addiction.
Ant rafts, formed by collective effort to survive floods, mirror the resilience and adaptability required to navigate extreme climate and environmental challenges faced by communities along the Mississippi River. Just as ants link together to stay afloat when threatened by flood waters, communities along the river have historically relied on collaboration and ingenuity to endure the economic and environmental currents. This the ants speak to both the tenacity of survival and the complex systems of interdependence that shape human and natural histories.
A free, public reception is scheduled for February 8, 2025 from 6–8 p.m. at Glassell Gallery. Britt Ransom will give a public lecture Monday, February 10, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. in LSU West Howe Russell Hall room 130. In addition to public programming downtown, visiting artist Britt Ransom will spend several days on campus with LSU School of Art students with a focus on sculpture and digital fabrication. Programs including 3D scanning and printing will be announced in January 2025.
This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council, as administered by the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, Inc. Funding has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
LSU School of Art Alfred J. Glassell Gallery Hours
Closed Mondays and between exhibitions.
ABOUT ARTIST BRITT RANSOM
Britt Ransom’s work explores human, animal, and environmental relationships through sculptures and installations created using digital fabrication processes. Using 3D scanning, 3D printing, laser cutting, and CNC Milling, her work questions our shared environment, climate change, and our relationships with other species. Translating data gathered from the environment, Ransom’s work travels through various levels of software mediation while often originating through the phones that we carrying our pockets.
Regularly examining other species and landscapes in relation to ourselves, Ransom question humans’ analogous existence as the largest and most complex pest-network on the planet. Her work is systematic both in construction and in concept, often a direct reflection of observed microcosms found at our feet, in the web of a digital mesh, and born out of the braided entanglements between ourselves and the other species of plants and animals with whom we share our world.
Britt Ransom (b. Lima, Ohio 1987) is an artist and educator based between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and New Orleans, Louisiana. Ransom is a current member of the New Museum’s New Inc. Social Architecture cohort and a recent recipient of the Heinz Endowment Creative Development Award. Her work has been recognized and supported through the Hopper Prize, Formlabs User Impact Award, Joan Mitchell Center Residency, Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator (LACI) Residency, Santa Monica Camera Obscura Residency, Workshop Residence-San Francisco, The Arctic Circle Residency, and the College Art Association Professional Development Award.
Her writing has been published in the Leonardo Journal by MIT Press (2019), The 3D Additvist Cookbook (2016), and The Routledge Handbook on Biology in Art, Architecture, and Design, Routledge Press Essay (2016), and In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship (2021).
Ransom is the great-granddaughter of civil rights activist Reverdy C. Ransom and currently serves on the Bishop Reverdy C. & Emma S. Ransom Foundation. She is also on the Board of Directors for Freedom to Grow, and has previously served on the Board of Directors for New Media Caucus.
In 2017, Ransom served as the SIGGRAPH Studio Chair and in 2019, as the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Chair, one of the largest annual computer graphics conferences in the United States. Additionally, she was supported by the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs as a fellow through ZERO1’s fellowship teaching exchange in Pachuca, Mexico.
Britt is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University where she is the area chair of Sculpture and a tenured Associate Professor of Sculpture, Installation, and Site Work. She has held previous academic appointments at California State University Long Beach (Long Beach, CA) and Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX). Ransom received her MFA in Electronic Visualization / New Media from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2011) and her BFA in Art and Technology from The Ohio State University (2008).
